Full Article on Strategy's Horizons and Boundaries

Happy new year!

Steve and I would like to share the full article with you in .pdf format. Also as a bonus we've added a fourth tool for the strategist.

Please let us know if you like the article and we hope you can use the tools we offer.

Cheers... Rob

Applications for the Organizational Strategist

Applications for the Organizational Strategist

We said at the outset of this month’s blog posts that effective strategy crafting begins from a strategic frame of reference or habit of seeing the world that executive leaders can learn to embrace. In the first discussion we reviewed the three dimensions that compose our perspective on strategy – an organization’s internal dynamics, its external environment, and its movement through multiple time horizons. In the second, we compared strategy’s scope or boundaries to those of organizational activity and planning. We are now in a position to step back and examine more fully what a strategic habit of mind actually is, and what this way of seeing the world implies in terms of organizational strategy crafting. We offer three inventories as tools for the strategist to continually assess and keep the information portfolios well stocked for strategic thinking.

Recommendations Regarding Organizational Activity. The strategist sees organizational activity holistically, as the whole of what the organization does – its combined operations, accrued day in and day out – in its movement forward through time. Moreover, the strategic mindset understands that the product of this activity, or the outcome of all of this “organizational doing,” is much more than simply profit or loss, or production quotas met, or delivery schedules filled. Rather, strategy sees organizational activity as having a consequent effect (or set of effects) upon the organization’s environmental landscape. Whatever the organization does, whatever it touches in its activity, affects the world it inhabits in ways that can be, and often are, both intentional… or not. The release of a new product, for example, draws new market share but may also stoke competition; letting go of a disgruntled employee eases workplace tension, but may inspire a lawsuit; etc.

The strategist sees organizational activity as a vast flow of stimuli and response, of energy exchange with its environment. For an interesting tangent about this web of life we suggest the reader consider the work of Fritjof Capra to read more about interconnected systems. But back to our point, the strategist should develop a mindset that “sees” organizational activity and operations through a lens of what environmental effects and influence all of these activities create – a grand interchange of sorts of objects, ideas, artifacts, energies, and value. And on top of all of this should sit a handy set of tools and processes to observe, capture, analyze, modify, and augment the ongoing organizational activities to serve strategy in the long run.

TOOL 1: The first tool we would like offer up for the strategist’s toolbox is one at the level of organizational activity – the activity inventory. The activity inventory may seem obvious to most of you, but you would be surprised at how many organizations take this less seriously than they should. The inventory is a holistic and active inventory of an organization’s capacities – its structure, relationships, processes, brand/image, and individuals. There is a large variety of tools and frameworks for this kind of inventory and we won’t focus on any single approach. What we would like to reinforce is that the inventory must be done and built into the ongoing systems of the organization, not just a periodic event.

Recommendations Regarding Organizational Planning. Planning is an intentional and vital process of all organizations. Some level of planning must occur, even if it’s minimal, before organizational activity can happen. But the two proceed hand and hand along the arrow of time. Indeed, based on the set of desired effects an organization is trying to achieve through time (increased market share, decreased costs, market expansion, etc.), planning is a necessary process that prepares, informs, and guides organizational activity, both directly and indirectly.

Planning’s purview generally looks from today forward in time some measure beyond organizational activity. It is by definition forward leaning and endeavors to anticipate, for example, supply-chain requirements, delivery schedules, workforce expansion, etc. When the planning processes of an organization are functioning well, they not only generally predispose the organization to operate well, they also enable organizational capacity to look still further forward into the future (and capitalize on the efficiencies and advantages such forward-looking efforts afford). And when an organization’s planning functions are firing on all cylinders consistently typically one will find within that organization evidence, sometimes even a robust presence, of an important feedback loop. This loop measures and assesses, on a recurring basis, the effects organizational activity is generating, both intended and unintended. It answers a vitally important question: “Are we doing things right?” Is the organization, through its actions, achieving its intended effects, and, just as importantly, if not, then why not?

Organizational planning has a proactive capacity to drive organizational activity toward desired goals and objectives. At the same time, there exists a reactive tendency to adjust activity given environmental opportunities and challenges that emerge. These two exist as balancing act with planning informing activity and vice versa. There is also a translational role to turn strategic direction into achievable activity. When organizations achieve excellence in the planning realm, we see a legitimate assessment loop is in place and providing ongoing feedback to its planning processes. Here you’ll find the organization that is efficiently addressing market demands, and anticipating well its supply chain tensions, etc. These are typically the organizations that are top tier in the current market landscape. However planning, like operations, is also not strategy. It is a common misconception that just because an organization is planning well, it is being strategic.

