Contemporary strategy

We founded Rival Strategy in 2016 to address a question: what is contemporary strategy?

Strategy is the pursuit of a position of advantage. But what this means in practice is changing. How people are thinking about the future and the possibilities it holds, the types of organisation we can imagine and put into practice, and how the technologies that underlie our actions are designed, built and used; all of these are shifting.

We need an understanding of strategy that is up to date with these changing ideas. Parts of this may come from traditional routes—places where strategy is constantly being considered, such as deep in the hearts of governments and corporations. But equally, and more likely, they may come from less familiar areas.

This is why we set up Rival: to create an environment where new thinking on strategy can take shape, by being able to engage a very diverse group of people, in very different situations. So far, we’ve done this by working with organisations as diverse as asset management firms, global manufacturing companies, international governance bodies, galleries, universities and some less easily categorised ventures, to list just a few.

Materials of contemporary strategy

Over the last year, we’ve developed a point of view on strategies that sees them as designed objects — in the sense that they’re not just the sum of the words that are in them, but deliberately designed, with their form following their function.

For us, these ‘designed’ strategies are made up of three different materials, each of which has different properties. These are presence, structure and leverage.

• Presence. This means how a strategy is communicated to people; how it is described in language, articulated in diagrams, displayed on a screen, and so on. More deeply, considering the presence of a strategy involves designing ways to access it over time: who knows about the strategy, how, and when; and how the effectiveness of the strategy is based on its exposure to different potential audiences at a given time.
• Structure. Strategies are designed to unfold over time and across space. The structure of a strategy links a course of action to an expected outcome — it brings aims and goals together with the means to reach them. This means the structure of a strategy is not just a series of planned events, it is what makes a given activity make sense (or sometimes not make sense), according to a bigger picture that includes external factors and unforeseen effects.
• Leverage: How a strategy procures and uses the resources within the environment. This can mean, for example, how an organisation understands its internal capabilities, putting to use the things it owns, or developing new ones. But it can also mean how a strategy relates to external affordances, by leveraging processes, events or systems in the outside environment — from shifts in social behaviour, law or politics to the advent of new technologies, which show up in a strategy as material that potentially provides new points of leverage.

Within this framework, certain themes about contemporary strategy are beginning to emerge. We’ll be writing more about this in future, but in the meantime here are just a few that we’ve come across in our recent projects.

Platform design

The idea of the platform has become steadily more popular, given the sky-high profile of businesses like Google and Facebook that put platforms at the centre of their technological, operational and financial models. At the core of platform design is the creation a set of elements that can support a given activity. In practical terms, across all our projects we’ve had to concentrate on finding effective ways to design and communicate these systems, and the stories (i.e., time-based activities) they enable to happen. More generally, platforms represent a move away from linear planning to the construction of models that can develop over time in response to their environment. Here, the clash between platform logic and existing cultures and ways of working — incentives, project structures, political pressures — seem of critical importance to us.

Overachieving organisations

What we call overachieving organisations are those that have consistently exceeded expectations of what they “should” be able to do. This may be because they have found a way to flourish in an overwhelmingly hostile environment, or are working at the very edge of what’s technologically and financially possible. Whatever the reason, they have prospered against the odds.

Of course, their position may involve a large measure of luck. But this isn’t entirely true for organisations able to keep going, because they have found new ways to learn from their environment, and convert this into action.

Across a series of engagements, both commercial and non-, we’ve been looking at how to build these capabilities into organisations so that they can continually learn, evolve, and anticipate what the future can hold. This has meant looking at areas as diverse as how data can be used to build services, to often neglected and unglamourous areas, like how people are trained. Ultimately, this is about creating smarter organisations, rather than just making them better informed.

Strategy and space

A recurrent theme in our projects has been to think about space as a strategic resource. When considering strategy, it’s a natural habit to think more about time (what happens when) than space (where, precisely, things happen). But a strategy has to play out somewhere. Architects and urbanists are acutely aware of the challenge of turning strategy into something that exists in a space, but are often on the receiving end of strategic thinking done elsewhere, which lands on them in the shape of a brief. Digital technology is beginning to shape not just how people use existing spaces, from workplaces to streets, but how they are designed in the first place; it yet works at scales so different from architectural planning cycles, which are comparatively as slow, heavy and ‘local’ as glaciers, that it is becoming more and more important to develop new ideas about how strategy and space relate to each other.

We’ve been looking at this through our ongoing work with the urban think tank Strelka Institute, the architecture school at the Royal College of Art, and organisations positioned to address urban scale challenges — ideas about the city as a service platform, and how the modelling of future scenarios can be driven by new sources of data, being two of them.

The culture of strategy

Lastly, and perhaps unsurprisingly given Rival’s mission, we’ve become more and more aware that how people (ourselves included) think about strategy tends to be very limited by the context that they’re in. There’s surprisingly little communication even between areas where the practice of strategy is something often discussed — a transfer of thinking between business, military or political strategy, for example—let alone less obvious sources of new insight.

In response, we’ve been developing a long-term internal project called Best Laid Plans, a survey of what we call “the strategic imagination” around the world and through history. Best Laid Plans documents striking cases of how people have attempted to enlist resources at their disposal towards a change in their circumstances, from myth and legend to the operations of present-day cartels, from bank heists to sporting comebacks, from shooting Hollywood features to the global eradication of specific diseases, and beyond.

As our body of work continues to develop, we’ll be writing more more on these themes and other evolving thoughts on strategy. For now, though, if you’d like to talk with us more about contemporary strategy, feel free to get in touch with us at partners@rivalstrategy.com.

Marta Ferreira de Sá, Partner and Director of Strategy

Benedict Singleton, Partner and Director of Design