Week 44, 2022—Issue #228
Strategic Wandering: Pathfinding, Planning, and Nonlinearity
Each week I share three ideas to help you build better organizations. This week, those ideas are all about strategy and uncertainty. (This article was originally published in the WorkMatters newsletter on Nov 4, 2022).
I’d like to connect a few dots today. The topic is strategic wandering and tweets are included for support and context.
Let’s dig in.
1. Pathfinding
I wrote about future studies a while back, explaining that there are (at least) four methods for planning ahead. @helenbevan summed it up nicely in the below tweet.
I went on to say that although most organizations spend much of their time in the high agency/high uncertainty realm, we actually don’t have many good tools for exploring emergent “pathways”.
2. Planning
I published an article a couple of weeks later outlining MAQE’s approach to something I called “strategic planning”. It didn’t take long for Niels Pflaeging (whose work I’ve often quoted) to respond:
Ouch. But I should’ve seen that coming. The word “planning” is best associated with environments with low uncertainty; it assumes that we know what the future holds. We don’t, most of the time.
3. Nonlinearity
Around the same time, Readwise.io sent me the following highlight from Invent & Wander in which Jeff Bezos talks about the importance of nonlinear exploration in business:
When we can’t plan we wander. But we can’t wander aimlessly. We need to be strategic about it. That is, we need to continuously explore emergent pathways in search of future growth opportunities.
Words are important.
My use of the word ‘planning’ was ill-advised. But not because there’s anything wrong with planning per se. It’s clearly a useful exercise under the right circumstances.
My word choice was ill-advised because we don’t actually plan… we wander. MAQE does not practice strategic planning as much as we practice strategic wandering.
That’s all for this week.
Until next time: Make it matter.
How can we build better organizations? That’s the question I’ve been trying to answer for the past 10 years. Each week, I share some of what I’ve learned in a weekly newsletter called WorkMatters. Subscription is free. Back-issues are published to Medium after three months.