So what would we recommend that organizations do at the level of planning to prepare for successful strategy processes? We recommend organizations employ the environmental data collected as an activity in high order environmental analyses. This sets up the second key strategy tool:

TOOL 2: Now focusing on the organization/environment, there also should be ongoing and deep assessment of the organization’s external environment and activity across the boundary. We recommend an environmental inventory as a descriptive assessment in terms of current opportunities and challenges (economy, market landscape, partnerships/collaborations/relationships, etc.). In addition to the inventory, however, we also recommend that this be augmented with a more sophisticated set of analytics and metrics to continually monitor changes in the environment relative to changes in organizational activity to evaluate fit in terms of widening and narrowing gaps.

Recommendations Regarding Strategy. Strategy sits “above” the realm of planning to inform and guide the planning process, just as planning does for operations. And like planning, strategy also looks forward, but much further out, and in our humble experience, much more comfortably so than the planner. Moreover, unlike the planning realm, notice that strategy’s cast is not limited to the future, but importantly also includes the past (and we’ll discuss exactly why in a bit). Indeed, when an organization’s strategic process are honed, arguably one could say that strategy’s purview could and should extend out onto the limits of an organization’s conceivable horizon line.

In strategy, there should be ongoing honest reflections on organizational effectiveness. A good way to differentiate strategy from planning is to suggest that strategy’s concern is not with an organization’s effects, but rather, strategy’s concern is with organizational “effectiveness.” And strategy’s corresponding feedback loop also helps differentiate this focus. Strategy’s feedback loop asks not Are we doing things right? but rather Are we doing the right things?. Are we in the proper markets, and if so, how long will these markets bear fruit? Are we leveraging the best practices internally? Are there new technologies approaching that could change our landscape? Is our organization well positioned for what we cannot predict? In short, strategy tends to be concerned with an organization’s existential interests, planning with organizational efficiencies, and operations with organizational output.

Figure 7 below now serves as our final image integrating all of the components from the prior sections. We find the organization, immersed in activity and operations, moving through time. All the while, the organization is impacted by the changing environment and in turn acts on the environment, creating changes and impacts as energy flows across the organizational/environmental boundaries. Multiple horizons exist across time, both into the short-term and long-term pasts as well as into the present, short-term, and long-term futures. The organization remains aware over time, on the level of activity, on the level of planning, and on the level of strategy by continually asking the questions – Are we doing things right? and Are we doing the right things?.

Figure 7 showing the full model for organizational strategy horizons and boundaries.

Let us now offer up a third tool for the strategist:

TOOL 3: In our experience we have found that few organizations do a very good job at keeping track of where they have been and where they are going. We recommended two inventories for activity and planning, the activity inventory and the environmental inventory. Now we would like you to consider a third, the historical inventory. Historical explorations and reconstructions prove to be a fundamental source for future context. There are fewer tools available to the strategist for building an historical inventory. Where we find many models for organizational activity and environment scanning and analyses, the practice of employing history as insight to the future is less developed. One can look to the historical sciences, cultural anthropology, and literature for clues. One can also consider ways to reformat the two prior inventories, activity and environmental, to highlight key outcomes and metrics for preservation in an historical inventory. In any case, again the key to do it, and do in a way that adds strategic value over time.

In our final post, the full article from this month, we will offer up a conclusion to our stream of consciousness and a .pdf of the full paper.

Happy holidays all!

Strategy's Scope

Strategy’s Scope

In our last post, we discussed how the lens of strategy’s perspective – developed across three organizational dimensions of internal capacity, environmental influences, and an organization’s history – provides a more complete and sophisticated foundation from which to assess an organization’s strategic potential. We suggested that effective strategy emanates from a perspective that pushes typical organizational horizon lines much further out, not only forward into an organization’s future, but also, and importantly so, backward and deeper into an organization’s past. In this post, we’ll build on that discussion, but through the lens of strategy’s scope. We suggest, as with the need to think further fore and aft in time, effective strategy crafting also demands a broadening and opening up of typically held organizational boundaries. To make that case, let’s first consider the scope and boundaries of organizational activity and planning.

