Strategy (and other new ways to think about leadership and management)

Thanks for sharing this @peteburden I shall take a look...

I came across a useful post by the folks at Optimi, who are part of the Enspiral Network in NZ, which explains their approach to standard forms of management: https://medium.com/enspiral-tales/co-opting-traditional-management-skills-for-self-management-816ab6795c52

The first section deals with the function of "people care and motivation". Instead of the typical command and control approach of appraisals / performance reviews, they opt for a buddy system (stewarding), team feedback (retrospectives), and learning goals (that help set the strategic direction of the company).

It's fairly light on detail but a nice overview of a different approach.

I think businesses are often quite poor at 'seeing' strategically and then turning that seeing into some kind of meaningful direction. I liked Anita Roddick's approach to the dreaded strategic team meetings she said something like: 'The Body Shop doesn't do strategies, we tell stories.' Mic drop. Do less strategic 'thinking' and more strategic 'seeing'.

I really like this @irenap . It's a great example I think of how the dominant narrative about strategy (and leadership and management) drives out alternatives. It's hard to even raise the possibility of 'seeing strategy' - it sounds weird!

I think our starting cultural assumption is that strategy is all about 'thinking' - and that therefore 'well educated intelligent people' are the only ones that can 'do strategic thinking'.
The assumption is that strategy is a rational process in which some people work out what is 'best' (or 'better') and then somehow (usually some kind of miraculous thinking is involved) get other people to implement it!

This flies in the face of my own experience - that strategy 'emerges'.

Of course, strategy will often be claimed after the fact as in "That's what we planned all along". Which for me is often another fairly transparent power play.

PS this might sound like a purely academic discussion. But it really worries me that coops might be tempted to fall into the trap of also adopting the dominant ways adopted (and spread) by bigger organisations. When I think doing strategy in ways that are more suited to cooperating could prove a really useful difference.

I've made up 'seeing strategy' up but I agree, I like it too! I've heard about 'story-telling strategies' when I was a meetings content producer years ago. I also ran a couple of these sessions since and I think (no, I know) the energy in the room far outweighs any other strategy session and there's not a post-it note in sight. There's a bit of preamble, getting workers on the same wavelength etc. but the results of the stories create real life themes that pop up across all job roles. Whether everyone likes it or not, those themes, especially if constantly recurring, actually start to become the business' strategic targets. The sessions bring out what your business or organisation as a whole is trying to tell you ... I guess what it wants you to see hence 'Seeing Strategy'. What corporates often do is ignore the themes and put in their own agendas anyway but I'd be excited to see what worker co-ops do if they get a hold of this idea. If you're even more interested Pete let me know, you'd be ace at running these for sure.

Hi @irenap yes I like stories and story telling. (And thank you for your very kind comment!).

I do think that like many very natural things when consultants get their hands on them they can become a bit stuck and stale. When a big benefit of such approaches is their 'freshness'.

When stories are told authentically and with spontaneity they can be amazing. When part of a defined session or process we can sometimes miss the point!

I think the same is true for 'seeing'. We can all see ('notice') what is happening when we take the time to slow down and look. When 'seeing' becomes a 'strategic approach' we have to watch that we aren't back in the domain of conventional ways of leading and managing and doing strategy.

And yes that's often about the broader agenda (corporate, consultant, whatever).

I'm reading https://www.betterworktogether.co from Susan Basterfield and others from Enspiral. Lots of interesting stuff so far, although a lot of it is common sense or unsurprising to anyone who has worked in a co-op setting for any period of time. I guess the book is aimed more at people who work in a 'command and control' setting.

Thanks for the insights @peteburden , @irenap , @graham2 so far. Often I wonder is anyone reading these threads? Today I can say yes, that was really useful stuff. I am on a permaculture design course ( PDC ) and we have been tasked with what should seem like a simple exercise of designing someones garden. We are a small team of 5 people. We have turtle diagrams telling us how to be best capable, ( my unpermaculture bit ) garden plans, I/O analysis diagrams, organization diagram ( my unpermaculture bit ), SWOC, customer requirements, sector analysis charts, how principles values, ethics are met. I am sat feeling something is missing ( other than a competent gardener) and that something just might be the story, so thanks for that. :slight_smile:

Yes @philcoulth every show garden in Chelsea atm has a story! In the same way every organisation (any org at all) should be able to tell theirs and especially what they hope it looks like at different points of maturity...that's strategic.. just like a well maintained garden. It's not enough to have an elevator pitch.. memorising a line ends up as a gimmick - people are wise to it and gimmicks age quickly. An organisation's story (it is its strategy!) needs to get someone to press the stop button in the lift every time. Which makes the strategist's job to see the stories clearly and present what the org's saying in a way that turns the key.. that stops the lift ...that works the thingy a me-bob..I have the powerpoint somewhere, if this is making sense to anyone let me know! :-)

I came across this recently - it's a nice attempt to try to integrate the difference between two opposing points of view that have exercised some here previously (systems thinking and complex responsive process).

I post it here because, for me, a sensible strategy is often to try to integrate different points of view - by first separating out what is different and then putting the two together in a way that produces a practical result. And as I say I think this is a good attempt.

An essay (or story) like this is perhaps also a metaphor for how worker coops can be different strategically - by getting really good at integrating diverse points of view organisationally and finding ways to work together that make the best of everyone's efforts. In service of making the world a slightly better place. I see lots of people in worker coops (and in alliances such as CoTech) really trying to do that, even when it can be inherently difficult in a world that often seems to push in another direction.