Latest / Complexity Cogitators Podcast / #016 - Direction
Transcript
- Joakim von Prónay: How do you best describe an organization's direction? Is it even useful to have a geometric metaphor for something that doesn't exist in a coordinate system? And when discussing an organization's strategic intent, is it useful to know that serving a potato is a perito front? That is what we are talking about today on Complexity Cogitators. My name is Joachim van Pronij, and together with Marco Ahumada Juntunen, we try to make sense of organizational behaviour. Marco Marco: Yuhakim! Ahhhh! I tried to get you there. Joakim von Prónay: Yes, unlike last time it was not long ago we spoke. Marco: It is not. Joakim von Prónay: No, which is nice. But as a contrast, we did have a very interesting conversation last time, together with the esteemed Anders Wengelin. And both of us, even though it was very recently, it awoke a lot of thoughts in our heads, and especially we got stuck on the idea of directions. How an organization should or could or would express their strategy or what they're trying to do or what they're trying to achieve. So this is where we have been not just the last couple of days, but over over the years have spent a lot of time thinking and it has boggled our mind. But which thoughts did it arise or awoken awake? Awake in you? Marco: A great many was a fun conversation and I know we'd want to be here for it. We're gonna miss you Anders, Anyway, I had a lot of thoughts. One of them was, and I kind of hinted to it during the episode, but it didn't have... the space really for that conversation. There are other things that we want to talk about as well. But one of the things that has stuck with me is the idea of using the word direction and like a geometric or a spatial metaphor for something that doesn't exist in space really, or at least not in a coordinate system. I got snagged on that thought during the conversation, but I've had more time to think about it since then. And then the other thing I was thinking about the idea of having a short one sentence-ish formulation of a strategic intent and how I think that kind of thing works in organizations and as a strategic device. So those two things have taken up my thoughts a lot recently. Joakim von Prónay: Yep. No, and those are two very interesting things. And especially b since you since you mention in itself that direction is a metaphor of perhaps the strategic intent or the goal or the objectives or whatever you talk about in the organization. My follow up question to maybe challenge both of us what is it then a metaphor for? Even though I tried to explain that in a few snappy words now. Maybe what would be a different metaphor? I'm asking this question openly because I honestly don't have a good answer. But I f I feel it is provoking myself a little bit. So that's why I o I asked the question. Marco: Well, it is a metaphor for change. We want something in the future to be different from what it is now. And if we take away the idea that direction has to be positive, there might be a negative direction. So we're heading somewhere we don't like is still a direction. So it's a description of change. Joakim von Prónay: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And that's that's a very good answer. It's a metaphor for change because we want something different than what we currently have. Because this is this is how I sp have spoken about change and transformation and strategic intents previously, but it it's actually a a good explanation of what the word direction and the explanation direction is a metaphor for. Because it goes without saying, if we already had those things, then we wouldn't need to change anything or we wouldn't need to go anywhere. So I I I think that's one of the main things. We want something different than what we currently have. Marco: And direction, you know, I'm being the word guy again, I realize, but direction is change in a coordinate system. So. a set of angles from a position into another. Joakim von Prónay: Yeah, exactly. Marco: a normalized vector Joakim von Prónay: Hm. And this is where it falls apart, right? Because as we touched upon in the conversation together with Andesh, we th there are no fixed points. So it's quite th it's quite fundamentally meaningless to create some some sort of abstract coordinate coordinate system for our strategic intent. Marco: I will only challenge you on the word meaningless there because we do it a lot and it is helpful. And that is kind of what we do when we, to say we create a goal and we put some measurements on it, that's essentially putting up a coordinate system for that goal. Joakim von Prónay: Yeah. Yeah, you're right. L let me let me correct myself because it's not meaningless, but I would say a little bit thought provokingly that it is pointless. Because and it there is not yeah, yeah, Marco: That's a fun geometric pun. Joakim von Prónay: there was not no pun intended actually, but still still fun. It's my innate Gothenbergian in me who can't hold back a good pun. No, but the saying is that I still I still like to talk about direction and still like to drive such conversations in organizations, and I do think they're very, very useful. And when I thought provokingly say that they're pointless, I'm pointing once again, no pun intended, to the fact that that is not the point. Marco: You're doing it on purpose. Joakim von Prónay: No, I'm just accidentally this funny. the point is to actually Marco: You Joakim von Prónay: actually engage in the process, right? to do collective meaning making or sense making to help and aid in decision making. So that's where we come back to the idea of strategic intent. It's meant to help you and aid you in decision making. on all levels of the organization. And this is also maybe connecting a little bit to what you said as well, the the one sentence representation of your strategy. Yeah, it's a good starting point. But you can also not skip the collective meaning making process around it. You need to contextualize that sentence. And these things