Slowing down to navigate fuzzy boundaries

I’ve been thinking about the space between strategy and tactics for a long time. It seemed at one time to be a very sharp and well-defined boundary. Some folks worked on strategy, others executed a collection of tactics to make the strategy happen. Sharp boundaries make for simple academic disciplines, neat organizational boundaries, and simplistic management practices.

The real world doesn’t respect sharp boundaries. Straight lines and sharp edges are human creations; they rarely appear in the natural world. That should have been a clue that we picked up on a lot earlier. Machiavelli understood this. A handful of the smartest thinkers did too.

But the forces that want to simplify are strong. Simple stories fit on PowerPoint slides. Simple models fit into spreadsheets.

The world always insists on complexity, but for the longest time it was possible to look past the complexity. The most interesting threads of the last decades are those that force us to reexamine the belief that there is a knife-sharp edge where I end and you begin. These threads are visible at all level of inspection. One of the hot topics in human biology today is the role of the microbiome; the line between me and not-me is muddied with intestinal bacteria and internal cell materials that are essential to life but are not part of our DNA. At the other extreme, there is the impact of human activity on the global climate. It takes a conscious effort of will to cling to simple explanations.

Simple explanations do support the temporary preservation of the status quo. “It’s complicated” or “it depends” are never popular conversational gambits. But our anxieties are triggered and amplified as reality continues to insist on being messy and complicated.

These anxieties are a clue that we can pay attention to.

I was teaching my class on organizational development this morning. We were looking at a collection of readings that talked about and around the challenges that individual knowledge workers and leaders must struggle with in today’s world. What is the role of emotional intelligence inside organizations? Why is resilience becoming more important even as efforts to pursue efficiency and optimization erode that very resilience? When does skill interfere with learning?
What struck me as I was trying to orchestrate the discussion was that the common thread connecting the diagnoses and the advice across these readings was speed. Speed drove anxiety. Figuring out ways to slow things down enough to make sense of them was that unifying thread.

For all that we celebrate speed, it separates us. We know this in the realm of personal relationships; they strengthen when calm displaces the frenetic. That chance in speed is subjective; to an outside observer that pace might still look rapid. On the inside, the principals have found methods and practices to move in sync. To use a phrase from Donella Meadows, the late thinker on dynamic systems, they have “learned to dance with the system.”