Sherpa Alliance

For organizational agility we need luck on our side. If, as the saying goes, “luck is where preparation meets opportunity” then an ongoing strategy process is about the “preparation” part of that and being ever prepared. As others have said:

“Chance favors the prepared mind” (Louis Pasteur)
“Luck is not chance, it is toil” (Emily Dickenson)
“I am a strong believer in luck and I find the harder I work the more I have of it” (Thomas Jefferson)

As an organization, how hard are you working and toiling to be ever prepared with luck on your side and not leaving it to chance?

Famously, Napoleon Bonaparte, on being told the virtues of a new general (the man’s heroism, bravery, skill in battle and so on) waved his hand impatiently, saying, “that’s all very well, but is he lucky?”

As an organization, how lucky are you? Your organizational agility depends upon it. Are you investing in the work and the toil or are you prone to strategy tragedy? Agility doesn’t come from a once-a-year or once-in-a-while strategic planning retreat. That’s not how we get lucky. Agility comes from an ongoing process, cycle and discipline, to be navigating a middle road of divergence and convergence. As the Eastern Airlines story illustrates, even very smart and experienced professionals are susceptible to becoming so convergently goal oriented (fixing bulbs) and insufficiently divergent (flying the plane) that the business can go into an imperceptible descent. Unlucky. Its not that we don’t need a strong convergence of goal-orientation to be fixing bulbs. The question is, do you have equally strong divergence of strategy and execution to be flying the plane? In many businesses the answer is “no”. Unlucky? No, bad preparation.

In his 2007 book, The Future of Management, Gary Hamel puts it this way:

“In a discontinuous world, what matters most in not a company’s competitive advantage at a single point in time, but its evolutionary advantage over time – the quest to build a company that can outrun the future – tomorrow’s profitability depends upon today’s evolvability – an adaptability advantage. Evolution occasionally equips organisms with apparently superfluous, reproductively neutral features that turn out, quite by accident, to be highly useful when conditions change. This is known as pre-adaptation. To be resilient, a company needs a lot of lightly scripted pre-adaptation – policies that give associates the chance to pre-adapt rather than react. Too much of what gets done in most companies is in response to some already pressing issue; there’s no slack, no space for improvisation, and no way to defend projects that aren’t immediately useful. That’s why so many companies end up on the wrong side of the change curve. Your job as a management innovator is to make sure that the management systems in your company encourage strategic pre-adaptation.”

Are you investing hard work and toil in your strategic pre-adaptation, evolvability and adaptability advantage to outrun the future? Or are you running to catch up, reacting on the wrong side of the change curve? Unlucky? No, bad pre-adaptation. The key is to master the mindsets and behaviors of organizational agility and to develop an understanding of how to get on and stay on the path of mastery.

In his 1992 book, Mastery, George Leonard puts it this way:

“Mastery: the mysterious process during which what is at first difficult becomes progressively easier and more pleasurable through practice. If you are planning to embark on a master’s journey, you might find yourself bucking current trends – our hyped-up consumerist society is engaged, in fact, in an all-out war on mastery. We see this most plainly in our value system – the prevailing bottom-line mentality that puts quick, easy results ahead of long-term dedication to the journey itself. More than ever, the quick-fix, fast-temporary-relief, bottom-line mentality doesn’t work in the long run, and is eventually destructive. If there is any sure route to success and fulfillment, it is to be found in the long-term, essentially goalless process of mastery – the path of patient, dedicated effort without attachment to immediate results. The master of any game is generally a master of practice. To practice regularly, even when you seem to be getting nowhere, might at first seem onerous. But the day eventually comes when practicing becomes a treasured part of your life. Masters are dedicated to the small incremental step and to challenging previous limits, to take risks for the sake of higher performance, exploring the edges of the envelope. The trick here is to not only to test the edges of the envelope, but also to walk a fine line between end-less, goalless practice and those alluring goals that appear along the way. The key is not either/or, it’s both/and”.

Are you investing hard work and toil in the mastery of your organizational agility, mastering the challenge of the “and” of end-less goalless practice “and” those alluring goals which appear along the way? Or are you losing the war on mastery of your organizational agility, defaulting to the “or” proposition of those alluring quick-fix, fast-temporary-relief, bottom-line goals, which doesn’t work in the long run and is eventually destructive? Unlucky? No, bad practice.

That’s what our work is about. Helping you with the “preparation”, “pre-adaptation” and “practice” of organizational agility so you can be luckier as an organization. Travel well.