Embracing a “Deep” Approach
The realm of strategy lies in a dormant state.
Our relentless pursuit of immediate victories and competitive edges has obscured its inherently personal and organic essence. Yet, by adopting a profound perspective and considering strategy as a psychoanalytical and philosophical endeavor, we can unlock its genuine human-centric potential.
Today’s strategists needs to go beyond data, metrics and template frameworks, avoid the shallow strategy and welcome the transformative power of deep strategy to shape a more meaningful future.
Key Article Takeaways
- Strategy is fundamentally personal and organic, not just data-driven.
- Over-reliance on mechanical strategy methods can ignore crucial human aspects.
- Incorporating psychological and philosophical insights can deepen strategic effectiveness.
- Practical application of strategy should balance psychological insights with strategic planning.
- A revival of human-centric strategy is crucial for more meaningful and effective solutions.
Modern missteps
In the early 1900s, American philosopher Borden Parker Bowne proposed two intriguing perspectives about the world we can see.
The first idea, called the ‘mechanical’ view, said that everything in nature is made of matter and works like a machine. It believed that understanding the world was all about mechanics and physics.
His second idea, the ‘organic’ view, suggested that there’s more to the world than just matter and machines. It said living things have things like intelligence, consciousness, and purpose that can’t be fully explained by just mechanics.
If we think about the organic view, it helps us see the complexity of nature’s systems. Instead of breaking things down into small pieces, it shows how everything in the world is connected and dependent on each other. It’s not just separate objects; it’s like a web that holds everything together.
The organic view was later updated to be called ‘Personalism’.
When we look at strategy through this perspective, it’s clear that strategy is more about people than things. Strategy is a human activity, driven by humans, for humans. People define, solve, and study the problems, and these problems usually relate to humanity in some way. While strategy includes aspects beyond just people, it’s not accurate to rely solely on mechanical factors. In reality, it’s quite the opposite.
Today, strategy has veered too hard towards the mechanical; the impersonal. It’s seen as a mere ‘accomplishment,’ something practitioners simply ‘do,’ rather than an intrinsic part of organisations’ core way of thinking. Strategy is now focused on a “micro-level of activity” with a “fascination with the details of managerial conduct, distract them from issues with substantive impact on organisational outcomes.”1
The process of making strategy more mechanical and impersonal has taken away its personal and natural essence. If we treat strategy too impersonally, we run the risk of asking the wrong questions, diagnosing the wrong problems, testing the wrong ideas, overlooking important connections, and being guided by the wrong plans and actions.
Today, we are increasingly focused on technology, data, and numbers. This, combined with a culture of rapid decision-making, is erasing the human aspect from strategy and from those who practice it.
The ‘data-driven’ mentality we operate in forces us to frantically and naively apply strategic frameworks and practices that reduce solutions and ideas to short-lived and overly idealistic ambitions. We prioritise short-term gains, quick wins and success without considering the long-term impact on humans — employees, customers, and society as a whole.
Facebook stands as a prominent example of a firm that failed to anticipate and prevent its worst-case scenarios due to its ultra-agile “Move Fast and Break Things” strategy mantra, fervently embraced by Zuckerberg in his pursuit to transform Facebook into a billion-dollar behemoth and every other tech firm that followed. This approach yielded success, but at what human benefit and cost? The aftermath has left a destructive scar on the modern world and the landscape of business strategy.
To navigate complex social situations and changing data, we need human empathy and creativity. Relying on rigid tools and methods during fast-paced, emotionally charged situations, where strategy is crucial, won’t work. To create a successful and impactful strategy, we must understand and use qualities like intelligence, consciousness, and purpose, as Browne described in Personalism. These qualities hold the key to success.
Awakening strategy
Now, more than ever, we must rekindle the link between strategy and the personal. We can revive strategy by integrating psychological and philosophical elements, leading to what I call ‘Deep Strategy.’ It’s rooted in contemplative insights, including intuition, drawn from our deep understanding of people and the world.
How does strategy actually formulate?