fit together quite strongly, in my in my opinion. But those artifacts, so to speak, or what they represent. you're supposed to use them in a process for collective meaning making so you can aid and guide your decision making. And I think in in this manner, this is why I do like to talk about direction myself, even though setting super clear long term goals is not always Yeah, the most useful thing. End of pun filled rant. Marco: was a good one. If it sounds like I don't think we should be talking about direction, that's not what I mean. I just think it connects interestingly into how we seem to think about organizations, how we seem to think about change taking place in a coordinate system, as there is something that we just need to figure out how to measure and then we can get there where all of the axes of this coordinate system, they're politically chosen. Like who chooses which axes are important, who chooses how to measure them, and who chooses how to rank them, which is more important. and who decides if we've actually succeeded with our measurements. All of these are questions for how do we travel in this coordinate system. And that we need to sort of somehow... solve in organizations. We don't usually talk about them that way, I realize, but... Joakim von Prónay: No, no, I no no I Marco: It's kind of... Joakim von Prónay: agree, I agree. Well but that that's also the thing, that's also why I wanted to have this conversation, because we usually don't talk about these things in this way. And Marco: Bye. Joakim von Prónay: as you to to quote you, it's not the worst thing to be wrong on a pod with the purpose of learning. Marco: Right. Joakim von Prónay: So I think you and I we're very free to explore our thinking in the moment right now. Marco: thank you. But I do have a more domestic kind of example of when I thought about this before. If you will allow me to introduce a slightly humorous example. Joakim von Prónay: You may. Marco: Thank you. Then you know potato, right? Joakim von Prónay: Yes. Marco: What is the best way to serve a potato? Joakim von Prónay: it it depends. Yeah. Yeah. Marco: That's exactly the answer I was going for. When we start expanding on the phrase, depends, the next natural question, of course, is on what? And then you will give me a few axes of values that are important for a good potato or a well served potato at least. And then I might add, what about crispiness? I think crispiness is important when serving a potato. And then we'll have a discussion. about mashed potatoes that you don't want crispy, right? So we have this set of axes that are all in some way, a good experience of eating potato, right? Not all of these are measurable. We would probably agree that there is no best way of doing a potato. You might have to qualify that with context like, are you trying to impress someone or are you just cooking for your family? That kind of stuff, something quick. And this is a perfect metaphor for strategy, right? Joakim von Prónay: No no, but I I I agree. I mean you you're you're laughing, but I actually agree. It's actually a perfect metaphor for strategy. Marco: And there is actually a word for this kind of multi-objective optimization in mathematics. It's called the Pareto front. Essentially, there is no position in this coordinate system that maximizes the value of the model. So there is no clear best position, mathematically speaking. Are you familiar with it? Joakim von Prónay: Somewhat, but please enlighten me. Marco: I don't think we need to get much more familiar with it than that because the metaphor kind of starts breaking in reality because of the things we were talking about. Not all of these axes, even if we can name them, are measurable. But essentially the idea is that some of these ideas are qualitative and some of them are quantitative. For example, you can't add how much trust do you have in an organization. So suppose that you're talking about making some kind of organizational change. And one of the things that you think is important to achieve is trust, which is a very big and abstract word, but it's hard to measure. Joakim von Prónay: Yep. Yeah. Marco: But the instinct often is going to be to try anyway. So you might ask everyone to rank on a scale of one to 10, how much they trust. And then you do some kind of aggregation. So where I was going with this is that if we had a restaurant and we had the goal of we're going to cook the best potato, you're going to get some questions to qualify that statement because that's going to be different depending on the day of the week and who's asking for the potato. but it still informs which questions we should start asking when we start cooking a potato. I think it's the same thing in organizations. So let's say that we want to be more customer focused. And you say that to the entire organization, every individual in that organization is going to create a... an interpretation of that statement and think about these are the ways that we are very customer focused and these are the ways we might not be. And the game then to create a direction or a coherent set of actions is to have people talk about this and agree on how to act on it. Joakim von Prónay: And this brings me back to the thoughts we had on utilizing philosophy or philosophical concepts in organizations as well. and it also ties back to the concepts of enabling constraints and especially the use of of symbols in organizations. This is where my head went now. And there's also a contradiction in my head when you said direction and coherent actions. Because my thought was immediately that doesn't necessarily need to be the same. Because we in this organization we want to be more customer focused or customer centric. And then you just let that out in the organization and allow all the interpretations that arise from this. It can still mean coherent action But it can drive different departments in different directions. Can it not? Marco: Definitely. Joakim von Prónay: Yeah. So and and not to challenge you on this, but this was a an interesting thought that