Strategy Meets Reality Podcast

Futures, Fit, and Fragility: Norman Chorn on Strategy, Scenarios, and Organising for Uncertainty

• Mike Jones • Season 1 • Episode 17

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Viability isn’t about predicting the future—it’s about preparing for many.

In this episode of Strategy Meets Reality, Mike Jones is joined by Norman Chorn—strategist, scenario thinker, and author—to challenge conventional planning and explore how leaders can make better strategic decisions under uncertainty.

Norman explains why conventional alignment makes organisations fragile, why strategic adaptability depends on coherence, and how low-regret bets create resilience without wasting effort. From complexity and culture to leadership ego and strategic ambiguity, this is a grounded take on how to think, plan, and act when nothing is certain.

🔍 In this episode:

  • Why efficiency is fragile and redundancy builds resilience
  • Coherence vs alignment—and why it matters for viability
  • Scenario thinking and low-regret bets
  • The role of purpose and culture in strategic adaptability
  • Strategy as continuous learning, not annual ritual
  • Why humility and decentralisation are strategic strengths

📘 Learn more about Norman’s work: https://www.drnormanchorn.com/

🎧 Keywords: Strategy, uncertainty, scenario planning, coherence, resilience, complexity, strategic alignment, futures, leadership, organisational design

📘 Learn more about Norman’s work: [Insert link to Norman’s website or LinkedIn]

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💬 Connect with host Mike Jones → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/

Norman Chorn (00:00)
I always say there's very little future in predicting the future. And it's probably one of the reasons that conventional planning

Mike Jones (00:00)
Yeah.

Norman Chorn (00:09)
has really fallen out of favor

strict alignment actually increases the fragility of the organization. It may be capable of fitting very well. mean, the whole concept of strategic fit, it may be capable of fitting to one set of environmental conditions, but not to adapt as the environment adapts.

Mike Jones (00:13)
you

Norman Chorn (00:26)
wisdom is the ability to change your mind when new evidence presents itself. And I think obviously the challenge here is ego.

Mike Jones (01:03)
Welcome back to Strategy Meets Reality podcast. I'm your host, Mike Jones. And today I'm glad to be joined by Norman Chawn, who we've had loads of interaction with over social media. So it's great to actually have you as a guest, Norman. How are you?

Norman Chorn (01:16)
Thank you.

Pretty good. Thanks, Mike. Nice to see you again.

Mike Jones (01:21)
Good. Just for our listeners, do you mind giving us a bit of a background about yourself and bit of context of what you've been up to lately?

Norman Chorn (01:28)
Sure, yeah, so I have a of a portfolio thing that I do at the moment. I consult, I run a small consulting business. I teach at a number of universities around the place and I like writing and researching. Very similar to you, Mike.

Mike Jones (01:43)
Yeah, yeah. What do you mainly teach at the universities?

Norman Chorn (01:46)
I run the program on strategy and uncertainty and in particular on scenario planning. in fact, I'm heading over to South Africa in a couple of weeks time to run their elective on the MBA program. And in the last while, I've been traveling pretty extensively through Southeast Asia, been working with a of multinationals, I'm sure.

you'll understand are pretty much on a state of continuous alert with this global uncertainty at the moment. So we try to do quite a bit of figuring out there. It's been very interesting.

Mike Jones (02:15)
Yeah.

Yeah,

I think definitely with what's been going on, just like COVID did really brought to the forefront around the need to understand the certainty to, you know, understand the utility of scenario planning, which is, yeah, sorry, wanna, no, yeah, I just saying which would really bring forward actually an interesting question to start with, which is,

Norman Chorn (02:35)
Dunno, yeah, right.

Mike Jones (02:43)
Why do we find it so difficult to understand what the future holds?

Norman Chorn (02:46)
Yeah, you know, I might just start by perhaps commenting on why people are interested in doing it in the first place. ⁓ I think one of the things that we've been countering has been this concern for resilience in organizations, know, the ability to kind of survive and continue thriving. And, you know, in a lot of ways, that really means you've got to be prepared for a range of different conditions and be prepared to

Mike Jones (02:54)
Yeah.