The Boundaries of Activity. As we discussed earlier, every organization in the world moves inexorably and unavoidably forward into the future. And in this relentless movement, day-by-day, month-by-month, organizations therefore must and do act upon the world. They put product into the market, they develop new ideas, pay salaries, secure supplies, train employees, etc. Even organizations that might choose to do nothing for whatever reason, in that very choice itself, act. And typically we call this set of actions or activity an organization’s “operations”; it’s the total set of “stuff” that organizations do.

Figure 4 showing scope and boundaries of organizational activity.

The scope of organizational activity then is primarily concerned with the present, with the here and now. And because of this, its boundaries (or purview) rarely extend outside of, or beyond these present concerns. The scope of an organization’s activity can, to a certain extent, reach into the near-term future – activities put irrevocably into motion today may occur tomorrow, or even next week (the supply invoice that takes a few business days to transact, the new product line that launches early next week – but not significantly so. Similarly, organizational activity can have some connectivity with the organization’s immediate environment, but rarely as far as operations or activity is strictly concerned, is that connectivity very relevant or long-lasting. Operations are first and foremost about doing. And as such, we can imagine the scope and boundaries of organizational activity as thus: not too concerned about much beyond the near-future, not at all concerned with the past, and not too concerned with the organization’s external environment, beyond those things which may influence activity directly, such as traffic or weather conditions slowing deliveries, flu bugs cutting productivity, and supply chain backlogs. Activity exists in the present moment, and at best it may be tactical as opposed to strategic. When activity begins to consider the future, we step into the realm of planning.

The Boundaries of Planning. The scope of organizational planning, in contrast, is very much about tomorrow and beyond, and its boundaries therefore necessarily extend and exist well outside those of ordinary organizational activity. Planning’s most important purpose is the preparation of organizational activity. Planning keeps an organization on its intended track, forecasting and securing the resources necessary for desired productivity rates, preparing the landscape ahead for intended delivery of goods, positioning workforce capacity for projected skill and experience requirements, and so on. Consequently, where an organization’s march through time is concerned, “the future” is a more meaningful term to the planner than simply “tomorrow”. Tomorrow certainly matters, but so too does next week, next month, next year, and, where long-term planning is concerned, even the next few years. Full disclosure, we’ll also assert that there is an element of planning’s scope that pushes its boundaries backward a bit in time as well. We will discuss in greater detail soon.

Planning’s scope also broadens much further into an organization’s environmental context. Relevant environmental influences consistently matter to the planner. Weather conditions or logistical constraints necessarily affect an organization’s future activity and planning will work to mitigate these effects. Further out ahead, relevant environmental conditions that will change or may even appear to be changing also fall within planning’s purview. A new competitor seeking to acquire market share, a required resource that may be facing shortage conditions next season, or an opportunity to collaborate with another company on a new product, are three examples of the sorts of environmental issues that lie well within planning’s scope but are beyond the realm of organizational activity.

Figure 5 showing the extended scope and boundaries of organizational planning.

One definition of strategic planning we’ve seen is adapted from Mintzberg:

Consistent, focused behavior over time adapting in response to changing conditions.

Regardless of the precise words you might prefer, the scope of organizational planning, determined by planning’s purpose both to keep an organization on its intended track and to continue driving the organization toward its desired objectives, as well as the boundaries this scope implies, are necessarily broader and further out in comparison to those of organizational activity. Planning and activity, however, need to exist in and endless dance of informing each other and adapting as the organization’s internal and external environments shift and change over time.

The Boundaries of Strategy. Now we begin to get to our key points on strategy. Strategy is often misidentified as something that is merely important or something that has to do with planning for the future. While these may both be true, the boundaries of strategy are more expansive. Strategy’s scope pushes even further fore and aft, and wider into the environment than that of planning. Strategy’s focus, or perhaps more accurately its intentional lack thereof, changes the basic shape of strategy’s purview significantly.  

We have already made the case that the nature of planning’s domain is about identifying the probable, and preparing organizational activity for actual execution paths. Furthermore, the planning realm tends to be defined or guided by resource availability, even anticipated resource availability, all of which is to say that planning exists in the ever-present reality of resource constraints. Planning’s purpose is to move future ambiguities toward and into clarity.

In contrast, strategy lives and dare we say even thrives in ambiguity. Strategy is about identifying multiple possibilities and discerning from them, those which are better probabilities than others, from a standpoint of building long-term organizational advantage moving forward. We like Jeff Bauer’s insight about the future, which he laid out in Upgrading Leadership’s Crystal Ball – forecasts like clouds of probabilities of future possibilities are the strategist’s handiest tool, especially as uncertainty increases.