popped up in my head. And it also doesn't mean that they're failing with their strategy if they have coherent action that are contributing positively to the organization, even though you cannot perhaps describe it as a shared can you just but you can describe that as a shared direction as well. And here we come into the Parito aspect of it, because you can You can measure this on so many different axes. So you can perhaps have one strategic intent, direction that is more customer focused, and then you allow this to be interpreted in different parts of the organization without what's the word? Without governing. So we are talking about an enabling constraint and not a governing constraint. And then it's more a matter of how would you in the different departments or different parts of the organization, how would you measure your success against becoming more customer centric? Because this interpretation would probably differ a lot. And I think this is back to the to the potato problem. We we will now coin this the potato problem. How do you best how Marco: I think it's a good name. Joakim von Prónay: do you best serve a potato? How do you best become more customer focused? I have no conclusion of this thought, but this was the thought that popped up in my head. Marco: So here's the thing, I think at least. remember when we talked about the difference between strategy making and strategy tending. So when we make strategy, for example, we craft a strategic statement such as, We're going to be the best at X, whatever that might be. We're going to make the fastest consumer car. Safest. I don't know. Pick an adjective. And then you throw that out into the organization and it's going to be interpreted differently, like I said before. But what's more interesting to me is what happens with these interpretations. I think there are two forces at play. One of them is this emergence and then these emergent ideas start combining and conflicting. through some kind of selection or enrichment process become the strategy of a group. And in the same way that the friction or I don't know if competition is the right word, but there is some kind of tension between these different ideas until they start living as some kind of. togethery idea. In the same way, we'll have that between different groups, like two different teams working with the same tech stack will have slightly different ideas of what this means to be the, we're going to do DevOps or whatever. And they make decisions internally. And if they don't talk in some kind of more or less generative process, they might. start pulling in different directions. They might choose different technologies or they might agree on a different set of architectural principles. Unless they talk, of course, and test these understandings with each other. And this process always exists in the pressure of something coming from above. let's say organizational needs or budgeting constraints or. stakeholder interests, I don't know what it might be, some kind of organizational framework that also exerts pressure on this process and these things. You can be more or less top downy in. So if the force from above is more governing and strict about what is the correct interpretation of this statement and how they apply the correction, you will get a different kind of strategy culture. In some organizations, let's say the authoritative interpretation might bubble up from above and might be something completely different than what top management had in mind when they drafted this statement. And then it can be more or less cool about that, right? Depending on the question probably. Some organizations would call this innovation. And the question then is these interpretations and the resulting actions of these interpretations, are they coherent with where this organization is going or its needs? So that's just my very fluffy big picture thinking of this. Joakim von Prónay: None the less interesting. but now my a pr previous previous thread exposed itself. And it's back to the potato problem, and the answer to the question, it depends. Because here, as you said, the the follow up question to this is essentially explaining what does it then depend on? Because if you have a strategic intent, we want to become more customer focused or we want to be the the the most customer focused company. Even if you have two or three or ten or a hundred organizations where they had the exact same strategic intent, you would get very different implementations or strategic execution based on this. Because they will all answer the question, it depends, and then explain that slightly different. And I think to me this is quite interesting because as you have in the past as well, when you are sitting across from the table in a consultant chair interviewing for working with a potential client, they usually ask you, Here is a situation, here is a problem, what would you do? Well, I learned quite quickly. Instead of just saying, I don't know, I said, Well, here are the things that I recognize from my experience. And here are some parallels I draw to different organizations. And here is that organization's context. And here is what I would say the implementation of a potential solution depends on. And now I feel like this is a little bit backwards because I believe that they should. Present to me what it depends on. The organization themselves should be able to explain their judgment criteria or their axis of optimizations or essentially what their strategic intents depend on. Marco: I had a chance to have this conversation just the other day. Joakim von Prónay: Yeah, please. Marco: I was presented with a situation that I would look into. Can't say too much about it, I realize, but essentially my reflex to that was, so I have a plan forming in my head about where I would start. And my reflex was that these are the things I would be looking for. So these are the aspects of a good potato. And I enumerated some of them. And then I will return the question, am I missing something or what would you look for in a good potato? so when I had that clear, so I would, these are the ways I would go about that. This is the thing, these are the things I could not measure. And so essentially the process was me, this is my instinct in this situation based on my experience. This is why I think you would like, why I want me in this. And if you think I'm wrong, help me out. So that was in a way that was me describing a good potato to them. and having them sort of adapt that to their context or what they valued. Joakim von Prónay: Yep. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think that has been implied by myself in the past. So I would have the same approach. But I don't think I rarely explicitly ask what am I missing or what's important to you. I think that has more been implied and then picked up in conversation. Marco: The structure of conversations wasn't exactly like that, of course, but the way you put it and the way you're thinking about the potato again made me realize that's what I was doing. Joakim von Prónay: Yeah, serving a potato is a pareto front. Marco: It is. But before that, deciding the parameters on what is important for a potato is a political problem. Right? Because you need to agree with another person. You're probably serving the potato to another person and Joakim von Prónay: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And and political in the sense of the problem of cohabitation or coexistence, you mean? Yeah. Marco: Yes, that's a reference back to our previous episode that when I or we talk about politics, it's about how humans decide how to make decisions or who makes to make decisions or like the human arbitration side of things Joakim von Prónay: Yep, exactly. Marco: and not election politics. Joakim von Prónay: Yeah. Yeah, but that's an interesting phrase phrasing. Serving a potato is a pareto front and highly political. That makes for a good for a good soundbite. But back to where we started then. Direction as a metaphor for strategic intent intent. Still useful, right? Marco: I think so. would still probably use it. I've used some of the work I've written. So I'm kind of cleansing my vocabulary of, or least being critical of mechanistic and overly geometric terms in how I think about things that are not mechanistic or geometric like organizations. So that's why, like the conversation we had about alignment, that I prefer the word coherence. And it's actually, it's the same geometric sort of argument that I have that there is no direction. So pointing in the same direction is not necessarily what Joakim von Prónay: Hmm. Marco: I'm looking Joakim von Prónay: Yeah. Yeah. And here I think this is now after after we have spoken right now, I think I would distinguish my own usage of the word alignment and coherence. Because I then see alignment as a group of people then clearly moving in the same direction, geometric direction, or however you measure that direction. But with the example we had with coherent execution of becoming more customer. Focused, I would rather speak of that as coherence and not necessarily alignment. So yeah, it's It's interesting. Marco: Next up in my vocabulary exercises is the word system, which is a favorite of ours. Joakim von Prónay: yes. Use it all the time for many, many things. Marco: Can I share my favorite candidate right now? I'm just thinking out loud. Joakim von Prónay: Yeah, please. That's that's what we're doing here. Marco: yeah. So in the I think it's from like political science. Originally, there is a word called polity, which is the name for a unit, a social unit in which decisions are made. So it's kind of a decision making context where you assume that these political processes take place in by which I mean, we are constantly solving the problem of cohabitation. How do we share things, decisions, power and so on. And what I like about that word is that when you use the word system, it doesn't mean humans necessarily. It can be a socio-technical system. And even if you call it a human system, it says more about the composition of the system than the condition of it. think of teams as polities or organizations as polities, then it puts to the forefront their political aspect and not how they are necessarily composed. Joakim von Prónay: Mm-hmm. Marco: which I'm considering as an alternative word for system when I want to forward those aspects of it. So let's Joakim von Prónay: Mm, yeah, interesting. Marco: see if we use that in a pod or if I end up not liking it. Joakim von Prónay: Yeah, we'll see. Ma it it's absolutely grounds for a future future conversation. But still. And also going back to the idea of of direction then and and coherent strategic execution, because there is a whole there there is a whole strategic school of thought around the idea of defining current state, defining target state, and then gradually moving towards it. I don't remember what that school of thought is called. Marco: Let me get the book. Joakim von Prónay: yes, please do. Marco: To me it sounds like the positioning school. Okay, I'll read them out loud and you tell me which one you like for this. Joakim von Prónay: Yes, please. Marco: So the cultural school strategy formation as a collective process. That's very close to what I was describing before, by the way. the power school, strategy formation as a process of negotiation. Learning school, strategy formation as emergent process. Cognitive school, strategy formation as a mental process. Entrepreneurial school, strategy formation as a visionary process. Positioning school, strategy formation as an analytical process. Planning school, strategy formation as a formal process. the design school strategy formation as a process of conception. And that's everyone. Joakim von Prónay: Then it's the learning school. I believe. No, wait, it's a mix of it. It's a mix of two I'm thinking of. Anyway, we don't need to go into details because I clearly clearly can't remember. I have some vague images in my head that are not Marco: . Joakim von Prónay: translating to the words that you have uttered. Marco: me see. Joakim von Prónay: Yeah, but there