Norman Chorn (03:14)
operate effectively in each of them. So in a sense then, understanding the future has been quite important because you wanna know what's gonna happen next year or indeed even next month sometimes. And so there's been this enormous interest in knowing what is it we need to prepare ourselves for in order to remain viable ⁓ and therefore resilient in our marketplace. I guess the challenge has been like that

Mike Jones (03:32)
Mm.

Norman Chorn (03:42)
People find it very difficult to get a grip on the future. mean, and there are a number of reasons for it. One of them is that the future doesn't actually exist at any point in time. It's not as if it's kind of waiting for you at the end of the garden gate and you've just got to get there and you encounter it. You know, if you look at our market, our environment, it's really a system. And like any system, it's made up of a series of

of elements and there many elements in it and each one of these elements really operates kind of independently. You've got customers, you've got regulators, you've got competitors, you've got technology, you've even got consultants who generally come in and confuse things as well. But in essence, yeah, and that happens a lot. But in essence, what happens like any system, it's subject to entropy to break down. So these elements and the connections between them

Mike Jones (04:20)
Ha ha ha.

Yeah, yeah.

Norman Chorn (04:33)
breakdown and what happens is that the rearranging of the elements on an ongoing basis causes the future or the current present to change. So really, rather than standing at a point in time staring at your garden gate and wondering when I get to that gate I'll be in the future, you've actually got multiple garden gates you face. Because in a sense, there is no one future, there are just multiple futures.

Mike Jones (04:55)
Hmm.

Norman Chorn (04:59)
And that, of course, introduces the whole question about why scenario planning, which is really about, it's actually more accurately termed scenario thinking, which is why I want us to start thinking about multiple futures and stop trying to predict them. I always say there's very little future in predicting the future. And it's probably one of the reasons that conventional planning

Mike Jones (05:15)
Yeah.

Norman Chorn (05:24)
has really fallen out of favor

because by the time you've dotted the T's and sorry, dotted the I's and crossed the T's and the ink is dry and you go out into the field, I think it was you that said no marketing plan or no strategy plan ever survives the meeting with its first customer. Things have changed. So just being prepared for one future doesn't really make lot of sense.

Mike Jones (05:41)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and I think that's right. we look at, we have a term saying, the plan is nothing, planning is everything. Yeah.

Norman Chorn (05:54)
Yeah, I

mean, it's the conversation that you're having all the time. And not only is it everything, but it's ever present because in a sense, you've got to be doing the planning or the learning all the time. And that's really what modern planning is in today's context. It's about continuously probing, trying something, getting feedback, learning from it, adapting, adjusting, and going around in this continuous circle.

Mike Jones (05:57)
Hmm.

Norman Chorn (06:20)
Gone are the days of the annual kind of planning meeting or strategy meeting. know, the trick used to be, this is a really important strategy meeting. So we're going to go to some exotic location and we're going to lock ourselves away for three days and keep everything secretive and then come out with, you know, the answer like, like Moses coming down from the mountain with the 10 tablets of, you know, the 10 commandments. And we wonder why it doesn't work. So, you know, we, we've really had to rethink.

Mike Jones (06:45)
Yeah, yeah.

Norman Chorn (06:49)
our approach to how we really set strategy and live strategy in these conditions of uncertainty.

Mike Jones (06:57)
Yeah, and you still see it the classic offsite or the annual cadence of strategy developments, very still prevailing in organizations, which gets frustrating as you try to get leaders to orientate more quickly. know, how do you increase this cadence? How do you make it a learning activity? They're quite they're doing a lot.

But often I find, especially when you think about scenario thinking, is that it gets confused and these will look to the future and think, you know, the future's doing this and, that's great. And they sort of just stare at it and wait for it to come rather. How do we then take that insight, that learning, that discussion and bring it to present to think about, okay, now we've sort of understood the multiple futures that we're faced with.

how do we use that now today so that we can start making decisions and actions in the present?

Norman Chorn (07:55)
Well, I guess the one thing that's always helpful to do is to be very clear about how you define your business and the business ecosystem in which you're operating. And to be very careful to understand the key uncertainties that you face in your environment. So the uncertainties might be around new technology, it might be about a change in regulatory.

features, it might be about new competitors entering the market, or it may actually be that your customer base is beginning to change. Now, I sort of liken uncertainties in your business environment almost like cracks in the surface of the land, if you like. I mean, sometimes when you see a crack in the earth's layer, what it really suggests is that there's some fundamental flaw in the underlying system.