An important aspect in adjudicating among these alternate futures is a strategic understanding of organizational capacity informed very much by its past. What new markets or products should we consider in the coming decade? What is the nature of the next generation’s workforce expected to be, and how will that come affect or change our organization in the future?  

Figure 6 comparing the horizons and boundaries of organizational strategy to planning and activity.

Strategy’s horizons and boundaries extend well beyond the realms of organizational planning and organizational activity. And indeed, effective strategy can and should not shy away from existing in tension with planning perspectives. Consequently, just as strategic perspective pushes the horizon lines further forward and back, so too does aperture of strategy’s scope widen compared to planning’s. Moreover, unlike planning’s scope, the further out in front, the broader out strategy’s tends to widen. In strategy’s domain, the environmental influences on the periphery of an organization become more meaningful and worthy of attention the further into the future the strategist looks.  

Next week, we’ll examine the implications these observations on boundaries and horizons have on how organizations move forward. Strategy’s process is necessarily different from planning’s or activity’s. We’ll also include some useful prescriptions implied from all of this.

Strategy’s Horizons and Boundaries

Strategy’s Horizons and Boundaries

This month in the blog I have invited Steve Rothstein to explore the implications of strategy’s horizons and boundaries on strategy crafting. Steve has strategy experience in the US Air Force, in education, and in nonprofit leadership. He’s currently with FDI Strategies and consults in the areas of strategy and innovation. We will unpack an organizational perspective on strategy and delve deeper into scope and process. This month we have a series of graphics to accompany the text to further illuminate our perspective. We hope you enjoy.

As organizations and as individuals, effective strategy crafting begins from a strategic frame of reference. Indeed, at its most basic level, strategy is much less an end product for an organization than it is a habit of the mind or a consistent way of seeing the world that executive leaders and planners of all kinds come to embrace. While organizations craft strategies to help them steer more effectively into and through the future, the concept of strategy, at its core, emanates from a world-view whose boundaries and horizons extend well beyond those of organizational planning and operations, deep into the periphery, into history, and into the future.

To better understand the broader extent of these horizons and boundaries, and more importantly, how and why the realm of strategy differs from that of planning or operations, over the course of this month’s blog posts, we’ll first examine the concept of strategy through two interrelated lenses: strategy’s perspective and strategy’s process. Thereafter, we’ll look the prescriptions that strategy’s broader frame of reference implies for organizations seeking to be strategically more effective.

Strategy’s Perspective

We can elucidate strategy’s perspective with respect to any organization through three different, but interrelated dimensions; an organization’s internal dimension, its external environment, and an organization’s transit through time.

On “organization”. To begin, let’s examine the organization internally. The strategic perspective seeks to understand, assess, and maintain a holistic and nuanced picture of the organization’s actual qualities in the here and now – its strengths and weaknesses, its formal and informal structures, its capacities and potential, processes, technologies, groups and individuals. In essence, it’s about what the organization does well and perhaps not so well, how it communicates, the dimensions of power, and process. For the reader more interested in this conversation, we suggest a deeper dive in Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization.

Figure 1 showing the organization with semipermeable boundaries exchanging energy with the environment.

Understanding an organization’s internal qualities begins with thinking about the organization well beyond its organization chart or financials. Any organization or agency can also be understood as a set of nested and interrelated individuals, work groups, offices, sections, departments, and so forth, each a sub-entity within others, each with varying internal qualities and effectiveness of inter-connectivity with other entities within the organization. Each of these are boundaries of one kind or another. Complexity rises pretty quickly when even viewing a small organization. Moreover, and importantly, it’s a strategic mistake to think of organizations as an entities independent of or unrelated to their outside worlds. Every organization’s boundaries, internal and external, are permeable to some degree, most even considerably. Typically, organizations have all sorts of relationships with agents beyond their own domains – all woven like a web in the environment. Even the tightest, most secretive of companies have employees who move into and out of these organizations on a daily basis, and who each have families, homes, and lives outside of the company. Looking at organizations through this sort of nested, permeable-walled lens, both one’s own and all of the others that surround it, is an important element in developing strategic perspective. In fact, we might say the flow of energy, the exchange of energy, between the organization and its environment is what keeps the organization alive and gives it its form.

