On Strategy: Part 3, the skills of the strategist

Welcome to another blogging Friday. This is the fifth of nine blog entries I planned as part of my 10-week mini sabbatical, and the third of a series on strategy.

In the first post of this series I defined strategy, combining the work of a variety of authors and resources. In the second I focused on applying this definition retrospectively to real plans and objectives I worked on in the past, to decide whether they were strategies or not. In this third and final one of the series I want to focus on the skills and competencies necessary to do strategic work.

In the same way as for the definitions entry, I first spent some time reviewing different authors (listed at the end) and I bring here the highlights of each of their works. I then conclude with a summary of my observations across these sources.

ARIA

The first work I looked at was Bob Caporale’s book Creative Strategy Generation. He dedicates one chapter to the proficiencies needed to develop a strategy. He summarizes it into the acronym ARIA which always reminds me of Arya Stark (GoT fans will get it).

[Interlude]

The Sanskrit word Arya is a surname and a masculine (आर्य ārya) and feminine (आर्या āryā) Hindu given name, signifying ‘honorable’. (source: Wikipedia, consulted on Friday 13, 2019.)

[End of the Interlude]

So the acronym stands for the 4 proficiencies Caporale says are needed to do strategic work:

• Analysis: required to process vast amounts of data and draw conclusions out of it, and making it simple and understandable. He argues that patience is a much more important skill for analysis than organization, which is what apparently other authors suggest.
• Recollection: the ability to draw from past experiences and influences. He refers to the things you have learned in the past, but also to what a company has done in its previous years, or even what others in similar situations have done.
• Intuition: he describes this as the ability to put aside all the formal knowledge we have, and try to connect with the “gut feeling” to allow to generate insights. He talks about this as being a temporary way of shutting our learnings down, but not to forget them, which is impossible, anyway.
• Artistry: in here he talks about the ability that artists have of expressing through different mediums their passions in a way that connects with their audience. There is strong emphasis made on focusing on the medium that our receivers will understand, and not the ones we think will work. This is applicable when talking to stakeholders, a team, our customers or anyone else we care about buying into and understanding our strategy.

Caporale argues that all four proficiencies are necessary to do strategic work, but the one we put more stress on will determine what kind of strategy we generate:

“If you draw more heavily on the proficiencies that are focused on your inputs (Analysis and Recollection), then your resulting plan will be more focused on the past and present. If, on the other hand, you draw more heavily on the proficiencies that are focused on your outputs (Intuition and Artistry), then your plan is more likely to be focused on the future and, perhaps even a future that nobody else has yet envisioned”.

In any of the cases, he does insist that strategy work is creative, and therefore you cannot learn what to do exactly, but you can learn how to do it. The analogy he uses is that it if you were told exactly what to do it would be like drawing by following a dotted pattern, but in learning how to do it, we learn to create our own freestyle drawings.

Thinking about Thinking

For Richard Rumelt, author of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, the key skill for a strategist is scientific induction. Here are a few quotes from the third part of his book dedicated to the mindset of the strategist which indicate this is the case:

“A new strategy is, in the language of science, a hypothesis, and its implementation is an experiment”.

“To generate a strategy, one must put aside the comfort and security of pure deduction and launch into the murkier waters of induction, analogy, judgment, and insight”.

“Especially in business, whatever grand notions a person may have about the products or services the world might need, or about human behaviour, or about how organizations should be managed, what does not accurately ‘work’ cannot long survive”.

Since he thinks of strategy as an experiment, then the strategist is a scientist. A scientist succeeds by coming up with a hypothesis and working toward disproving it. This work will reflect in the initial hypothesis going through multiple iterations by adding to it, or eliminating from it, or modifying it in any way that is deemed necessary as new data is found along the process. This data must be seeked actively.

Rumelt insists that in this work, the most difficult challenge is our tendency to not see beyond our own ideas, which is why he talks about the importance of developing the skill of thinking about our own thinking. Read that again: thinking about our own thinking.

As an example, he talks about one of his classes, and how when probing his students on how they came up with a strategic recommendation to a problem he gave them, he found that most did it intuitively, meaning that while reading the case the idea just popped in their heads and they then stuck to it. But a good strategist will try to poke holes into the initial idea, and try to produce not one, but two, or three or more alternatives, and he/she will also revisit the initial problem at hand, since the problem diagnosis is what guides the recommendations, so rethinking may generate new recommendations.

The way he puts it is that “our own myopia is the obstacle common to all strategic situations”.

He provides a few interesting tips to overcome this myopia, and my favorite is that of developing a skill to try to destroy your own creation. The way to do it, since that is psychologically very difficult to do (to fight ourselves) is by building a mental panel of experts that you have known and whose judgment you respect, but who have views that diverge from your own. You would imagine what they would ask or say about your idea to try and destroy it. He says this works because our brains are great at recognizing and comprehending well-integrated human personalities.

Finally, he says that “an important virtue of a good leader is putting the situation in perspective and having cool-minded judgment. Both virtues help mitigate the bias inherent in social herding and the inside view”.

He specifically breaks downs the biases we are all victims to, emphasizing on “social herding” (thinking that everything is or is not OK because everyone else is saying so), and on “inside view” (thinking that we are different and that the lessons from other times and areas do not apply to us). He also suggests that the way around these is paying attention to real-world data.

The 11 performance-driving behaviours

The third book I consulted was 4D Leadership, by Dr Alan Watkins. This was my top book of 2018. While the focus of the book is on leadership, its goal is to promote the development of vertical leaders that can drive results. And since the goal of a strategy is to drive results, I considered it pertinent to turn to this one, too.

There are three fundamental dimensions that the book challenges leaders to develop: how we do things (the “it” dimension), who we are (the “I” dimension), and how we relate to others (the “we” dimension”).

Dr Watkins derives his work from multiple disciplines (neuroscience, psychology, business), which is what I find so fascinating and convincing about this book. Among others, he brings to the surface the work of Professor Harry Schroder and Dr Tony Cockerill, which came about when trying to answer to the question: ‘What behaviours differentiate those leaders who produce superior organizational performance in a complex, dynamic and challenging environment?’.

They identified eleven specific behaviours which where grouped in four behavioural clusters:

1. Imagine cluster, focused on gathering information that will be needed to build and progress an idea or design a solution. In this case, a strategy. The behaviours included here are:
2. Seeking information.
3. Seeking information.
4. Forming concepts.
5. Conceptual flexing.
6. Involve cluster, focused on engaging other people in the process of developing workable concepts. This reminds me of the actionable part of a strategy (see the first post in the series for details). The behaviours here are:
7. Empathetic connecting.
8. Facilitating interaction.
9. Developing people.
10. Ignite cluster, focused on getting people on board, and providing clarity and confidence to implement the developed concepts in stage two. In this case, the execution of the strategy. The behaviours here are:
11. Transmitting impactfully.
12. Building confidence.
13. Influencing others.
14. Implement cluster, is about actually making it happen. The execution of the strategy, if you may. The behaviours here are:
15. Being proactive.
16. Continuously improving.

The behaviours are further classified into six levels of development, where the highest of all is called ‘Strategic Strength’, and the description of this level is:

“[the] leader bakes the behaviour into systems or culture to create a legacy so that the organization does not need to rely on them for impact”.

While seemingly complex, the good news in this framework, is that it says the behaviours can be developed and are not innate. And that a handful of highly developed behaviours already translate into positive impact. The system works not only for individuals, but for teams and organizations. So if a team has leaders with different levels of development in different behaviours, they can complement each other.

Conclusion

My first observation is that all authors refer to the collection of information and they talk about a rigorous approach to this. Caporale talks about it in the Analysis and Recollection competencies. Rumelt in the scientific analogies he uses. Watkins in the imagine cluster of the framework cited, where seeking information is the first observed behaviour.

A second element common to all is having a creative and flexible imagination, working in combination with the ability to relate to others and to the above mentioned rigorous and proactive search for information. In Caporale’s work it is described in the Intuition and Artistry competencies, where you have to force yourself to put aside your acquired knowledge, and by having to understand your receivers medium of communication to bring them on board with your strategy work. Rumelt indirectly refers to it when bringing into his head the opinions of other people, where he is forcing himself to think beyond his own initial ideas; and also when forcing yourself to look at data that others may not be looking at as they are trapped in social herding and inside view biases. In Watkins book it is implied in the imagine cluster, particularly with the behaviour of conceptual flexing, described as the ability to develop multiple ideas simultaneously and not becoming overly stuck on one. It is also implied in the involve and ignite clusters, where you need to listen to other people’s perspectives and transmit our ideas successfully to them.

Finally, while it is not mentioned explicitly in any of the materials, I would conclude that strategy is a team sport.If you consider the two observations I made above, all of them require to work with others for one thing or another. Be it to access the information in the preparation stages, or to engage them in the development of your strategy, and most definitely when it comes to implementing it. In fact, if you consider how complex is the framework described by Watkins, you are very likely to need different leaders with different behaviours developed to be able to complement all the pieces of the puzzle to have a functional strategic team. And that is assuming they are able to collaborate with one another.

As Caporale puts it:

“The number-one key contributing success factor for your strategy will be the people who will help you implement it”.

There is definitely much more to explore on this topic, but I will close it for now, and leave you with the materials I used in case you want to go more in depth.

• Book (Goodreads link): Creative Strategy Generation: Using Passion and Creativity to Compose Business Strategies That Inspire Action and Growth by Bob Caporale
• Book (Goodreads link): Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters by Richard P. Rumelt
• Book (Goodreads link): 4D Leadership: Competitive Advantage Through Vertical Leadership Development by Dr Alan Watkins

Happy Friday,
Maria 🌺

Originally published at https://marialasprilla.wordpress.com on December 13, 2019.