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Charting the Corporate Mind – What’s in the book

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In my last post I had mentioned my rediscovery of the book, “Charting the Corporate Mind” by Charles Hampden-Turner (CHT), and how I find the whole topic of dilemmas particularly relevant to my practice of Strategic Impact Making.

I am documenting here some of the key points that I see as pertinent and noteworthy. While this is not a book-review, I will also make observations about how I see dilemmas playing a role in complex situations where leaders have to make strategic choices.

The Introduction by Ronnie Lessem in an interesting read in itself. Most people might not know of him, but during the 90’s when this book was written, he too was considered a Mangement Guru.

The author CHT is taking on an ‘existential’ challenge most managers face – having to make difficult choices from among myriad complex alternatives. CHT has separately written about his vision of the Radical Man.

A manager is a social being in relationships with others – their capacity for synthesizing, symbolizing and exploring frees them from being ‘stimulus bound’. Such capacity permits them to rebel against the absurdity of atrophying cultures and empty forms and enables them to create new meaning and renew themselves in their environment.

He goes on to list other qualities about this ‘Radical Man’ manager, such as quality of perception, self-awareness etc., but the one I found interesting was something about ‘suspending their cognitive structures, permitting their own structures to crumble in the face of contradiction.

This is a quality that will be pertinent to the issue of reconciling and resolving dilemmas. This is the idea in Strategic Design – one discovers the complexity that underlies a seemingly simple situation, that it has many dimensions and scales – and often issues that do not seem to reconcile easily. These dimensions then must be brought into a dialectical process – perhaps that is the process of making/prototypiing – that then tries to find a reconciliation between various dilemmas – the only way one can do that is to perhaps transcend.

Another interesting thought goes – ‘When there is no initial dilemma, there is no gain from designing a solution’. This is for me the starting step of the Meta-Design Process, the one I refer to as Q0 – something you must do before you even engage on a Strategic Impact journey – The need to clearly identify the challenge that creates a Case for Action.

In critiquing the use of Profit as a measure, he highlights why it falls short, mostly in systemic terms as not serving the cause of organizational learning, such as, it comes too late for it to help in the learning, it is too narrow in its scope (the system has many more dimensions to pay attention to), there might be other things more important and that it does not deal with societal or environmental issues.

Here is another interesting statement – The hunt for the unicorn is a doomed quest – no pure unambiguous essence of virtue exists.

We are like jugglers he says – the more balls there are the more we are likely to drop them if we get fixated on just one.

CHT, as the book title suggests, uses Charts to make the dilemmas Visible, something people can periodically review to check progress. I have personally used such visualization in managerial group setting and confirm how effective it is for faciliating conversations about contentious complex topics.

The journey of resolving dilemmas has a direction – towards an ever richer synthesis of values, towards mounting complexity, towards packages of knowledge more intensely and aesthetically organized, and towards the expansion of the mind itself.

In essence, dilemmas are an existential reality, resolving them requires a certain mindset – the kind a ‘Radical Man’ possesses, particularly in the sense of being willing to set aside cognitive structures, recognizing the need to use devices to facilitate conversations among diverse stakeholders and finally to see the whole proces of resolution and reconciliation as a learning journey.

Book Cover - Charting the Corporate Mind

Navigating through Complexity – grappling with dilemmas

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In recent times there has been growing awareness of the concept of Complexity, with a corresponding increase in the number of publications that advise us on the need to embrace it, as a necessary condition of our times, and even more so going into the future.

Complexity is the very nature of the reality on which we layer aritificial and human/social systems often obscuring it in the process. At some juncture, the alienation and misalignment between reality and our constructs leads to dysfunction, often serious. Complexity also arises within the systems we construct to counter and master complexity, one of the hallmarks of our times.

This happens through all the interconnections and interdependence that we build and live with and continue to grow every passing day. I do not mean to write here about the nature of complexity, and all that is implies but just bring attention to what that realization or discovery leads us to.

