The shared task of strategic integration

The task of strategic integration arises whenever an organisation must continue and change in a dynamic context. Faced with increasingly extreme and unpredictable events, almost all leaders can appreciate that their contexts are complex and nonlinear and that the uncertainty this gives rise to is profound and unavoidable.

Yet their response to uncertainty is usually mired in a fantasy of rational control. Humans tend to ignore randomness and deviation in favour of extrapolation from past norms, which diminishes our ability to accurately foresee the future. This is compounded when leaders approach the future as an available set of risks to be managed. Risk comes to be 'actuarialised', with leaders identifying, quantifying, predicting, and mitigating foreseeable events and offsetting unforeseeable ones.

Yet how effective can all this be when our general ability to foresee is so limited and our professional ability to enumerate risks drives us to normalise or exclude catastrophic scenarios or make them someone else's problem? As dynamism increases, and with it uncertainty, our modern dependency on rationalisation and quantification is challenged. Yet the same context that gives rise to unpredictable events can also give rise to unpredictable creative responses to those same events.

This provides a rationale for reframing organisations as complex adaptive systems. Rather than focusing solely on cultivating the ability of leaders to foresee the future, we can broaden our regard to also focus on cultivating the ability of an organisation to adjust its 'fit' with its context. To slightly overstate things, instead of putting all our efforts into predicting the unpredictable, we can spend more time adapt to changing conditions as they arise.

It is important to get the balance right here. Treating organisations as complex adaptive systems invites us to strike a new balance between planning and adapting, not to abolish planning entirely. Essentially, a system of planning is now paired with a system of adapting, in a learning loop where each system somewhat offsets the limitations of the other.

Visualising a simple organisation as a complex adaptive system

When we view organisations as complex and adaptive, we treat them as "special cases where engaged agents display a capacity to change and learn from experiences in ways that can allow organisations to adapt to changing conditions." [1] Let us try to visualise what is being described here. Take a simple organisation, one with a centre, populated by senior leaders, and a periphery, populated by several service and support teams, together situated in a dynamic context.

In this model, the centre produces continuity by planning while the periphery produces change by adapting. Without continuity, an organisation cannot achieve anything significant; without change, it cannot survive long enough to try. Thus, both planning and adapting systems are required if an organisation is to achieve the right 'fit' with its context.

 This may seem obvious when stated this way, yet in practice this systemic view of organisations can pose an almost insuperable threat to senior leaders' identity, status, and ways of leading. Senior leaders at the centre must now consciously co-create strategy in real-time with their service and support teams at the periphery. Or, to flip the subject (and protagonist) of the sentence, service and support teams must now consciously co-create strategy in real-time with their senior leaders at the centre.

Sustaining the learning loop

 'Top-heavy' leadership structures where central leaders come to dominate peripheral teams are still preferred by those leaders who derive a professional identity and status from them. Yet in a complex adaptive organisation, senior leaders no longer produce strategy in a linear way: leaders formulate, teams implement. Instead, leaders analyse and plan at the same time as teams improvise and test, and in this way, the whole organisation learns and renews itself.

Senior leaders are still expected to lead in a traditional sense: thinking long-term, making strategic choices, mitigating obvious risks, and remaining accountable to their boards, regulators, members or shareholders, and communities. Yet they are also expected to lead in a non-traditional sense: releasing teams, creating slack, rewarding experimentation, and inviting feedback that demolishes their otherwise staid view of things.

Teams are still expected to serve and support in a traditional sense: discovering needs, launching and maintaining services, solving problems, and remaining accountable to their leaders, peers, customers or users, and communities. Yet they are also expected to serve and support in a non-traditional sense: translating choices, interrogating assumptions, championing users and stakeholders, and upsetting business-as-usual to improve organisational fit.

This is the deepest meaning underlying our proposition that at Weft "we help leaders and teams share a strategy". Sharing here implies sustaining the learning loop between leaders' central plans and teams' distributed adaptations that emerges whenever an organisation consciously operates as a complex adaptive system. We firmly believe that sharing strategy on these terms is one of the finest ways to lead and participate in organisations so they can be just as dynamic as the contexts in which they operate.