Embodied Strategythe day beforeI was having a great conversation with a colleague about organizational learning…Nudging Embodied Strategy

The law of tightening aperture2023What happens to the teams with wide apertures over time? Does the…Strategy and FOMO2022There’s this really fun neologism that the cool kids use: FOMO, or…Embodied Strategy2022I was having a great conversation with a colleague about organizational learning…The whole concept of the cone of embodied strategy is a bit depressing, to be honest. What’s a mature organization to do? Curl up and cry? Surrender to obsolescence? Maybe. But any statement of complete inevitability gives me pause. Though the force of habits is strong, we all have seen the evidence of habits being broken and people – including ourselves – changing themselves.

Innovation frontier2023First, we need to know what our embodied strategy is. We need…Why will this be hard for us?2021I was working on a strategy and helping review another this week,…Strategy Aperture2023The concept of embodied strategy continues to captivate me. Recently, I found…Silly math2022In Jank in Teams, I employed a method of sharing mental models…It is my experience that just like humans, organizations tend to feel the pain of being constricted by their own habits. There’s consternation about becoming too bureaucratic, moving too slow, or vocal concerns about siloing. It is usually that pain that creates opportunities for becoming aware of the embodied strategy. In a larger organization, there are nearly always moments, the junction points in time where a change becomes possible. Speaking in silly physics, the pain creates excess of potential energy that can be converted into kinetic energy of change with a relatively small nudge.

Bumpers, Boosts, and Tilts2022A discussion late last year about different ways to influence organizations led…The key here is recognizing that nudges aren’t some magic thing. “Yay! We’re going to nudge things now! Let’s nudge everything!” isn’t going to get us very far. Nudging is a particular kind of tool that originates in Donella Meadows’ notion of leverage points. For a nudge to be effective, we must understand a) the place to which the nudge can be applied and b) the direction in which the system (our organization) is willing to move.

Solved, solvable, unsolvable2022I have been noodling on a decision-making framework, and I am hoping…Both of these pose questions to what appears to be unsolvable problems: what works as a potent nudge for an organization today is unlikely to do the same for a different organization – or even that same organization in the past or future. This can be quite discouraging and disorienting, and frankly, seem kooky and like consultant-speak. Because they stem from the unsolvable class of problems, working with nudges is always going to have that flavor. They hang in tension between rational and woowoo.

Organizing and sensing connections2021Tucked away in a couple of paragraphs of the brilliant paper by…Organizational cartography2022Given that this team is thriving, the various units within it collaborate…To make this whole nudging story more concrete, let’s look at one facet of embodied strategy: the means by which the tacit knowledge percolates. In my experience, the embodied strategy tends to have roots in there. Put differently, the communication structure of the organization defines the kind of embodied strategy it ends up with. All I am doing here is echoing Conway’s law: “Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.”

What the heck is strategy work?2022One interpretation is a visage of a wizard: me sitting in an…Continuously Integrated Strategy2022Somehow, these amazing ideas don’t seem to extend to strategy. In the…A strategy and a plan2021Working as a group, our good fortune depends (among other things) on…Put next to the classic understanding of strategy, the causality may feel backward. Usually, we pay attention to team structure and communication as things that are subservient to strategic work. We launch reorgs and set up new meetings, slide decks, mailing lists, and program spreadsheets to set the strategy, right? I suspect that the relationship is much more reciprocal. Yes, when we are able to change how the organization communicates, its embodied strategy changes as well. However, I am skeptical of the idea that imposing a new communication pattern on a team will do anything of a kind. More than likely, efforts like this will result in the all-too-common outcome of a failed top-down initiative: the embodied strategy and the communication structure in which it’s rooted will neatly weave around the change, unaffected.

Tension in Shared Mental Model Space2022This just occurred to me today, so I am writing this down…To get less frustrating results, we are better off examining how tacit knowledge seems to spread across the organization. Look for the spaces and channels that thrive. They may not have a clear purpose and even look like just people loitering about (remember the stereotypical watercooler?). Once these are discerned, see if there’s friction. What constrains them? And what effect do these constraints have on the sharing of tacit knowledge? Due to these constraints, is there an unmet need that perhaps could be addressed in a different way?

