JOURNEY MAKING for MAKING STRATEGY

The implication that effective strategy comes from developing commitment from those with power - those who have to deliver the strategy.

Commitment comes from involving power brokers in the process of developing the strategy: for them it must be a journey.

JoURNeY = Jointly Understanding Reflecting and Negotiating strategY

Journey Making involves the use of:

Cause Mapping to Understand and Reflect upon the causalities of strategy delivery

Special computer software to represent causalities - Decision Explorer

And often, special computer software to aid negotiation, build consensus, maximise productivity of the management team - Group Explorer

Who are the major proponents of Journey Making?

Colin Eden and Fran Ackermann through their writing in books and articles.

But, also see the work of John Bryson.

What differentiates the Journey Making approach from that of others?

• A focus on the realities of management in the organization: what drives the attention of managers – the major issues and concerns that managers believe they face.
• An acceptance that, in most circumstances, incremental change is more practical than wide-ranging and fundamental change.
• The demand that a robust business model is constructed and tested, and so it involves the discovery of core distinctive competences through a designed process, rather than their being stated.

"Many strategic planning efforts come to nothing because i) they do not involve directly the power brokers but rely on support staff, and ii) take an idealized view of the organization and what it can achieve. These two points are related. Urgent strategic issues engage senior managers. Their time is largely devoted to trying to avoid possible future disasters, manage their own ambitions, protect their own reputations, and ensure projects keep on track. Some issues are urgent, some are interesting, some are strategic, and some are tedious but require immediate attention. If strategy making does not at least pay some attention to these dominant drivers of the organization then it will not be seen by the power brokers to connect with the real world. Strategic planning becomes an “annual rain-dance” of no practical import. It is an idealized notion. Unless power brokers are directly involved then these issues are not surfaced and addressed. Through negotiation they may be reviewed and seen as less important for a sound strategic future, or they may rise to become central, but unless they are at least surfaced then the attention given to strategy making will be at best an arid intellectual exercise and certainly not emotionally engaging.

The issues that managers actually address determine the strategic future of the organization, not the published strategic plans which often collect dust on shelves rather than having any impact on purposeful activity. The published material may influence the issues that are addressed, but often only at the margin. Some situations become addressed as strategic issues and other potential issues are not noticed. The way managers think about what goes on around them determines what is noticed and what is not. So, one of the outcomes of strategy making is a change in the way issues are defined. And so the way managers think about what is problematic, and what is an opportunity, has to change as a result of strategy making. Thinking belongs to people in the organization and not the organization, and the thinking that matters is that of the power brokers. They must be actively involved in the process of making strategy because ways of thinking cannot be changed other than incrementally. (From a psychological standpoint this is known as “elaborating a person's construct system”, or “scaffolding”.)

Thus, understanding and acknowledging the "reality" of an organization is crucial to making the strategy deliverable. The starting point must be to detect emergent strategizing .. This is how an organization determines its strategic future through managers habitually defining some situations as important and the ways in which they address these issues.

Emergent strategizing addresses the way in which most organizations demonstrate patterns of decision making, thinking, and action. Often “taken for granted” ways of working and problem solving come from the habits, history and “hand-me-downs” of the organization's culture. Whether the organization members are aware of this or not , even if they define themselves as “muddling through” rather than acting strategically, such enacted patterns inevitably take the organization in one strategic direction rather than another. Organizations do not act randomly, without purpose. It is this process of going in one strategic direction rather than another, based on patterns or, what are sometimes called “recipes” of perceiving and acting, that we call “emergent strategizing”.

Thus, we contend that any organization, big or small, will be acting strategically whether the emergent strategizing is quite unselfconscious, or rather more deliberate. As, for example, when there is a knowing reinforcement of the existing ways of working by key members of the organization in pursuit of particular outcomes or purpose. In either case the emergent strategic direction, and implicit or explicit goals and purpose, are detectable and, to a greater or lesser degree, amenable to change. It is in understanding the implied direction (based on the issues thought to be important) that change can be determined. Of course, for some organizations, this implicit or “emergent” strategy may be determined as best for that particular organization . When this is the case then the organization has moved from a patterned and emergent “muddling through” to become a deliberate emergent strategy .

Starting strategy making by detecting emergent strategizing involves: respecting the history of the organization, understanding its ways of thinking and acting in practice rather than that espoused, and understanding the role of systems and structures. These are all aspects of understanding the culture of the organization.

As we have implied above, in practice the best way of getting an understanding of the emergent strategic future of the organization is through an exploration of the ways in which the power brokers define and address strategic issues. In doing so it is also more likely that these managers will become engaged in the strategy making – both emotionally and intellectually.

This approach to strategy making implies that the new strategy will make demands on changing the way issues are defined and addressed – that is ways of thinking and acting in practice will need to change. But, these changes will be determined in the light of the existing ways in order that the chances of successful change can be assessed. The approach also implies that changing the strategy of an organization demands incremental change from emergent strategizing to a deliberate, but realistic or realizable, new strategy. The incrementalism invariably involves changing structures and systems as well as recognising that the strategy making process itself is designed to promote change by renegotiating ways of understanding the purpose of the organization, and creating and testing a new business model or livelihood scheme through a thorough exploration of patterns of distinctive competences. It is both a rational and social process.

Quoted from "The Practice of Making Strategy: a step by step guide" by Ackermann, Eden, with Brown, Sage, London 2004