As the team looked back on the last year, we reflected on two themes which consistently emerged in our most interesting conversations. These themes surfaced in our work on climate, health, scientific research, humanitarianism, and other areas.
If these themes are related, it is because they ask questions beyond the scope of what is normally expected from “strategy”, even for organisations focused on social impact. Most strategy is about organisations and most strategy is rational (or at least pretends to be).
The strategic questions that kept coming up in 2023 were about networks and emotions. They invited us to think about pace, agency and power. These questions shift the focus of strategy from a single, rational organisation. They ask us to look outwards to the network, and inwards towards the personal.
1. How can networks deliver?
The first recurring question is about strategies for building effective networked organisations.
Many of our clients are in the business of building and supporting collaboration for common goals. This can be in dynamic coalitions, membership organisations, federations, decentralized movements, and others.
In every case, they know that if they can build and mobilise a purposeful network, there will be a powerful community that can achieve much greater impact than any individual.
This is an era of collaboration. The idea of “small pieces, loosely joined” was one of the first organising principles of the web. The power and importance of networks and partnerships is obvious in a highly connected world. If your ambition in the broadest sense is to solve big, difficult problems, then you need to acknowledge that no-one can do everything, and everyone needs to collaborate.
But building strong networks is just the beginning.
Making the case for a collaboration is straightforward. Making collaboration effective and enduring over time is very hard.
The price of collaboration can be a lot of inertia. Consensus takes a long time, members move at different speeds, authority to make decisions can be opaque. People want different levels of certainty and tolerate risk in a different way. Conversations about the network itself can overwhelm the work the network is trying to do. We often see trade-offs between scale and agility, between coherence and creativity, depth and breadth of impact, and many other conditions.
But pace really matters, and it often feels like this is traded away too easily. These networks are being built to address urgent problems. They have to find a way to overcome this inertia. Once momentum is lost it is hard to get the flywheel moving again. The membership, strategy, culture and processes of networked organisations are inter-related. Leadership matters, but alone it’s not enough. The temptation to use quick fixes to ensure stuff gets done can undermine the principles of the network, but doing everything by unanimity can mean nothing gets done.
It’s a hard problem, with real trade-offs, and it’s shared by many.
2. Does strategic transformation need personal transformation?
Successful change in an organisation demands a personal transformation before a strategic transformation. Often, this happens most simply by changing the leadership. New leaders with new beliefs can lead to new strategies.
When we reflect on those organisations that seem to be the most “stuck”, it’s often because they have leaders trapped in an old way of thinking, or an old way of being. This might be about power, their place in the world, how they think of themselves, or how they think the world works.
Getting individuals personally aligned to the organisation’s objectives is often the business of “culture change” and “transformation”. In those sorts of conversations, people often talk about winning “hearts and minds”, but the emphasis is really mostly on the “minds”. It’s about winning an argument.
The more interesting question might be about the “hearts”.
James Baldwin wrote: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Last year, we spent a lot of time working with clients who argued strongly that personal transformation sits at the heart of their ambitions for systemic change. They aim to shift mindsets first.
They would argue you can’t solve climate change without fundamentally reframing humanity’s relationship to nature. You can’t help people in their community if you don’t give them the tools to help themselves. At a basic level, you can’t solve anything if you don’t believe you have the agency to make a difference. At a practical level, you won’t tackle climate change if you don’t believe in climate change.
The question that keeps coming up is “How should you think about the relationship between personal beliefs and strategic outcomes?”
Do you tackle the underlying beliefs to achieve the strategic outcomes? How do you do it, even if you have decided to?
The complexity of this is multiplied when thinking about whole communities, or groups of decision-makers. When combined with the challenges of strategy in networks, it only gets more complex.
Good strategy always has a strong narrative, but this goes deeper. We’ve found scenario planning and other futures tools are helpful to reframe their perspectives and challenge core assumptions, but we’ve also recognised that this is slow and difficult work, and even when people do start to challenge their core assumptions, they are still likely to snap back into their old ways of working. As with the networks question, leadership matters, but alone it’s not enough.
Throughout 2023, questions like these kept stacking on top of each other.
Tackling these questions is messy and uncertain and risky. It moves away from the comfortable rational, organisational frame of most strategy work.
What links them together is that when organisations are thinking about their ambitions for systemic change, their capacity to build and manage coalitions, the opinions of others, and the role of personal beliefs in choice-making, then arguably what they are thinking about is called “politics”, in the broadest sense of the word.
If you are starting to tackle these questions, then “politics” isn’t just a risk factor, or something to do with elections, it’s the whole operating environment. It might be helpful to acknowledge that, because as we go into 2024, these questions will keep coming up.