The Wallpapering Principlefour days beforeThis principle builds on the layering principle, and deals with a common…Strategy Aperture

Dandelion or Elephant?2022The contextual quality of the lens allows us to use it to…What the heck is strategy work?2022We turn the mastermind toward frameworks. The key objective of this role…Embodied Strategy2022I was having a great conversation with a colleague about organizational learning…The concept of embodied strategy continues to captivate me. Recently, I found a more resonant way to talk about the narrowness and breadth of the cone of embodied strategy: the strategy aperture.

Nudging Embodied Strategy2022The whole concept of the cone of embodied strategy is a bit…Why will this be hard for us?2021I was working on a strategy and helping review another this week,…As I explored earlier, organizations tend to have a certain gait, a way of doing and thinking that they develop over time. No matter how much we try to convince them otherwise, they will always veer toward that certain way – hence the term “embodied” strategy, used in contrast to “stated” strategy.

Strategy and FOMO2022There’s this really fun neologism that the cool kids use: FOMO, or…The cone of the embodied strategy is a degree to which the organization is subject to its embodied strategy. Put very simply, the cone of the embodied strategy indicates how much flexibility we have in pursuing various future opportunities. Narrow cones indicate very little flexibility – we are set in our ways, and that’s the way we are. Broad cones indicate a lot of flexibility – the world is our oyster.

Being Strategic2022It all begins with intention. There’s something in our environment – the…Borrowing the term from physics, we can use the word “aperture” to indicate the breadth/narrowness of the cone of embodied strategy.

More narrow aperture means that as an organization, we are well-suited for producing only a certain class of ideas. Think of a team that’s laser-focused on a particular problem or highly specialized to build a certain kind of product.

The gifts of failure2023The stepping stones tactic is one way through which we can maximize…Broader apertures allow organizations to be nimble, more mercurial, able to anticipate and act on a wide variety of opportunities. Some – most – of these will not pan out, and some will hit the motherlode.

Generating ideas and strategy coherence2022Here’s the thing. In software engineering (as likely in many technology fields),…Neither broad or narrow strategy aperture is bad or good in itself – however, it must be matched to the environment.

Dandelion/Elephant Strategy Rubric2022I discussed the nature of conditions that encourage dandelion or elephant strategies,…Narrow strategy aperture is very useful in more elephant-like environments, where it’s all about optimizing the fit into the well-known, stable niche. The more narrow our aperture, the more elephant-like environments will be attractive to us.

Growing dandelions2022A couple of weeks ago, I talked about r/K-selection and mentioned two…The flexibility the broader aperture brings is very effective in dandelion’s environments: brand new spaces, where constraints aren’t clearly defined. The broader the aperture, the more comfortable the team is in a dandelion environment.

The law of tightening aperture2023What happens to the teams with wide apertures over time? Does the…How do we find out strategy aperture for our organization? My intuition is that we need to look at how this organization is constrained. Put differently, what are the limits that confine the cone of its embodied strategy?

Limits of attachment and capacity are interlinked2021It felt both liberating and somehow odd to make a distinction between…Limits to seeing: capacity and attachment2021Helping a colleague process tough feedback this week, I’ve been reaching for…Limits2022This story builds on the one I wrote a while ago, and…Applying a framing from the problem understanding framework, we can look for three limits: time, capacity, and attachment. Note: these limits are nearly always tangled with each other in mutually reinforcing ways.

The waterline2023Similarly, every technology organization has a waterline. Everything above this waterline will…The time limit is the easiest to spot and is the most intuitive. Does everything within our organization seem to happen slower than on the outside? The more emphatically we confirm this statement, the more likely our aperture is on the narrower side. Conversely, does it feel like our team moves faster than everyone can blink? Then we probably have a broader strategy aperture.

Tension in Shared Mental Model Space2022This just occurred to me today, so I am writing this down…The limit of capacity is also fairly straightforward. What we don’t know creates a negative space where we can’t create new ideas. Skills, expertise, and the breadth of experience are key factors in pushing the organization’s capacity limits outward. How specialized are we as a team? Deeper specialization narrows the aperture – and so do team cultures that produce echo chambers and groupthink.

A vision and a hallucination2022To be compelling, a vision must be posed as a solution. That…The third limit is attachment. Words like “risk”, “downside”, and “uncertainty” typically come up to describe this limit’s contributing factors. For example, the more customers we’re serving with our products, the more risk we will be taking to pursue new opportunities – this narrows our embodied strategy aperture. The more existential the idea of change feels within our organization, the less broad our aperture is.

Enumerating constraints2021From the bottom, we are supported — and limited — by our…Asymptote analysis using customer-vendor loop2022Another potentially useful source of insights is using the customer-vendor loop for…Jankless2021As we Orient, examining our prediction error and updating our model of…Strategy aperture gifts and cursesthe day after, links hereNow that I’ve sketched out the concept of strategy aperture, let’s play…Innovation frontierlinks here, 2023As you may remember from my previous essays, this understanding will also…Makers and Magicianslinks here, 2023As I asserted before, there’s a brief moment when this opportunity is…By studying these limits, we should get a pretty good sense of our team’s strategy aperture. Now comes the key question: does it match our environment? If the answer is a confident yes, then we are set to accomplish amazing things. And more than likely, we’re not even asking ourselves these questions, busy doing those things. However, if trying to answer this question sows doubt in our minds, we might be in a mismatched environment: our embodied strategy prevents us from being effective to achieve what we’re aiming for.