Jankless2021As we Orient, examining our prediction error and updating our model of…These questions are difficult to answer. But once we have at least an inkling of what’s going on, we can start experimenting with nudges. The presence of friction and the pressure of constraints indicates appetite for change: the system is willing to shift, awaiting our nudge. One of my colleagues recently shared that creating a cross-functional chat room was one of their greatest buck-for-bang career accomplishments. Just the mere fact of establishing such a room led to a noticeable improvement in collaboration across several teams, creating a place for having conversations that simply didn’t happen before.

Pace layers of predictability2023One thing that stood out to me was this notion of a…I’ve had a very similar experience a while back, when a sudden departure of key senior leaders left everyone on the team shocked and rather lost. I didn’t know anything about nudges or systems back then, but following my intuition, I created a chat room titled “<team name> Kin”. The room acted as the figurative flag to rally around and helped sub-teams come together. Many years and several teams later, I was delighted to learn that the chat room still exists, still active, numbered in hundreds of participants, and having successfully survived the churn of chat software migration.

The waterline2023This one is a very short framing, but hopefully, it’s still useful.…We might be tempted to summarize the learning from these experiences as “let’s create chat rooms for everyone and call them <team name> Kin!” And indeed, I’ve tried this recipe multiple times – with meager results. Looking back, in all cases, I followed my intuition about unlocking the sharing of tacit knowledge, but neglected to consider a system’s willingness to move. Both examples that worked did so because they were nudging the organization’s communication structure out of a constricted, miserable state. They were unlocking a metaphorical spring and releasing the accumulated potential energy. In my less successful attempts, I was expecting the nudge to act as some sort of energy generator, and that’s not what nudges do.

Generating ideas and strategy coherence2022Here’s the thing. In software engineering (as likely in many technology fields),…At this point, you might be going:“Dimitri, you can’t be serious. You started this post talking about strategy and somehow veered into … making chat rooms? This nudge thing doesn’t appear very strategic.” It’s true – it doesn’t. Nudges that end up shifting an organization’s cone of embodied strategy often don’t look like much. They don’t have the grandeur and vigor of broad initiatives. And that is all right. A robust, well-communicated strategy will work exceptionally well as long as its destination fits into the cone. Otherwise, we must be looking for nudges.

Being Strategic2022It all begins with intention. There’s something in our environment – the…Finding the right nudge can be freakishly hard. Even now, much more comfortable with my system thinker’s hat, I still find many of my nudges to be ineffective. What I tell myself is that I just need to do better than random. To get there:

• How to think and what to think2023We act on what we think, so “what to think” is close…Invest into learning the system you’re in. Keep looking for places where nudges can be applied.
• Builder and Gardener Mindsets2022Briefly, the distinction emphasizes the difference in mindsets with which we approach…Avoid the trap of imagining that the system is a machine that could be completely understood. Think of it as a garden: it’s a little bit different today than it was yesterday.
• The Four Needs Framework2020The stories we tell ourselves shape how we see the world around…Look for friction and building pressure, where potential energy seems to be trapped. These tell me where the system is willing to change and a nudge may be effective.
• The gifts of failure2023The stepping stones tactic is one way through which we can maximize…Don’t bet on one nudge. Prepare to try many times. Be playful. Once in a while, give into intuition despite what logic might be stating. There’s a neat safe-to-fail experiment framing that helps me to get into the right mindset.

Gravity and water2023I have been lucky enough to be part of the process of…Steady winds, doldrums, and hurricanes2023It just so happened that this year, many of my friends and…Vision-oriented and impact-oriented mindsetseight days afterI had this really interesting framing pop out during a chat with…A crutchlinks here, 2022Instead, my guess is that our approach might be the same as…Dandelion or Elephant?links here, 2022The contextual quality of the lens allows us to use it to…Nudges, boosts, bumpers, and tiltslinks here, 2023The quartet is finally complete. I’ve written about nudges separately, and already…Changing the embodied strategy of a large organization is not impossible. In some ways, large organizations can change more rapidly than small ones, because they tend to amass incredible amounts of potential energy even in brief periods of stuckness. However, unless approached with a system thinker’s eye, they will appear to resist change with such strength that makes them look made of solid, immovable stone. Which is why the effect of a nudge can seem like magic when it works.