Applying an emergent strategy

Why?

If you don't believe in the value of strategy, then the notion of applying an 'emergent approach' to it may seem the height of ridiculousness. As such, it is probably best to stop here and come back when you are ready to take a planful approach to managing work and uncertainty.

And here is an immediate point of contention: how can an emergent approach be planful? Isn't the point that ‘emergent approach’ is just a fancy term for ‘winging it’?

Back to basics

Henry Mintzberg told us that all good strategy is emergent. It requires a commitment to reflective learning through doing. Where the horizon is close enough that planning can be undertaken in detail and with certainty, then you are dealing less with questions of strategy and more with questions of operational execution.

Sun Tzu told us that you need to know yourself in order to have half a chance of avoiding defeat. The other half comes from knowing your enemy. Victory comes from knowing both yourself and the enemy and from properly understanding the context and circumstances of the issue. An emergent strategy is applicable where only some of that information is available to you. The purpose of the approach is to structure a learning process designed to develop good information on the enemy, context and circumstance, first to avoid losing, second to win.

An emergent strategy is neither a mechanism for nor a guarantee of direct control over circumstances. It is a means for influencing your own fate by holding true to your goal. Events – enemy action, force majeur or the hand of God - may force you to fall back from your goal despite your strategy. A plan-based strategy would shatter at that point, but an emergent strategy would flex and yield, learn and recalibrate.

An emergent strategy has two fixed points:

·      who, how and where you are now; and

·      who, how and where you want to be at some defined future point.

And even though these two things are fixed, they still need to be reviewed from time to time.

As fixed points, they constitute the reference markers for gauging why, where, when and how to act. Knowledge of the desired end point lets you assess the value of any action or opportunity. Knowledge of yourself lets you assess the cost and risk of doing something or nothing.

Emergence into action

So, as a middle manager, or team or project leader, or even sole operator, how do you do it?

Firstly, you just do it. I mean this in the sense that if the responsibility for strategic management is not explicit in your job description it is certainly implicit. You cannot run something well if you are not looking ahead and making choices. Be warned: only a minority of managers are genuinely strategic, and it gets lonely.

Secondly, keep in mind that communication is an essential element of strategy, and you have three audiences: yourself; your team; and your bosses. You are the first audience because the most important job for your strategic thinking is to help you stay on top of things. Your team is the second audience because they give life to your strategy. The better they understand the 'why' of the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of what you task them to do, the more they can add value to it. Your bosses are third only because they will have already conveyed their strategic expectations to you. You don't need to reveal your strategy (although you should): but you really need to show you are delivering theirs. As such, creating a written up strategy is a good way of addressing all three audiences, using a list of headings to ensure you cover the important things. Use PowerPoint, one slide per heading, to encourage brevity. Make the team do monthly reporting and annual reviews aligned to your strategy statements, and share the results up and across the business thoughtfully. This way you think about it, the team thinks about it, and others get the chance to, too.

Thirdly, you need to clearly articulate the goals your team is accountable for. Your legislation gives you your ‘raison d’être’, while the agency statement of intent gives you your priority outcomes. These purpose and outcome statements are often at a high level to speak to the whole organisation or business group. Use whatever descriptor of your team exists to interrogate the higher statements to identify 'yours' and then refine them. Use your team's domain knowledge to identify meaningful tangible things you can track.

Fourthly, you need to recognise the full range of activities and outputs that your team is responsible for. Most of these will get only lip service in organisational planning documents, as 'business as usual' is often taken as given. However, they constitute the biggest risk of resource diversion and reputational harm, as well as present the greatest opportunity for year-on-year efficiency gains. For example, I would literally draw maps – something between a Venn and a box-and-wire diagram - to capture everything in, on, and just over our boundaries. The aim is not to do everything equally, but to know what to watch and where you choose to accept risk by lowering the priority for resource.

Fifthly, build reserves. Reserves are resources you can put into action when needed. In policy shops you can't have people sitting around waiting in case something happens, so building reserves can be sensitive. The art of doing so is an article topic in its own right. But it is always worth the effort. Examples include: keeping ten percent of effort going towards nice-to-do jobs that can be scaled, stopped and re-started at need; not letting 'must do' projects blow their time contingency early, so you ensure some of it can be clawed out later if really needed elsewhere; keeping building the team’s integrated domain knowledge, as experts can do more and faster than novices; and never wasting overtime on trivia nor being mean with flexing hours to fit around staff issues, but also not hesitating to cash in the good will you earn when the time comes for a surge of extra effort.

Sixthly, build buffers. Buffers are practices that catch the flow of new work and put a shape on the flow that gives you more time to think about whether and how to respond. For example, at one time I used a 'two bills' approach to regulatory stewardship. I kept a real second bill on my proposed legislation programme as a 'catcher' for half-formed amendments people wanted to shove into my primary bill. I started that a year ahead of development of the primary bill getting underway so the notion of a second bill was familiar and accepted by the time the scope pressures started to materialise.

Finally, don't be afraid to evolve things as you go. The initial impetus has to come from you. But the ownership from below, beside and above necessary to make it all work depends on your team, peers and bosses being able to see their ideas honoured. Also, you are just one person, with a particular point of view: involving others addresses your blind spots. However, while being adaptive and inclusive, you need to be careful to pace any evolution and to maintain a consistent core narrative that is true to the job so that the process of change builds understanding and ownership not confusion.

So, where is the strategy?

As the name suggests, the strategy 'emerges'. As certainty is discovered and created, a body of choices and actions accumulates, forming in retrospect what planned strategies attempt to specify in prospect. Even so, the meta-strategy, if you will pardon the term, is about adopting a posture that gives you more chance of having the time to think and respond intentionally.

Ultimately, the emergent strategy is visible in the behaviour rather than the paperwork.