Week of 2022-08-15
Where I talk about the seemingly invisible force that often thwarts our attempts at effective strategy work: the “embodied strategy”. I also share some ways to contend with this force that, at first glance, may not look very strategic.
Embodied Strategy
I was having a great conversation with a colleague about organizational learning and at one point, I kind of just blurted out that strategies are embodied. Here’s my attempt to expand a bit on this idea.
Put very simply, organizations usually have two strategies: one that is stated, and one that is embodied by the organization. The first one is typically highly visible, and the second is mostly invisible and only detectable by its effects. As I mentioned before, every organization has a strategy. Even if this strategy is not stated, the presence of outcomes and the patterns they follow indicates some sort of strategy at play. It might not be the same as the stated strategy. It could be a strategy that accelerates the team’s demise. It could be a strategy that favors short-term outcomes to the long-term ones. But there’s a strategy nevertheless.
Why do I find this seemingly nitpicky point so important? Because when we say in exasperation “this team/organization/unit can’t do strategy!”, what we’re actually saying is that we have given it our best, but failed to influence this team/organization/unit in attaining a state of executing on a strategy that is coherent with its stated intentions. What I am offering here is some light on where the source of such a failure may reside.
If you ever met a human, you might notice that we are full of habits. Some of them are good for us. Some of them are not so much. Organizations are bunches of humans, so they follow the same pattern. We call some of these habits rules and processes, and others norms and culture – or maybe even mission-critical infrastructure. Organization’s embodied strategy emerges from the full collection of its habits. It is this embedded strategy that defines the range of the outcomes and behavior patterns that are within the organization’s reach.
As we all know from our own personal experiences, habits are hard to change, especially without putting in some intentional and patient effort. Some habits are so ingrained that they become part of our identity. This might add clarity to why sometimes, despite our best attempts to devise and instill a different strategy — no matter how elegant and sound — the outcomes remain the same. If our ideas fall outside of the organization’s range of embodied strategy, our efforts to realize them will be in vain. The habits will hold us tightly within that range.
To visualize what’s happening, imagine that there’s a vertical line on the horizontal scale of time, representing the range of what’s possible, constrained by the embodied strategy. Even if the range stays constant over time, the choices we make are path-dependent. So, from our vantage point of the present, the line will produce a cone-like shape when projected into the future. If our desired strategy plots a course outside of this cone, this strategy is unlikely to succeed. In such cases, the stated strategy becomes detached from the embodied strategy, resulting in loss of coherence.
It also becomes evident that if we are to influence what an organization does, we must begin with first understanding its embodied strategy and the range that it affords. We need to know the shape of the cone. Rather than throwing up our hands in frustration, we need to stop looking at the stated strategies, load up on patience and dig deep.
Since it’s all habits, the facets of the organization’s embodied strategy will be hiding in plain sight. They will not seem like the usual strategy artifacts we’d find in a shared folder. Embodied strategy is tacit knowledge, and not something that is cleanly captured in a slide deck or a spreadsheet. In fact, the less noticed the habit, the more likely it is part of the embodied strategy. In many cases, only newcomers or outsides can spot them. This is why I love chatting with folks who recently joined the team. They have the best chance of seeing what the rest of us have long stopped noticing.
There seems to be a fairly strong relationship between the age of the team and the shape of the cone. A newly-formed team will have an extremely wide-ended cone: there’s very little strategy that’s actually embodied. Nearly everything is possible. As the team grows and develops its collection of habits, the cone narrows. Mature teams are stuck with the needle-like cones: they graduate to what they’re supposed to do, and that’s the only thing they can do. The embodied strategy becomes a trap that doesn’t let them change.
I hope you hear parallels with the Innovator’s Dilemma in this story. Aversion to risk and sticking with what works isn’t some simple thing that organizations can just choose not to do. When the next big opportunity manifests, no matter how strikingly, a mature organization can’t act on it because its embodied strategy, over time, shrunk the cone of possibilities into a laser-thin line. The negligible likelihood of this line intersecting with new opportunities is what foretells the organization's future obsolescence.
This shrinking happens naturally, as a result of the team encountering challenges and obstacles, finding ways to overcome them and committing these experiences into its memory. Some of these might be company lore. Some of these will be new gates in the launch process. Many will result in the broadly-adopted tools and frameworks being built. Each – though good and useful as a matter of progress – narrows the width of the cone bit by bit. This process is not something we can prevent from happening, and we’re better off realizing that it’s always at work.
Especially for organizations that have been around for a while, we must understand that while we can change what the organization does, the manner in which this doing happens is rarely affected. For instance, following Clayton Christensen’s advice in The Innovator’s Solution, we might decide to form a distinct team that will pursue a strategy that puts us outside of the organization’s current cone of embodied strategy. However, if we’re not careful, this team will choose to rely on the larger organization’s well-established norms, practices, and processes. As a result, we might be surprised to find out that our attempts to reach our desired destination are thwarted by the same cone of embodied strategy that we wanted to break out of.
It seems to me that every exercise in strategy must begin with the study of embodied strategy. The whole “know thyself” bit may sound cliche, but there’s a reason why both Roger Martin and Richard Rumelt emphasized “coherent actions” and “capabilities” as part of strategy work: they were pointing at the notion that our strategic aspirations are constrained by the cone of habits our organizations have accumulated.
🔗 https://glazkov.com/2022/08/16/embodied-strategy/
Nudging Embodied Strategy
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Invest into learning the system you’re in. Keep looking for places where nudges can be applied.
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.
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.
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.
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.