Mike Jones (08:35)
Hmm.

Norman Chorn (08:46)
And so in a way, what we often do is we often say that you should allow uncertainty to be your friend. And it's your friend for a number of reasons. One is that it really does signal the potential pathways into the future. So if you understand the uncertainties that you have at the moment, things that you wish you knew more about so you could plan more clearly for the future, if you use those uncertainties and use them to really

explore how they might lead to alternative futures. What that does then is gives you some understanding of what the probable futures might be. And you can build models from this. In fact, one of the methods we use in scenario thinking is to isolate your, what I call, critical uncertainties, which are the few uncertainties that have the biggest impact, that would have the biggest impact on changing the game.

Mike Jones (09:37)
Yeah.

Norman Chorn (09:39)
and also which you are most uncertain about. Now that in itself is kind of interesting because people are saying, well, you know, we're very certain about this thing and therefore we should act on it. Well, yes, you should, but that's not the subject of scenario thinking. Scenario thinking is the stuff you're uncertain about and that will have a big impact if they do eventuate. And those are the things you really need to take account of because they will shape the future. And once you've done that, you get a picture of these alternative futures.

Mike Jones (10:04)
Yeah.

Norman Chorn (10:08)
And the question then that we often find very interesting is we ask people not what is your strategy in that environment going to be in that probable future? There's several. Not what your strategy will be, but rather what capabilities will you need in order to survive? Because you can't predict the strategy you're going to require until you've actually engaged with that environment. So you ask yourself, what are the capabilities I'll need to really do well?

under that set of conditions. And that's ultimately what resilience is about, having the right capabilities. And if you've got a range of very divergent futures, alternative futures, you then backcast from the futures into the present. Now, the question is, you know, when you look at the capabilities across those different futures, how do you know which ones to really start preparing with and start building? And what we find is that

When we backcast from these futures to the present and compare these different capabilities from these different futures, we find there's a series of commonalities. And we call those common capabilities, low regret bets. In other words, these are things you can really invest in with a lower risk. And so these become, if you like, a sort of a no brainer, well, let's start preparing these common capabilities.

Mike Jones (11:12)
Mm.

Norman Chorn (11:29)
because we know we're to require them under a range of different conditions. And as we kind of make our way towards these garden gates, it becomes clearer and clearer which one is beginning to materialize. And so if we continue the orientate and decide and act sort of loop, the loop all the time, it really means we begin fine tuning our approach as we get closer. And in a funny kind of way, it's kind of how they land on the moon, you know, they.

Mike Jones (11:51)
Yeah, yeah.

Norman Chorn (11:56)
start off saying, well, we think the moon's sort of there. Let's head off in that direction. And as long as you're heading in vaguely the right direction, what you're doing is you're orientating continuously as you get closer and closer and closer, fine-tuning the capabilities you'll require, and then actually finding that that is a way of really being prepared for that future that you've projected or you're looking towards being prepared for.

Mike Jones (12:17)
Yeah,

And I like that. And it really gets to the heart of how people prepare because even though under those multiple futures, the stuff that you currently have that probably will be consistent over those. And I think by looking at those, you know, these elements aren't changing. These are the common capabilities that we're going to need that we don't currently have. So we start investing those these ones are not unsure about, but we could start to make

what do we need to see to enable us to figure out which path is starting to go down. And you can start getting your team a bit more focused and orientated around those.

Norman Chorn (12:54)
Yeah, I think that's right. And the interesting thing is that what I've observed is that those organizations who do do some form of scenario plan will then choose what they see as the most likely plan or the most likely future. And I'm a little uncomfortable with that approach because in a sense, if you're going to actually make a bet on what the future is going to be or which of those futures you're going to kind of prepare for, then you may as well have

Mike Jones (13:09)
Mm.

Norman Chorn (13:21)
done that right in the beginning and don't worry about scenario planning at all. So I like to keep all those options open. And really one of the key things in strategy, of course, in uncertainty is don't take too many actions that limit your future options. So you try to keep your options open and common capabilities is a way of being able to do that. Now, I think often you find that this might mean there's a slight additional expense.

