Our Take on it

Our Take on it ?

Strategy is an exercise in thinking about your own sustainable development.  It answers the question : "How can we stay competitive and preserve our capacity to develop our organization further in our specific business environment?" It tells you what you have to do to successfully address the needs of your customers tomorrow.  Key success factors are :

• future oriented ?
• outward looking ?
• with involvement of all stakeholders ?
• adaptive ?

We will help you design and facilitate a process that involves all stakeholders, creates a shared purpose in the organization and engages people's energy and expertise. That shared purpose and the insight people have in the strategic choices (and the reasons behind those choices) will enable them to CONTRIBUTE and COLLABORATE in a truly autonomous way and yet connected to the rest of the organization.

We will also help you develop a culture of distributed leadership, inviting all to take the lead and initiative where they feel enthused and competent to do so.

And our managers ? Indeed managers will make a shift from traditional power where deciding, knowing the answer, controlling, etc... were key, towards a role where they essentially 'enable others to act' and facilitate collaboration, initiative, leadership in others.

In a simple and even in a complicated environment the cause/effect relationships are relatively obvious and knowable by managers.  It makes sense in such a situation to create standard processes, workflows and good practice databases.  It also makes sense to create a relatively strong hierarchic leadership.  In a complex and more chaotic context it is an illusion to think that solutions can be prescribed.  Here we can't copy solutions from the past and we need emergent and novel practices.

Waiting for answers from the C-suite, will not do the trick.

The Cynefin framework shows the relationship between the complexity of the context and the need for distributed leadership, with managers evolving towards the role of facilitator of experimentation and collaboration.  The less predictable a situation becomes the more reasons to stimulate decentralized initiatives, simply because the situation cannot be controlled anymore from the center.

Gary Hamel makes the point that organizations cannot be managed by management practices (pay for performance, specialization, control, ...) that were largely invented in the beginning of the 20th century : WE NEED TO REINVENT MANAGEMENT. Move! works with leaders and managers in organizations to make that shift from controling to unleashing the energy of the people they work with.