Emergent Strategy
Business 101 goes something like this.
Do a strategic plan for the year, or three. Build a budget around this. Get to work.
If the last few years have taught us anything it is that the human-imposed linear planning sequence just doesn’t work, except in a few rare lucky circumstances.
The plan neglects to take into account the ecology in which we are implementing the strategy, the ever-changing environmental conditions, the future – short and long term – the past, and the interrelationships between all of our people, including the community we serve.
In a world of accelerated acceleration, where each day presents us with surprise, change and the ‘unprecedented,’ our old models of linearity and predictability are a fool’s game.
To dance with emergence, to be able to hold the purpose for which you have coordinated all activity as the ‘true north’ and then to attend to the whole ecology and inter-relationships in the now, planning the next step from the moment by moment place, is to partner with rather than to seek to have our ambition bend to our will.
To do this is to become a finely tuned instrument of awareness, both of the immediate ecology within our enterprise, plus the immediate ecology external to our enterprise, in the larger field of global confluence and change, and the rapidly emergent future.
This is the profound role of the steward leader.
Photo taken August 9th 2021
