A vital thing to keep in mind when designing company strategy

To start with, it's imperative to strive to better understand the crazy task you are attempting when designing company strategy.

Done without due consideration, at best your work will be ignored; at the opposite end of the scale...confusion, anger, resentment, distrust and a plethora of unintended consequences that leads to an even more toxic system.

Here's the thing - our world and it's predominant method of thinking has falsely led us all to believe that reality is 'understandable'. By taking apart and analysing the parts, we then by default also assume that we know how the 'whole' works. This false assumption is at the heart of why strategy work so often results in disappointment.

We are taught that concepts and constructs can be analysed and simplified down into manageable pieces and through this paradigm can then be successfully manipulated and reconstituted to produce desired outcomes. And through this deeply-flawed way of seeing and understanding the world, a lot of companies then attempt to guide their complex, messy organisations into an uncertain, unknowable future.

But that's not how reality, or organisations, are constructed or work.

An organisation doesn't have neatly defined borders that you can confidently say where it starts and stops. The astounding complexity that existing within even the smallest grouping of people is an unfathomable fraction of the madness that happens within the social system that we would call a big corporation. Attempting to steer this giant mess with a few randomly selected objectives and milestones and thinking that you're going to achieve an envisioned result is delusional lunacy.

So the vital thing to keep in mind when designing strategy is that you are attempting to steer the un-steerable in a direction where you are not sure whether or not it's even worthwhile going.

Right - now that you are armed with a bit more of a realistic understanding of the madness that you are attempting, you will most certainly now see the job at hand differently. You will perhaps see how difficult it is and how careful you need to be when even considering whether or not you should disrupt this angry hornet's nest with an intervention.

Reality is astoundingly messy and complex. We blind ourselves into believing that things are simple and understandable, but this illusion is also our biggest weakness. Without an appreciation for the complexity of the systems that we are attempting to fix any meddling with that system will undoubtably create unexpected and unwelcome outcomes rather than what was actually intended.

This isn't to say that the task is hopeless, but with the enlightened perspective that what you are engaging with is a complex adaptive system nested within multiple other complex adaptive systems you'll know that you're working with selected abstractions and have a better chance of affecting the right actions that will bring about the desired results.

Strategy after all is about selecting actions that result in better outcomes than if we had to rely on chance alone. By appreciating complexity with humility the strategist increases the odds of selecting the appropriate actions significantly.