I have previously defined Strategy Deployment as “any form of organisational improvement in which solutions emerge from the people closest to the problem”.
That definition has served me well over the years. However, I was recently listening to an interview with Jabe Bloom on John Willis’s Profound Podcast, and a couple of things struck me that led me to consider updating this definition.
Contexts
The first thing is that in complex situations, there is no single problem. Instead, Jabe refers to the contexts, where many problems are constantly interacting, shifting and changing. This is what Russell Ackoff describes as a mess.
“Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes. Problems are extracted from messes by analysis. Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes.”
Russell Ackoff
Propositions
The second thing, which naturally follows from this, is that there are no single solutions to the mess. Instead, Jabe talks about propositions, which are plausible ideas for how to deal with the mess. As the mess evolves, and potentially untangles, the propositions will evolve and change accordingly.
Improvements
This concept of contexts and propositions, rather than problems and solutions, seems more attuned to the ebb and flow of strategy deployment that I recently described. I could simply update my definition to be “any form of organisational improvement in which propositions emerge from the people closest to the context”. However, I’m not sure how clear that is. Instead, we could say that the propositions are for hypotheses of solutions, and the context is the mess of problems. Given that, an updated definition would be:
Any form of organisational improvement in which (propositions for) hypotheses (of solutions) emerge from the people closest to the (context as a) mess (of problems).
I’m still reflecting on this and will be trying it out to see what the reaction is. I suspect it will evolve further. While I have left a reference back to langauge of contexts and propositions, and problems and solutions in parentheses, I may remove these completely. Let me know your thoughts!