On the one hand is the awakening to a certain kind of underlying beauty – a sense of awe. On the other hand is the realization that there is a reason we encounter so much intractability in our times, and that, if we accept this ’truth’, embrace it so to say, there is hope.

For all that I have read and heard, I have seen very few recommendations on how to actually deal with the many possibilities that such challenges rooted in complexity expose. We recognize that there are many possible pathways to navigate through the situations – many possible dimensions and possible points of intervention. The recommendations then have to do with experimentation, probing, and building rapid learning organizations, among others. There is more to the various approaches and I will deal with that in some other post.

One of the things that occurred to me, was that complexity posed the decision maker with dilemmas – of course in this case a multi-horned multi-lemma so to speak. That train of thought led me to thinking about dilemmas and the work that has been done in dilemma theory.

I was reminded of a book from several years ago – “Charting the Corporate Mind”, by Charles Hampden-Turner. I had referred to this book in the early 90’s when I was pivoting my career from business management to consulting. The book is certainly targeted at the Corporation and the role of the Manager. However, during my recent reading I realized that much of the book’s discussion of dilemmas and how to approach them remains relevant to our complex contexts in general.

Over the next couple of posts I will review some of the key concepts from the book and how I believe those concepts and approaches might be relevant to our need to deal with complexity in a somewhat systematic manner.

10 Rules for Strategic Innovators – 1

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2014 I am in the midst of reading “10 Rules for Strategic Innovators” by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble. As I reflect on what I am reading I will write a series of posts – not so much as a review of the book, but the thoughts it triggers.

Before I picked up this book, I was revisiting “Blue Ocean Strategy”, “Business Model Regeneration” and a number of other well-known texts on Strategic Innovation. ‘Blue Ocean’ certainly is about Strategic Innovation, in that it looks at the architecture of value as a starting point before it gets into business models.

Accordingly, once you have understood the dimensions of value you can play around with them in different ways to create unique uncontested configurations, which then become the basis for one or more business models. I will reflect on Blue Ocean Strategy shortly, so will leave this topic for now. My intent of bringing that reference and other books was that there are a number of other sources that discuss “Strategic Innovation”.

The subtitle, which you see on the inside cover flap (should you have a physical old-fashioned object), gives you an accurate gist of what this book is about – “How to build a breakthrough business within a profitable old one”. This book is focused specifically on those businesses that are currently profitable, and for various reasons are pursuing a new strategic opportunity that is distinctly different from the existing business. It therefore does not discuss ways of identifying breakthrough ideas, but focuses rather on execution.

The term ‘Strategic Innovation’ is mentioned often in the context of innovation, though as one can expect, interpretations vary. I have been thinking of it more in terms of the nature of impact innovation has on the enterprise. Strategic Innovation is not just about the degree of impact, or about business models, but rather that which is radically distinct from anything the enterprise is currently doing or done before, and therefore transformational. Strategic Innovation would certainly involve new business models, but the reverse, in my opinion, is not true. One could innovate an existing business model with a significant impact, but it may not necessarily take the enterprise on a radically different strategic path.

Similarly, management researchers seek an organizational code—a set of rules that can reduce dysfunctions, sustain growth, and lengthen the average corporate life span beyond that of a human being. The code will have to enable strategic innovation: a process of exploring experimental strategies.

Strategic innovation involves testing new unproven, and significantly different answers to at least one of the three fundamental question strategy: who is your customer? What is the value you offer to the customer? How do you deliver that value?

I like the notion of organizational DNA. I have been thinking of business architectures as “value design systems” – design systems that once put in place can create a range of value within a range of contexts. The second line in the quote above puts the emphasis on experimentation and testing. I think experimentation is very much a part of the whole innovation process. However, I do not think you can exclude the critical activity of identifying significant opportunities to pursue from the overall umbrella of strategic innovation. ‘Strategic Experimentation’ though is what the authors emphasize on as critical to making strategic innovation real.

