Author of the Emergent Approach to Strategy | Bringing Clarity to Strategy Theory and Practice | Revealing the Common Foundations of Creativity and Innovation in Business, Technology, Science and Music
Aidan McCullen and I discuss the essence of the role of strategy (link in comments). It is to enable people to make decisions in their local area that are for the benefit of the whole. Without this guidance, what else can they do but act to optimize their local situation? By definition, then, the strategy will always have tradeoffs because local situations will 𝙣𝒐𝙩 be optimized. Only a central rule can provide this functionality. See Aidan's The Innovation Show for excellent discussion. #EmergentApproachtoStrategy #PeterCompo #AdaptiveStrategy #StrategyDesign #StrategicPlanning
Part I of the 𝗘𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗔𝗽𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗮𝗰𝗵 𝘁𝗼 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝘆 presents this logic (https://amzn.to/3xYcWy8).
first, actually I never understood, why there are so many different ideas, models and approaches about systems, since they represent pretty easy to understand endevours based on defaults and agents on interaction. second, strategy is always about resource allocation what defines the basic layout of any system, almost every time causing constraints, there are basically no systems without developing them. third, natural systems have learned to accept and bridge bottlenecks instead of radically resolving them. Such dissolve action preserves their stability, flexibility and resilience to change and disruption. Any reductionist approach [such as ToC] that attempts to optimize individual parts of a system in isolation, on the other hand, can often lead to new problems, as the interdependencies and feedback loops within the system are not sufficiently taken into account. A holistic approach that respects the complexity and dynamics of systems is often more robust and better suited to creating stable and adaptive systems in the long term. but who knows, maybe I'm wrong ... ;)
Decentralised decision-making *does* work. All you need is a mutual understanding of direction and how you affect the system towards that goal. You are assuming that people only act in self-interest. What of shared values? You are also suggesting that local decisions are inherently in conflict with broader goals. Again, this is not true, as small local decisions can scale to benefit the whole - federal systems, for example. I have a value system called AMMERSE, and I have seen small isolated teams, given some values, make decisions that align well with the broader intent, communicated only via values. If you are a head teacher, do you have to govern the teachers to teach? Do you think a teacher needs to be given a strategy with rules in order to align with the goal of the head teacher - to teach? When a school board says, we need more engineers, do you think that message is unclear, and local teachers wont know what to do with the global aspiration? The education system works on values - and is most often derailed and made ineffective by bad rules. If we left it to values, education arguably would be far better.
That is not what complexity theory says and ‘global aspiration’ is a disastrous concept if you want to enable emergence. You are describing what you perceived as working for in your last job. That is a valuable contribution to the field but please don’t talk about bottlenecks in a CAS
guardrails often just prevent you falling off a cliff but may not direct the path you are taking. you may not follow them, just avoid them.
It’s been a great experience Peter, looking forward the last few episodes.
I am not sure about CAS, but this sure relates me to the i* (eye star) framework that talks about how Goals of individuals impacts the way they collaborate/coordinate/co-operate, whether in bold line relationships or dotted line (or just behind the scenes, surreptitiously). While Strategic Dependency can contribute to CAS, Strategic Rationale is more internal/ personal. At least in my mind.
Local pricing of opportunity cost - excellent 👍
Author of the Emergent Approach to Strategy | Bringing Clarity to Strategy Theory and Practice | Revealing the Common Foundations of Creativity and Innovation in Business, Technology, Science and Music
3mohttps://www.linkedin.com/posts/aidanmccullen_innovation-strategy-activity-7238093064475463680-lmKi?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop