Purposeful Pattern as Plan

The traditional view of strategy is that it is simply a ‘plan’, framed as a consciously intended course of action, or set of guidelines for dealing with a certain situation. This implies that they are both made in advance, and deployed consciously and intentionally - a purposeful action, or design for purposeful action.

{{divider}}

However, if strategy can be intended, then it can also be realised. In other words, defining a strategy as a plan is not sufficient - we also need a definition that encompasses the resulting behaviour. This is where strategy as pattern comes in - specifically, a pattern in a stream of actions. For example, when Picasso painted in a distinguishable blue or style for a time, that was considered the strategy, and in this sense, strategy is a consistency in behaviour whether or not intended. In fact, the origins of the word strategy stem from the Greek ‘strategos’ - the art of the army general, and a word bound up with the concept of free will.

{{divider}}

Having strayed from its roots, not many people seem to define strategy in this way today, but there are many quotes and interviews that lay reference to the idea, such as this one from a business executive in the book Strategies for Change: Logical Incrementalism - ‘gradually, the successful approaches merge into a pattern of action that becomes our strategy. We certainly don’t have an overall strategy on this.’ Or this piece from Business Week on a joint venture between General Motors and Toyota - ‘the tentative Toyota deal may be most significant because it is another example of how GM’s strategy boils down to doing a little bit of everything until the market decides where it is going’.

{{divider}}

This infers the labelling of consistency in behaviour as strategy. Going one step further you could also consider whether there is intention to that consistency. Whereas plans may go unrealised, patterns may appear without preconception. To paraphrase Hume, strategies may result from human actions, but not human designs. This means we can separate the two definitions into intended and emergent strategies. In deliberate strategies, there is a previous intention, whereas in an emergent strategy, patterns develop in the absence of intentions, or despite them.

{{divider}}

The Collective Mind

{{divider}}

The internal focus relates to the ‘why’ of the strategy - the deployment of resources, but more specifically, which resources and for what purpose; there are times when it pays to manage the details and let the strategies emerge themselves. The external focus relates to the position as strategy - the relationship of the force with its environment, in ecological terms strategy becomes a ‘niche’, in economic terms it’s a place that generates ‘rent’ (returns to ‘being’ in a unique place).

{{divider}}

Unlike the stereotypical views of strategy, the concept need not be tied to rational planning or even conscious decision-making assumptions, but is essentially a descriptive idea that includes an organisation’s choice of niche and its primary decision rules for coping with that niche. In military decision making and game theory, it is generally applied to a ‘two-person’ game or head-on competition, where ploys are especially common. Here it is used to outwit an opponent or threat. In Porter’s book ‘Defensive Strategy’, there are a variety of plans for both reducing competitor retaliation, and increasing his perception of your own.

{{divider}}

Head-on is not the usual case in business, and a ‘niche’ is usually a position that is occupied to avoid competition. Strategy as a deployment of resources can therefore be used as a ‘collective’ strategy - one pursued to promote co-operation between organisations, and even would-be competitors (equivalent in biology to animals herding together for protection).

{{divider}}

Strategy as perspective looks inside the heads of the collective strategist - not just a chosen position, it encompasses an imagined way of seeing the world. Whereas some organisations are rapid pacesetters, quickly creating new technologies and exploiting expanding markets, others perceive the world as set and stable, instead sitting back in long established markets and building protective shells around themselves, often relying more on political influence than economic efficiency. Some may focus on ideology, engineering, or sheer productive efficiency.

{{divider}}

In this respect, strategy is to the organisation, what personality is to the individual. As Philip Selznick writes, the ‘character’ of an organisation is its distinct and integrated ‘commitments to ways of acting and responding’ that are built right into it. A variety of concepts from other fields also capture this notion: mental frame, cognitive structure, relatively fixed patterns for experiencing the world, the culture of a society, ideology, the paradigm of a community of scholars, or in German the ‘Weltanschauung’ - worldview, a collective intuition about how the world works.

{{divider}}

Therefore, strategy is a concept, and all strategies are abstractions that exist only in the minds of interested parties - a figment of imagination. Those who pursue them are influenced by that pursuit, or care to observe others doing so - conceived of as intentions to regulate behaviour before it takes place or inferred as patterns to describe behaviour that has already occurred.

{{divider}}

What is key of this concept, is that this is a shared perspective, it is with respect to something (a society / community of scholars / an organisation), except for its association with the word personality. In effect therefore, when we talk about the word strategy, we are referring to the collective mind. A major issue in the study of strategy formation therefore becomes how to read that collective mind - to get to grips with how intentions diffuse through the system called organisation to become shared, and how actions come to be exercised on a collective yet consistent basis.

{{divider}}

Perspective Paradigm Shifts

{{divider}}

While some consider perspective to be a plan - such as Lapierre’s ‘dreams in search of reality’, or Summer’s ‘comprehensive, holistic, gestalt, logical vision of some future alignment’, others consider it as something that gives rise to plans (for example, as positions and/or patterns in some kind of implicit hierarchy). This would be more a set of basic principles, commitments and norms, that form the policy core; while plans, programmes and decisions form the protective belt.

{{divider}}

The glue that holds these ideas and constructs together, moulding streams of decisions into patterns is therefore vision. In this sense, perspective itself may dictate pattern, not necessarily through formally intended plans. The classic example is Honda, who did not plan to sell small motorcycles until they arrived in America and the concept inadvertently took off. They developed their intentions through their actions, and pattern evoked plan.

{{divider}}

An overall strategic perspective could be said to have been the underlying formation of this - namely that Honda tried various things in their formative years and gradually consolidated a perspective around what worked. In other words, organisations appear to develop ‘character’, much as people develop personality, by interacting with the world as they find it through the use of their innate skills and natural propensities. Thus pattern can give rise to perspective too, and so can position.

{{divider}}

The difficulty is that perspectives are ingrained and incredibly difficult to change. They may become so deeply ingrained in the behaviour of an organisation that the associated beliefs become subconscious. When this happens, perspective can come to look more like pattern than plan - in other words, it can be found more in the consistency of behaviours than in the articulation of intentions. This subsequently makes change of plan and position difficult unless compatible with the existing perspective.

{{divider}}

Collective Co-creation

{{divider}}

Like perspective, strategy requires eclecticism - no one definition takes single precedence over any of the others, they are all interrelated and context dependent. Not all plans become patterns, and not all patterns that develop are planned, some ploys are less than positions, while other strategies are more than positions yet less than perspectives. Each definition encourages us to address fundamental questions about organisations in general.

{{divider}}

Ultimately, strategy deals with how leaders try to establish direction. But when related to the fundamental issue of imagination, cognition and (sub)consciousness, how deliberate are these intentions, how are they conceived in the human brain, and what do they really mean. This becomes even more intriguing when related to behaviour and in a collective context.

{{divider}}

If organisations are defined as collective action in the pursuit of common mission, then strategy as perspective focuses our attention on how intentions diffuse through a group of people, to become shared as norms and values, and how patterns of behaviour become deeply ingrained in the group.

{{divider}}

We are creatures of our environments, and from the micro to the macro, from individuals to organisations and societies: the philosophical and psychological underpinnings of the activities in which we choose to partake means that creating or finding and being a part of an organisation that aligns with your values and contributes to being the change that you want to see in the world, while understanding that there is unity in diversity, is key to co-creating the future we want to live in.

{{divider}}

‍