Where I learn about a new concept of strategy aperture and examine the gifts and curses of teams with different apertures. Also, an ode to gardeners.
Strategy Aperture
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Neither broad or narrow strategy aperture is bad or good in itself – however, it must be matched to the environment.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
🔗 https://glazkov.com/2023/02/18/strategy-aperture/
Strategy aperture gifts and curses
Now that I’ve sketched out the concept of strategy aperture, let’s play with it. Let’s imagine two teams: one with a wide strategy aperture and the other with narrow. What are the gifts and curses of these teams?
A team with a wide strategy aperture will have the gift of sensing: it will be able to discern a massive variety of opportunities. The flexibility of the wide aperture gives it the capacity to try everything. Dabble in this, taste test that. Write a quick prototype here, throw together a demo there.
One thing that this team won’t be able to do is doggedly pursue one particular opportunity. When sensing is a gift, commitment is a curse. Teams with a wide strategy aperture usually stink at delivering on the opportunities. They are idea factories. Their curse is that someone else usually takes these ideas to market. PARC, Bell Labs and many other venerable institutions of technology innovation are all subject to that curse.
Let’s look at the other team. Its narrow aperture gives the team the gift of focus. This team knows how to take a vague idea and make it real. As long as this opportunity is within its capabilities, the team will find a way. Unlike the first team, this one won’t get distracted by a new shiny and accidentally forget about what matters. Like a tractor or any other power tool, if we point this team to a problem, we know that they will give it their all.
The curse of this team is that it’s pretty much blind to other opportunities. Once the target is locked, there might as well be no other opportunities – everything is poured into the one that’s chosen. As a member of engineering teams, I’ve seen this pattern repeat quite often. It’s like watching a train wreck in slow motion. When new disconfirming evidence emerges, the narrow-aperture team just keeps on chugging. Even when everyone knows the effort is going to fail, nobody dares to mess with the gears. People just keep shrugging and saying: “Yep, this one’s going to end poorly.”
This vignette gives us a nice distinction to build upon. If we look around various teams in our organization, can we spot the ones with the narrow aperture? Can we point at the ones with the wide aperture? Knowing their gifts and curses, can we predict what will happen next with the project they are working on?
🔗 https://glazkov.com/2023/02/19/strategy-aperture-gifts-and-curses/
The gardener
I often use the analogies of gardens and gardening in my writing. It’s only fitting that I talk about gardeners. This was inspired by something that my friend Alex Komoroske said once – though now he tells me that he can’t remember saying that. Oh well.
When we talk about gardening, we picture a flourishing environment, where everything is neat and lovely and blossoming in the serene calm. We tend to imagine gardens the opposite of the hustle and bustle, dog-eat-dog kinds of environments.
However, to become these environments, gardens need gardeners. The key property of a garden is not the fertile soil, or a picturesque location, or even the choice of seedlings. The key property of a garden is the gardener — someone who is able and willing to exercise significant power to ensure that the garden is protected from the rest of the environment.
Gardeners skillfully wield all kinds of violent, cutting instruments to ensure that the garden is growing well. They get on their knees and ruthlessly pull out anything that is not supposed to be there. They engage in prolonged battles with pests, who keep finding new and clever ways to get into the garden. Gardeners fight for the garden.
The reason why gardens exist is because they have gardeners: individuals who are willing to put their sweat and tears into them.
When the gardener leaves, the garden dies. It doesn’t die quickly. For a little while, it may even look like the garden is going to be fine. Like all the work that the gardener has put into it has finally paid off and the garden can live on its own. But that is not to be. Eventually, the rabbits dig out the roots. The mites take over the leaves. And the garden withers. Over time, the surrounding environment swallows it, making it part of itself.
Sometimes, a garden gets lucky and gets another gardener. But the new gardeners see the inefficiencies of how the flowerbeds were drawn, and how the soil is too heavy on clay. How the water supply could be moved to a more central location. They have different ideas about the kinds of plants they want and where. TWith the same gusto as the previous gardener, they mold the garden to their liking. Gardens are shaped like their gardeners, and if they aren’t, they will be.
Here’s to gardeners. Those who are willing to expend their effort and their capital on building a patch of something that’s perhaps quirkier and weirder, but undeniably more intentional than the rest of the environment. I salute you.
Week of 2023-02-20
I certainly fall into the broad aperture in most realms of my life -- just last week I started writing "smaller aperture" at the top of my daily task list to remind me of just that
do you have writings on support for both the broad aperture teams/individuals and the narrow aperture ones (wherever they are... they're not me and often not the folks I hang out around.. though it sounds like you do!)?
thank you for your clear writing, I appreciate it!