Strategy begins as a mental exercise, involving thoughts, ideas, and theories that are explored, put into action, and validated. In the realm of strategy, principles like Carl Jung’s ‘Model of the Psyche’ and the concept of the ‘Collective Unconscious’ help strategists delve into both individual and collective minds to recognize and address biases, blind spots, and desires, offering a more comprehensive, intuitive perspective for crafting and executing strategies.
Additionally, at its core, strategy is a philosophical journey. It starts when a strategist questions the current state of affairs and envisions a better future. This desire for improvement sparks a quest for understanding, aiming to uncover the reasons behind the current state and chart a path to a superior future state. In strategy, philosophical thinking is crucial as it challenges assumptions, meanings, beliefs, and theories. It focuses on clear definitions, logical consistency, and coherence.
To attain strategic wisdom, a strategist must not only gather knowledge about competitors, the landscape, or customers but also develop a holistic understanding of the reality influenced by both small-scale and large-scale forces.
Philosophy also provides a coherent logic for making choices. It creates a framework for enriched strategic thinking by encouraging us to think deeply, critically, and broadly, enabling strategists to navigate complex challenges and craft strategies that lead to true, lasting transformative outcomes. Embracing philosophy allows strategists to transcend mere goal-oriented approaches and instead, nurture a thoughtful and reflective process that leads to more informed, ethical, and enduring strategies.
Applying deep strategy
You might think this all sounds like a bunch of pious and esoteric fluff; it could easily become just that if we dismiss it as such. However, there’s a practical way to ensure that a deeper approach to strategy serves a real purpose. In his book “Good Strategy/Bad Strategy2” strategy expert Richard Rumelt lays out the elements of a good strategy, which include a Diagnosis (the “Why”), a Guiding Policy (the “What”), and Coherent Actions (the “How”).
Every strategic exercise starts with a question: “Why…? ”, What if…?”, “How do we…”?, “Can we…?”. Research and analysis that produces the Diagnosis that harnesses psychodynamics such that of Jung’s can show us that strategic thinking doesn’t need to occur in isolation but within the broader context of the collective (un)consciousness. This includes understanding cultural, societal, behavioural and historical influences on decision-making and market trends as a whole rather than data points from a single, or random, points in time completely separated from the human psyche.
By diving deeper into the underlying psychological and cultural factors, strategists can gain a deeper understanding of the landscape and devise unique and differentiated strategies that have true relevance and expose a true breakthrough.
Rumelt describes the Guiding Policy as the approach or path chosen to address the challenge. This chosen path must be made based on a coherent logic for making choices. A philosophy is at the heart of a strategy because it provides a logical framework for thought that connects the different strands of the strategic landscape. The lack of a unifying philosophy impacts the coherence and meaning of subsequent activities, resulting in illogical, inconsistent, and expensive behaviours that hinder development and result in missed opportunities. Coherent Actions carry out the Guiding Policy by tackling the obstacles or leverage points identified in the Diagnosis. Most of what we see in strategy today skips straight to this step without unearthing the important insights and wisdom formatted in the previous steps — a frantic action plan, an incoherent framework an ambitious set of goals.
Awakening strategy calls for a revival of the lost connection between strategy and the human experience. Embracing a psychological, philosophical, and ‘deep’ approach strategists delve into the depths of their minds and the collective unconscious. Integrating the wisdom of philosophy, they can transcend mere goal-oriented thinking, crafting strategies that navigate complex challenges with depth and creativity. By acknowledging the limitations of purely data-driven, techno-centric agile approaches and embracing a more holistic, organic view of the world, strategists can develop more effective and enduring solutions to complex problems.
The strategist, a seeker and a lover of wisdom, not of goals and outcomes holds the power to shape a more insightful and impactful future. It’s time to awaken the true nature of both the practice and practitioner.
MacKay, B., Chia, R., & Nair, A. K. (2021). Strategy-in-Practices: A process philosophical approach to understanding strategy emergence and organizational outcomes. Human Relations, 74(9), 1337–1369. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726720929397
Rumelt, Richard P. Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters. New York: Crown Business, 2011.