More On “environment”. Extending this thinking now, the importance to developing strategic perspective on any organization is based on a clear understanding of where and how an organization is nested within its own broader environment. An organization’s external, environmental relationships should be viewed from a variety of facets. Industry, regionality, supply chain, sector, size, financial position are a few common examples. What is the quality of the organization’s industry relationships? What is its role and relationship with the region(s) wherein it exists? With government? With the public? What sort of clout and standing does it currently hold with respect to these different facets?

Figure 2 showing the organization internal and external environments over time.

Often in scanning an organization’s environment, we employ the PESTE framework at minimum – political, economic, social, technical, environmental – but we often extend this framework to add other relevant dimensions. To better understand an organization’s environmental context, it’s helpful to assess these various and multiple influences based on their relevancy, scale, and impacts. For example, a local school district may be as strategically relevant to a up and coming regional manufacturing firm (quality of life, workforce development, etc.) as might be the Chinese steel market (that makes up a significant portion of the firm’s supply chain interests). On the other hand, the local school district’s relevant and peripheral environmental interests will likely look substantively different. State legislation to adjust education standards is whole lot more relevant to the school district’s perspective than the manufacturing firm’s. And the district has little reason to care much about the steel market in China.  

On “Time”. The third, and perhaps most important dimension in developing strategic perspective with respect to any organization is to recognize and fully embrace the fact, by their very existence, organizations move inexorably forward through time. The same perspective applies to all of the entities that constitute any organization’s particular environment as well, relevant, peripheral, or otherwise. Moreover, a strategic perspective sees this movement as constant and fluid rather than as a series of discrete increments. The fully strategic perspective sees its ship moving constantly through the ocean, seeking better currents and weather conditions, adjusting course as needed to navigate there more effectively. The planning perspective sees the same ship heading toward a waypoint, reaching it then heading toward another one, and then another, and so on.

Figure 3 showing the organization moving through time and into the future.

An additional element of the time dimension, vital to the strategic perspective and in practice most often overlooked, is the past. While it’s true that, fundamentally, strategy’s primary concern is looking forward, it’s also true that effective strategic perspective with respect to an organization’s future emanates from a strong strategic understanding of the organization’s past. An organization’s capacity in the present is dependent on its past that brought it here. Moreover, this past defines, with much more clarity and accuracy, the viable or even possible futures looking forward. In other words, the strategic perspective evaluates an organization’s future possibilities by thinking of the organization as a vector – an entity with both magnitude and direction. A retail chain that has specialized in children’s clothing over the past five years cannot tomorrow or next week suddenly move into industrial protective wear. But it can consider such a move over the next few years, and certainly, if conditions warranted such a transition, the chain could be fully into and established in that new market within a decade. Two horizons exist, one into the past and another into the future.

So reviewing the three dimensions of strategic perspective – the internal dynamics, the external environment and forces, and the flow of time – we are now ready to talk in more detail about strategy’s scope. Eventually this will take us into the realm of planning. By the end of the month, we’ll offer up a few applications and methods to help guide you through a better understanding of strategy’s boundaries and horizons.

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Robert Brodnick, Ph.D. Principal www.strategicinitiatives.com robert@strategicinitiatives.com 530.798.4082 Steve Rothstein, Ph.D. Director of Strategy, FDI Strategies srothstein@fdistrategies.com

The Role of the Arts in Strategy Crafting (full article)

Here is the link to a .pdf of the full article. Thanks... Rob!

4 Applications of the Arts in Strategy Crafting

Various Applications: Practical Catalysts Large and Small

Practical applications of arts-fired catalysts and orbital learning can spring from any one or a combination of our senses, exactly analogous to our many art forms: painting and drawing, stories and poetry, sculpture, hand crafts, songs and instrumental music, expressive movement and dance, theater and acting. Whether formally conceived and rigorously rendered or invented on the fly in the spirit of improvisation, arts-based experiences can deliver us to new vistas, perspectives, introspections and expressions of strategy. Skilfully facilitated experiences in nature can serve a similar, mind-shifting purpose precisely because nature too reconnects us with our senses, with beauty and imagination. “To the Eye of a Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination Itself. As a Man is, so he Sees. As the Eye is formed, Such are its Powers.” (Blake) In this final section of our article, we share four contrasting applications of our arts-based methodology drawn from four different art forms, playing out at different scales of personal and group process.