is a school of of thought around strategy execution that is clearly very much aligned with the idea of understanding your current states and state and defining a target state and then just mapping out the way to get there. Even though I I think one of the the more realistic ways of of doing strategy execution is to combine a different school of thoughts and especially from the learning school where you need to define as we talked with Andish about as well, safe to fail experiments and learn the outcome and then adjust your future target state based on that as well. But no, I will continue to talk about direction for sure. Marco: Yeah, same. just struck me that after our conversation with Anders, that word means something new to me. It's all. Joakim von Prónay: No, I think a little bit meat too. Or more so it resonates with how I have been trying to talk about it in the past, but now it's a little bit more clear. Marco: But if we go even further back, the topic in the book that raised this conversation was one of the 12 thoughts or principles in this book. And I believe the formulation was set directions, not detailed goals. Joakim von Prónay: Yes, in Andesh Andesh little book, Twelve Thoughts on Complexity, yes. Marco: And that's really how I subscribe to that idea and that phrasing. because the way I like to think about it, and again, we go back to what you said, I often describe my work as saying, it's more important to find better ways of describing the present and what we want to change about it than trying to create a detailed account of the future and then figure out how to measure that and how to close that gap. because the present is something we have access to now. And a lot of us that have opinions and insights that we can draw from to create the description of it. Joakim von Prónay: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Maybe a little bit of criticism to our conversation here when we say a an an example of a strategic intent or direction would be to become more customer focused. But to further that we need that needs to be contextualized as well. Why is that important? And there in exploring the answer to the why question there, that to me taps into the idea of a target future state or something that we would like to aspire to, to be or to become, or to achieve. And think that conversation and in my in my experience and opinion, that phrasing needs to be grander than just a very detailed goal or objective. So the the step towards achieving that should be on a larger scale, so to speak. Because then to actually be able to pragmatically and coherently execute execute your strategic intent, then I fully agree with you. If we have better ways of ex explaining and describing our current state and then understand what we want to happen, what we want to be different, then that's how we create movement. And this is when we once again come back to the idea of the geometric representation of direction. And here I believe the as Anders said as well, the phrasing of becoming more of something is a very good way of representing that. So yeah, I've gone full circle. Marco: When I'm sitting here thinking, I'm thinking there's another dimension to this whole thing. And there's also, How are you getting there? So there's also an aspect of strategy in that. we want, let's say we want to go on vacation, you and I, but we want to do it in a environmentally sustainable way. So it's not just the destination that's important, it's also the process of getting there. It's also a strategy, right? Joakim von Prónay: Yeah, it is. Marco: we packaged that once in the the episode about strategy. can't remember if it's the one that's deep in our archives that only our VIP members have access to or if it's the one where we talked about strategy. Anyway the thing I said was that strategy is everything that makes us move in the same direction. in roughly the same way, at roughly the same time, for roughly the same reason. So any statements or artifacts or whatever that serve to do that or strategic artifacts. Joakim von Prónay: Yeah, that brings me back to the to the restaurant where they want to serve the best potato. Because all those aspects play an important part. And in this you n of course need to take into account the location of this restaurant. Where are they located? What are their opening hours? A breakfast potato is probably different than an evening or dinner potato or a late night snack after the bar closes potato. So Marco: sure. Joakim von Prónay: there are many aspects to optimize against. Once again, it is a pareto front. Interesting. Marco: I think we're going to meet the potato example again. Joakim von Prónay: Mm. Yeah, I've mentioned it many times today, just to anchor it in my head. So I like it. Marco: It's funny, it was such an incredibly nerdy moment when I got that question and I kind of just paused. struggled with how to formulate that and then it struck me. This is a Pareto frontier. That Joakim von Prónay: Yeah. Marco: was a moment I was certain I'm a nerd. Joakim von Prónay: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Cool. Marco, do you have any any final thoughts? Marco: I don't think so. And I'm pretty sure I'm not having potato for dinner. And I don't think you are either, actually, because I Joakim von Prónay: Me No Marco: know what you're having for dinner. Joakim von Prónay: Yes, me too. It's Pizza Night. Cool. Marco: year. Right, well then, sounds like we're wrapping this up then. Joakim von Prónay: Yes, let's let's do that. Marco, thank you for the conversation. Marco: Thank you, as always. Joakim von Prónay: Until next time. Marco: Toodaloo. Joakim von Prónay: Ciao. Thank you for listening to the whole episode. If you enjoyed the conversation, please consider leaving a review and sharing the episode with at least one other person who you believe will also enjoy it. It truly helps us reach more people. And if you don't follow us already, please consider subscribing to our Substack on complexitycogitators.substack.com. 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