Underlying this emphasis on experimentation is the thinking that strategic innovation requires dealing with a significant amount of ambiguity and uncertainty. It is therefore not possible to make concrete plans to execute an idea in the conventional sense, and experimentation therefore is integral to the execution approach, at least in the beginning.

The approaches discussed describe ways to work through this uncertainty, a process termed ‘strategic experimentation’. Correspondingly, if the uncertainty does not exist or has been reduced due to for example another competitor having already tried the approach, then it does not qualify to be termed “strategic innovation” according a list of several criteria in the introduction. Distinguishing strategic innovation from other forms such as process or service innovation, the authors specify that such innovation always involves unproven business models. I wonder if this is necessarily true. Is it possible to come up with a strategic innovation, but you are able to replicate or borrow from a business model from some other domain.

Strategic Innovation is critical in the increasingly challenging business context in order for enterprises to stay ahead and be able to influence their own destiny. With the shift in emphasis in strategy from planning to innovation and change it is a competence business must develop, and this book proposes to show you how.

Developing a Social Business Strategy

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The term strategy in the context of Social Media or Social Business has different connotations. I distinguish between three types of ‘strategies’

Business Strategy – or rather a Social Business Innovation Strategy
Execution Strategy, and an
Operations Strategy
I will describe here what you need for a ‘social media’ Business Strategy.

Once you have the foundational stuff in place, namely a good understanding of how social media works (viral mechanisms, influence etc), where the opportunities are, what is happening in your industry, your markets, in particular customers etc, and you also understand the implications for executing such a strategy and what it will mean to operationalize your new solution/s – you are ready to develop a Social Business Strategy. These foundational exercises are in the nature of an Exploration or Discovery. They help you get a sense of the overall landscape and what the opportunity looks like.

Even though one could describe the process of developing a business strategy in several steps, here are three high-level steps one goes through in its development.

Step 1: Identify the opportunities and align with your strategic priorities:

You have to identify the specific opportunities for your enterprise: It is very important to base your strategy in your own context and align it with your strategic priorities.

So one of the first steps is to identify all the possible ways in which you could use Social Media – whether it is in Marketing, Customer Service or Product Development. (I am focusing here on the external perspective, since you are using the term ‘social media’).

If you are thinking broadly, then perhaps you would also want to consider Enterprise-internal opportunities. In fact, in order to be successful with any of the externally-oriented opportunities, you will necessarily have to think systemically, and include internal functions as well.

Develop a framework for assessing value – often it is more than just economic. In any case you will need this to justify some kind of a ‘ROI’ – at least in order to systematically assess what you should or should not pursue.

Step 2: Assess your readiness to address the identified opportunities

Based on your work in Step 1, there might be several opportunities you could potentially pursue, however, you have to pick those that you are likely to succeed at.

You should assess your organization’s prior experience with introducing similar change – particularly if you have no prior history of working with “social technologies”.

There are a number of new concepts and competencies involved when working with social media. Assess therefore whether you have the necessary competencies.

All your stakeholders might not be comfortable with the implied changes. Assess the changes and impacts that the opportunities could have on your organization and who and what that might affect.

In particular you need to assess if your customers would be willing to adopt the new solutions and what would motivate them.

In the assessment exercise, do include technological readiness. Some of the detailed implications of technology might not be apparent till you get to the design stage though.

Step 3: Developing a Strategy and a Road Map

Now that you have a good understanding of the opportunities, the value they will create for your business, and the ability of your organization to execute successfully, you have a prioritized shorter list of what you can successfully pursue.

Identify those from this list that provide the most value and are easiest to implement for your first forays, and develop a road-map to implement the rest over time.

It is also very critical to develop a set of design principles – design not being limited to technology, but all aspects of the new solution.

Establish metrics for success and put in place a good governance strategy to guide and lead the program.

You now have enough substance to build a strategy, and to mobilize all the stakeholders to back you.

Finally, strategy is an iterative process – things will change as you deploy and learn, so be open to revisit and change – quickly!