The Concert of Ideas and The Harvest of Learnings

Invented in the late 1970s by John Cimino and colleagues, the Concert of Ideas is a keynote type event embodying a set of artful triggers designed to set the minds and hearts of participants in curious exploratory motion. Featuring grand and exciting music performed by award-winning artists, the Concert of Ideas IS a world-class concert performance. Music by Bernstein, Copland, Gershwin and Rachmaninoff as well as Broadway showstoppers are essential ingredients of a Concert of Ideas. But there is more. Woven through the music and creatively juxtaposed to leverage imaginations, audiences discover equally brilliant contributions from thinkers such as Einstein, Picasso, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Margaret Mead, James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. The whirlwind of connective possibilities is exhilarating. Participants are royally entertained. Simultaneously, they are invited to think deeply, to entertain new perspectives, and ultimately, to enter into thoughtful dialogue with one another.

The Concert of Ideas is the original prototype for the orbital model of thinking and learning. Each song, story, poem or theatrical scenario comprising the Concert of Ideas serves as a catalyst to launch the listener-participant on a journey of exploration around the central focus or theme of the Concert of Ideas. Each image, metaphor or narrative trail embedded in the songs, stories, poems and theatrical scenarios suggests a curious and inviting trajectory for closer examination, but importantly does not deliver discrete answers. Instead, it points to possibilities, to directions of exploration, leaving the process open to the participant’s own originally conceived configurations of thought and meaning. In this way, the thinking and learning happen by surprise along the way in the midst of captivating play.

Taken altogether, the Concert of Ideas might be considered one large scale, multi-layered catalyst for setting the mind in motion. As such, it is critical the experience be thoroughly and invitingly debriefed. Opportunities for quiet reflection, small group discussion and sharing of insights back to plenary are vital to shepherding the process to its richest outcomes. Deep dives into emergent and more specialized content are a natural next step on the heels of a Concert of Ideas and the ensuing processing. Further artful catalysts on a smaller scale can refresh the minds and imaginations of participants as often as needed along the way to crafting the final work product.

A special culminating event aimed at synthesis and full ownership of the final work product can also take an artful form. Known within Creative Leaps International as a “Harvest of Learnings”, this culminating event is assembled collaboratively with participants to distill and imaginatively re-express key insights and outcomes of the entire work process. The end result is a celebration of personal creativity and achievement. Music, poetry, song, humor, spontaneity and the element of surprise merge with the honest insights, learnings and enthusiasms of the fully engaged participants. The experience anchors learning, creates powerful memories and sends people home with a sense of triumph. What is more, the arts-based methodology has been internalized, its catalyst energies and orbital strategies absorbed into the tool kits of the participants themselves.

Modelling Collective Vision

Everyone can be an artist. The experience of engaging in artistic expression opens the pathways for creativity, immerses us in flow, and makes connections and associations among ideas and thoughts fruitful for strategy crafting. The challenge is that not everyone is awash with artistic talent across all of the arts – who is? We have developed a technique that makes the artistic experience accessible to nearly everyone, more like serious play than art. The method has individuals working in small groups to build models set in the future.

To get ready for such an activity, we first need to explore and define either a problem or a scenario. The group needs a trigger to set themselves in motion. One approach is to articulate a clear, current problem and then take the group to the future using a variety of stories. Once the setting is established, small groups are challenged to build a model of what the future is like when a positive solution is in practice. For example here is a potential problem, We know that our current program/offering is falling short in terms of active engagement - what would a future program/offering be like that was really engaging? A second approach to set the context is around future vision based on depicting and extending a number of current trends and forces. For example, We know that these four trends are emerging and will disrupt our current business model - what future business model will likely emerge as a result of these intersecting trends?

The second step in preparation is to identify a single artful medium for model building. We sometimes use clay or putty, but building blocks, pipe cleaners and small objects, or any kind of collection of small, odd objects can be used – even a combination of items. The goal here is set the bar very low for entry so everyone plays. We set groups in motion and ask that they build their model and write a story to tell when they make their presentation. This works well in mid-sized group setting where four or five or more groups can show their models and tell their stories. The larger group learns along the way.

The orbital experience is activated in three phases. First, each individual in the small group begins to touch and hold the objects. Once some familiarity is gained, they start to put things together, even before the group has decided where to go. The experience of building, tangibly, kinesthetically, sets the mind in motion around the task. The first orbital experience. The second comes from creating the story in the small group. As the story unfolds and builds, the models tend to adapt and reshape. Experiencing the story adds layers of clarity and possibility, the second orbital experience. The third, and maybe final, maybe not, experience comes during the small group presentations. Experiencing the minds of another group, their story, sends the individuals away again on a micro learning journey. Returning to their own thoughts, now more enhanced with each story.

