"Strategy is emotional"

This was not a comment anyone expected to hear in a panel discussion about strategy and AI! However, it was the comment that resonated most strongly with all those participating.

Earlier this month I was involved in an open event organised by the International Association for Strategy Professionals UK (IASP UK), ‘Sensing the future: strategy and AI’, which looked at some of the challenges of forecasting the future and how AI might inform ecosystems modelling more effectively and so help an organisation consider the implications for its future. (The event wasn’t intended to cover all aspects of AI and strategy - that’s very wide-ranging - just to use one example to explore more deeply some of the potential uses, limitations and implications: it’s easy to get carried away by the current hype about AI!)

Obviously the presentations at such an event are important - and the two speakers at this event were very good - but it’s their ability to stimulate the thinking of the audience that really matters, and in my view the ensuing discussion is equally as valuable: it’s through sharing views, clarifying understanding and hearing different perspectives that people develop a deeper and more rounded understanding of a subject and can be motivated to explore further.

This particular open panel discussion was fascinating: at first the comments were all about the exciting possibilities of AI, and what participants were using it for; then it developed into the importance of thinking carefully about what was useful and appropriate rather than just technologically possible (“beware geeks bearing gifts” was one of the apposite comments made). But it was when the conversation started talking about how organisations actually ‘do strategy’ - and the role of people - that the tone of the discussion became deeper, resulting in the declaration that “strategy is emotional”.

That was quite a shift, from the initial excitement about the shiny new technological wonder that is AI to starting to consider it as just a tool that needs to be used with thought and care, and then even describing it as too cold and cerebral to be ‘the answer’ to how organisations develop their strategies in future.

(It was noticeable too that as the conversation became deeper and more thoughtful the pace of people’s speech became steadier: there was more listening, more considering the points made, more thinking before responding. This is something that I have observed often in effective strategy conversations in organisations: the initial desire to make a point or state a position evolves into ‘richer conversations’ that are essential to achieve shared understanding and form a basis for moving the discussion forward. You can feel people breathe; there is space to think.)

There is often a similar shift too during the process of developing a strategic plan. At first the approach can be task-driven: collect and analyse data, prepare inputs from functions or departments, brief working groups to address specific aspects. There are timelines and deadlines, a defined structure to the process, a desire to ‘complete the task’. Analysis is rational, conclusions derived logically, contributions submitted with the expectation that these just need to be ‘stitched together’ and woven into an overall strategic plan. Strategy workshops are bound to a tight agenda: first there are a series of presentations (that usually overrun!), then breakout groups that are allowed far too little time to really get into deep discussion, rushed feedback from the groups to the plenary session, then someone takes away the flipcharts to write up as notes, only a few of which are taken forward to inform the next stage of the process.

But often too there is something that prompts further consideration and discussion. It could be a challenge to a view that has been assumed a ‘given’, or a different way of looking at a situation (through a novel lens or framework, for example), or the realisation that there are fundamentally differing views that need to be resolved. Addressing such issues requires deeper deliberations - and it is then that people appreciate that a strategic planning process is not a fully-plannable linear step-by-step project but rather a collective exploration to really understand the organisation’s situation and the futures open to it.

Answering fundamental questions or resolving issues can take time. Two examples from my experience: in the first, a major UK fmcg company started to question the industry’s established way of looking at the market, and commissioned research to be able to understand how consumers actually chose and used products in the category. That usage and attitudes research then informed a new model of the market that was the basis for the company’s strategy for the next 10 years.

In the second example, it became clear during the early stages of developing a new organisation’s strategic plan that there were differing opinions about the organisation’s role and how it should operate. This led to some deep personal work with the Executive team, individually and collectively, to develop shared agreement about the organisation’s purpose and values: only then could the strategic planning process resume.

Strategic planning is about people in an organisation making sense of what it wants its future to be and how it’s going to get there: it’s a collective endeavour, and it affects everyone in that organisation. It matters, and people are invested in it. I have observed how this can develop through the course of an effective strategic planning process, from perhaps some apprehension, doubts or even scepticism in the early stages: people become fully immersed as the journey progresses and their shared understanding grows: there is a total commitment to working out how the organisation is going to move forward. It is an intense process involving asking and answering challenging questions, deep thinking, and many focused and sometimes difficult conversations; it takes considerable energy, mental and emotional. The sense of achievement (and sometimes relief!) is palpable, even though everyone realises that this is just the start of the next stage of the organisation’s strategy journey.

When you mention the term ‘strategic planning’ most people’s first impression is of a difficult, intense, sophisticated, analytical, very rational and objective project (often involving only the senior echelons of an organisation or entrusted to big external management consultancies - and it is easy to see how the information and logic abilities of AI fit into this perception). Yet the purpose of strategic planning is to map out the intended next stage of an organisation’s future, and organisations comprise people working together in a shared endeavour: it affects their future, and that matters, a lot. It is people that need to make sense of this, to care about the journey ahead, and to be motivated to help make it happen.

So yes, strategy is emotional!

For further exploration

• For more information about the International Association for Strategy Professionals visit strategyassociation.org; details of the IASP UK ‘Sensing the future: AI and strategy’ event that was held earlier in May are here
  

• Lynda Gratton’s book, ‘Living Strategy - putting people at the heart of corporate purpose’ (Pearson Education Limited, London, 2000) is an excellent exposition of the importance of a people-focused approach to organisational strategy