“What we practice at the small scale sets the pattern for the whole system”

adrienne maree brown, emergent strategy / fractals

The Beauty of Little Things

What strikes me during check-ins and conversations these days is the rift between the big picture and the little things. There’s a painful gap: we sense that the world urgently demands our attention, yet we are absorbed with the small stuff on our plate. The space in-between lies in darkness. As the thundering skies make our little stuff seem meaningless, we are not withdrawn from the global, rather guiltily torn and unable to fully be present on either side.

But smallness isn’t necessarily the problem: Agency dwells in concrete steps. Change begins with tiny cracks in the system. Bayo Akomolafe – as always – has fine words on this: “The world emerges with minor gestures written in the minor key. It’s not the categorical – it is the infinitesimally small, it’s the fugitive that makes for change”.

Thus, in the best case, the small things cast their shadow on the big picture – not the other way round. Fractal responsibility doesn’t require a massive lever; we just have to consciously align our little things and give meaning to the new patterns within them. While this is a reflection on personal navigation, it may also be fruitful in regards to organisational strategy.

A Moving Mosaic

Strategy has an exciting ring to it: A grand expedition, a genius plot, a secret door to new levels of success. Surprisingly, the closer you get to strategy the more mundane it feels. Once it is concrete and actionable it often is just a stone throw away from a high level To-Do-List. Why is that?

Nothing big ever changes if the daily practices and routines close to the ground don’t change. The little things have a life of their own that wants to be understood and respected. The art of strategy development is about envisioning how these little things can create a new mosaic, emerge into a more desirable big picture, whose exact nature may not even be knowable yet. Consequently, strategy implementation is closer to gardening than to construction: weed out practices that seize to deliver positive impact (exnovate) and nourish emergent practices that grow positive impact in novel ways (innovate). This requires continuous strategizing, not a once-off smart strategy paper.

Facilitated Emergence

If strategy is best understood as a verb, then who is the agent? Are we evolving the system or is the system evolving with us in it? Are we creating a game plan to reach our goals or is strategy – as Henry Mintzberg famously proclaimed – simply “a pattern in a stream of decisions”? Does strategy belong to the world of design or to the world of emergence?

Let’s explore for a moment the possibility, that it is both. The nature of a strategy is best understood in hindsight. It espouses patterns that are influenced yet don’t fully match what has been intentionally designed. Mintzberg’s quote is a reminder that we have the agency to make decisions but that things don’t always play by our book. We are called to start taking emergence seriously and to stop treating it as disturbance to our plans. This understanding of dual agency by the system and the strategist lies at the heart of the idea of Facilitating Emergence.

There are numerous ways we can engage with dual agency. In his current work Dave Snowden describes the concept of Wayshaping as an application of Constructor Theory. Wayshaping involves “altering the landscape itself, its potentials and affordances, so that desired paths emerge naturally (and thereby sustainably) and undesired ones become difficult or impossible“. Wayshaping works by modulating the internal processes that structure and (re)produce the system – the scaffolding of organizational behavior. A more immediate approach is to directly influence and continuously modulate patterns of practice as they emerge.

The Strategy Sandwich

The Promising Patterns approach places emergence in the center of a strategic sandwich:

The upper layer (the top toast) is formed by our tangible target horizon – the strategic intent. Formulating this is clearly a design effort and many fine tools have been developed and shared for this. The intent should describe qualities of the desired intermediate future, not deliver a blueprint of solutions to current problems.

Once we are clear on the intent and the general strategic direction it implies we can start gazing at patterns. A pattern is a non-random order of elements in a system. It doesn’t necessarily espouse harmony or symmetry, the regularities that constitute its order do not even have to be obvious to our naked eye. In pattern gazing we are looking for new and emerging practice clusters that seem to work well in the light of our strategic intent. Promising patterns may show themselves in topics that find special resonance; in efforts that seem to yield above average returns or spark engagement; or maybe in recurring new qualities of partnerships and projects that effect unexpected positive results. We are not looking for isolated events or outliers here, but for the weak signals of a new successful web of practice. Pattern gazing is not a boardroom affair, it is a job for everyone.

The bottom toast of our strategy is where the continuous gardening takes place. In this layer promising patterns are strengthened and multiplied. In turn, patters that prove to be unsuccessful or unfruitful, are dampened by shutting down resource and energy flows to them. The constant resource and attention shift that comes along with this process require new ways of organizing: we have to get comfortable in breathing structures and preliminary order, but it may be worth it: Over time the organizational mosaic comes to take on more and more qualities of the strategic intent.

A special feature of this approach is the weaving of analysis and intervention, of present and future. Most classic strategy processes draw on some remote relative of a SWOT framework. Classically we examine the capacities of the organisation and the dynamics of its environment in two discrete steps. The pattern approach folds them into one: A Promising Pattern hints to an emerging capacity that is well adapted to the organisation’s emerging environment. Promising Patterns are where the present comes face to face with the desired future.

What’s Different?

The described architecture builds on Lechner & Bär’s (2008) “Guided Evolution” approach. In this process strategic initiatives are managed along three phases: Variation (initiating a portfolio of promising initiatives), selection (discerning, which initiatives should be strengthened and which ones should be terminated) and retention (anchoring successful initiatives in organizational routines). The main difference between Guided Evolution and the Promising Patterns approach is the level of intervention: While Guided Evolution is essentially a management concept using probes and experiments (in Dave Snowden’s words: stimulated emergence), Promising Patterns is a facilitation concept, a continuous appreciative inquiry that is harnessing the potential of (naturally) emergent innovation.

This gradual quality also sets Promising Patterns apart from Opportunity Driven Strategy (ODS). While ODS has an equally high regard for emerging constellations in the (internal and external) environment, it is about getting ready to spot and seize relevant opportunities. Such strategic moves involve at least medium level risks and require the willingness for entrepreneurial disruption. In the Promising Patterns approach risks are lower and change has a smaller grain.

So how can Promising Patterns deliver profound change of strategic direction? In contrast to radical change projects and mega-pivots that many corporations and foundations have undergone in the last decade, the strategic shift along Promising Patterns follows a continuous gentle rerouting of practices. Disruptive change efforts may be admired for their boldness but they often cause so much collateral damage, that you can only afford them if you have deep pockets and a long breath to rebuild things from scratch. This is not to say, there is no place for radical change – as long as it is sustainable. Where drastic moves and quick foundational shifts are sought after, approaches of facilitating emergence may not be in place. Where organic transformation is regarded as a continuous process over time, the Promising Patterns approach holds great potential.