Reflecting and harvesting is a critical facilitation matter. What we might be left with are great stories and lumps of clay, all swept away at the end of the day. The positive experience will live on, but meaning must be extracted and documented. We like to use photographs of the models, videos of the stories when possible, and a set of synthesis exercises at the conclusion of the activity to identify the key learnings and takeaways. There will always be a next step in the strategy process and good outputs from the modeling and storytelling need to be isolated so they can serve as inputs to the next part of the process.

Engaged Enactment of Our Current Dilemmas and Potential Solutions

A completely different twist on the storytelling that accompanies building models is to make the story an art itself. Here we describe the arts of acting, improvisation, and role play as the inspiration for thinking about the future. Utilizing this artistic medium, participants fully enact and engage in an alternate and possible future through expression and active creation.

To get ready and design the journey, there are three key activities. First, we create a scenario of the future to establish the setting for the action. Second, we engage participants in generating forecasts of the future, extending the scenario using a variety of likely events and situations that could be, but currently are not. The final activity is writing and enacting the script, where smaller groups are encouraged by facilitators who have been coached in telling a good story and delivering the story through acting and role play. Some basic ground rules are typically enough for a group to deliver an entertaining and enlightening story. Again, this is art for the masses, accessible to nearly everyone.

The method activates orbital learning in three phases. The scenario is the initial activation of the orbital experience. When the future scenario is depicted, usually through a combination of narrative and projected images, a new idea space is generated. We find participants being able to fill voids between what is and what could be and generate new interpretations and perspectives – ideas emerge. The session then turns to participant engagement in building their own forecasts. These forecasts need not be perfect nor even accurate, in fact, we have found some of the more absurd futures make for a better story and unlock unseen possibilities. Sometimes playing with what is surely not possible opens in the mind further to unseen possibilities.

Finally, we have the performance of the story or script as the final opportunity for orbital learning. This happens on two levels – one as performer and another as audience. Doing something, expressing something has a different impact than thinking about the same subject. We find that the actors experience the future differently than the audience and have different learnings. We encourage personal journaling about the experience shortly after telling the story, more on this soon. For the audience, they have the opportunity to be entertained, to observe, and to make additional connections. While it is helpful again for audience participants to journal on the experience, we have found that questions or prompts help accelerate their ability to unpack and record learnings. Mixing in a bit of surprise through improv can really add some fun twists to the storytelling and acting.

Harvesting learning in this situation is a bit challenging. It is important to find a way to capture each story and we recommend two approaches. One is to have the group actually write a script, and while it may not be perfectly performed, it provides a record. The second and perhaps preferred method is to video record the story. While his has many advantages, it may not always be practical. A second recommended strategy for harvesting is individual journaling on the experience. It may only take 15 or 20 minutes, but embedding some quiet time, either after each individual performance or after a collection on them, really allows each participant to better understand and reflect on what happened and what new possibilities emerged for them. Finally, we like the whole group to debrief as a way to push the learnings even further and identify consensus characteristics of the potential futures and unique ideas that manifested during the performances. We recommend creating an archive of these three methods for harvesting learning; the stories can be used in the future for further provocation.

Visual Imagery as a Catalyst for Exploring Values, Perspectives and Extension of Future Thinking

We live in a highly visual culture and visual imagery is everywhere. Somehow, we never tire of it. Our brains light up in response to it. Our emotions kick in instinctively and our imaginations appear to revel in the perceptual intrigues even the most ordinary images can be heir to. To utilize visual imagery as a tool for activating imagination, personal perspectives and future thinking is to work in most everyone’s comfort zone. While a smaller number of us may feel capable and comfortable drawing images, the threshold for participation in viewing visual imagery is virtually non-existent. Pictures tell stories and we love stories. Pictures can be provocative or pull at our heartstrings. Pictures can be puzzles, illusions, astoundingly beautiful or shockingly horrific. They are worth a thousand words. Taking tips from artists and advertisers over the centuries, teams of researchers and facilitators have designed an impressive array of visual tools with which we can extend our thinking and prime our individual expressiveness.

Perhaps the best known tool of this kind is called Visual Explorer and was designed by a group at the Center for Creative in Greensboro, North Carolina. In essence, it a set of more than 100 vivid and suitably diverse images which can be spread on the floor along the periphery of a modestly large room where participants can stroll as they search for one or more images they freely associate with an issue, question, challenge or personal attribute. The pictures selected by participants become the subject of personal reflections, guided journaling and finally facilitated small group conversations where the pictures can be shared and explored for what they might signify and potentially reveal about the issue or subject at hand. Skilful facilitation of this process is crucial to the harvesting of rich outcomes. The pictures themselves are the catalysts for launching minds and hearts in curious exploratory motion through the idea space surrounding the focal point of their orbital journeys.

As a sample of this experience, here below are seven visual images utilized in a small scale version of this activity developed by John Cimino and known as Visual Primer.

The questions which follow form the outline of the facilitation process guiding participants through their orbital journeys. The journey unfolds in three discrete phases, each phase beginning with quiet personal viewing of the seven images followed by a response to the prompts of a particular question. The questions and prompts are progressive, each one inviting a deeper exploration of a participant’s inner terrain.

Round One: Take a look at each of the seven images which follow and make a brief note or two of what each image conveys to you -- a thought, an impression, a message, a value, an emotion, an insight?

Round Two: Secondly, which images do you find yourself drawn to most?

Round Three: In what ways do they connect with who you are, the issue we are exploring or the desired future we are seeking?

As with the Visual Explorer activity, the initial processing of the images via Rounds 1 through 3 is accomplished by each participant on his or her own as guided by the facilitator. The small group conversations follow. On the heels of small group conversations, a plenary discussion can debrief the overall experience harvesting the most significant outcomes, insights and trajectories for future explorations. What’s more, a number of images will have been identified as hallmarks of the group’s journey and strategy crafting. Finally, it’s worth noting that this particular activity affords experience designers and facilitators tremendous latitude for converting it to a variety of purposes simply by varying the inventory of images and customizing the set of questions, particularly question #3.

Summary and Conclusions

In earlier blog posts, we took a fresh look at how we experience the arts and the processes they set in motion linked to perception, imagination, memory and the senses. We then introduced an orbital model of thinking and learning as an effective way of exploring the idea space surrounding whatever we might designate as our subject or point of focus. Referring back to the arts, we showed how arts experiences can serve as an efficient and powerful catalyst for launching our attentions into that idea space affording us satellite views of our subject from a variety of perspectives.

In our more recent posts, we endeavored to unpack this arts-based methodology into a series of six steps: (i) creating mental readiness, (ii) the designer’s tools for guiding the activity, (iii) activation and immersion in the orbital experience, (iv) debriefing and processing the experience, (v) opportunities for extension learning, and (vi) final synthesis, discernment or recycling of the experience. We followed this with four sample applications of the methodology at different scales and drawn from different art forms: The Concert of Ideas and Harvest of Learnings using music, poetry, theater; Modelling Collective Vision using clay and other small manipulables modeling of future scenarios; Engaged Enactment of Dilemmas and Solutions using acting and improvisation; and Visual Primer using visual imagery as catalyst for future thinking.

Throughout all of these experiences and applications, participants and facilitators move through three basic mindsets or internal states. The first state is engagement or readiness, the process of enlisting a willing spirit of wholehearted participation. The second state is all about the participant’s creative response to the arts-based catalysts and orbital journey. The third state is that of discernment, making sense and identifying outcomes. The orbital nature of the experience affords the time and space for an unhurried 360 perspective seamlessly modulated through our senses, our imaginations and the felt experience of our emotions. The approach is indirect rather than linear and one dimensional, at once properly distanced and surprisingly intimate, precisely the way of all great art, universal and personal at the same time.

Our hope for this post is first and foremost as an invitation to play, an invitation to jump in and experiment with the myriad ways the arts can inflect, inspire and enrich our thinking. Strategy crafting is an affair of the heart as much as the mind, a process challenging our imaginations, intuitions and our willingness to act. To craft strategy means we must work skilfully, smartly, artfully calling upon all our faculties. After all, the vessel we would construct must be seaworthy, as secure and watertight in rough seas as in calm. Finally, our creation must inspire confidence, dedication and ownership, all those “trickster’ qualities of our nature too slippery to grasp with mere logic. It is in our nature to dream, to seek new horizons and to act to make those horizons visible and achievable. Consider the work of art your work, the work of bringing the future in being.

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Robert Brodnick, Ph.D. Vice President for Strategy & Innovation www.strategicinitiatives.com robert@strategicinitiatives.com 530.798.4082 John Cimino President http://creativeleaps.org/ jcimino@creativeleaps.org