Mike Jones (13:23)
You

Norman Chorn (13:48)
in the way you allocate your resources, because maybe you're spreading your allocation a little more broadly than you'd otherwise like to. And sometimes you need to carry that additional expense. It's a kind of an anti-fragile measure, if you will. And there's always a cost in some kind of redundancy in any system. But I liken the additional cost of the small redundancy as being

Mike Jones (14:00)
Yeah.

Norman Chorn (14:12)
similar to business continuity insurance that you would have to pay anyway. So you start with your common capabilities and you can begin paring them down as the picture begins to emerge and gets clearer and clearer. And sure, some of them might be redundant, some of them may not be needed any longer, but some of them may well need to be enhanced and built quite considerably to enable you to be effective in that situation.

Mike Jones (14:32)
Yeah.

And it's a lot easier or quicker to stop something rather than to try and rebuild something from scratch. Especially, and I like when you talk about the anti-fragile and that bit of redundancy. I get really frustrated with this common orthodoxy about efficiency, where it's like, we must be efficient. And I always say, what question are you asking? You're asking,

how do we be more efficient or how do we make efficiencies? And often it's the latter. They're trying to make efficiencies so they cut everything. And then they limit their options, like you said, you know, must always act in a way to increase your options. And they limit their options and they limit their ability to have a bit of agility under these different scenarios as they start to come along. It's a frustration of mine.

Norman Chorn (15:12)
Yes.

Yeah,

it's really quite interesting because one of the things I'll challenge the leadership team with is the statement that an efficient organization is very fragile. And that kind of shocks them a little. And we sort of go through that, know, an efficient system is one where the elements are very tightly coupled and there is no redundancy in any of them. And one of the things that cause it, well, there are two factors that cause the fragility there. The first is that

Mike Jones (15:36)
Mmm.

Norman Chorn (15:51)
Because of the tight coupling, the ability to pivot or to change direction is in fact quite limited. The organization is really good at doing one thing and one thing really well. And if it encounters unanticipated environmental conditions, it can't shift. The other kind of weakness of a tightly coupled efficient system is that a problem in one area will actually cause the entire system to fail.

So we talk about being very wary of over leveraging your key assets and having more than one pathway towards certain organizational outcomes. For example, if you find that, this is a real example that we encountered, if you find that the technical skills and the latest technical skills with the latest technology is very important.

for your people, then maybe you need to more than one training department. And if you disperse geographically like we are in Australia, this particular engineering business had a training center in Perth in Western Australia and one in Melbourne on the East Coast. And obviously, there was a duplication in certain cases where they could have saved by centralizing and standardizing everything on a shared service.

you know, the advantages were obvious because oftentimes the one center would come up with something quite unique and the discussion and the conversation between the two training centers often produced better solutions as a result of the diversity. Plus, of course, if one center fell over for whatever reason, there was always the other center. So I think this kind of redundancy that you need to carry is really a very powerful, but only in critical areas, of course. I mean, that's why your

Mike Jones (17:20)
Yeah.

Norman Chorn (17:33)
motor vehicle you drive has got more than one braking system and the second braking system is probably never used but it's always there in the event of an emergency.

Mike Jones (17:36)
Yeah

Yeah, I like that analogy. And this comes at heart when we talk about alignment versus coherence. And people may think about it's semantics, know, they're the same word, but they're not because we're talking about coherence, exactly what you're saying allows, you know, self-organizing systems, they're not necessarily aligned, but they are working towards a viable system. But there's a bit of...

Norman Chorn (17:46)
Yes.

Mike Jones (18:04)
they're decentralized and they have ability to absorb adaption quite quickly where alignment often find it means that they want everything the same. They want the core capabilities throughout the organization and which often leads to a lot of centralization.

Norman Chorn (18:15)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I have a very personal story on this one. In fact, my doctoral research was really, which gave rise to a book, was really about the alignment of strategy, culture, leadership, and the market. And in fact, in my work on strategic alignment, I argued very strongly about strong high levels of alignment between the elements.

And what I've increasingly begun to understand over the last 10, 15 years is that the strict alignment actually increases the fragility of the organization. It may be capable of fitting very well. mean, the whole concept of strategic fit, it may be capable of fitting to one set of environmental conditions, but not to adapt as the environment adapts.

Mike Jones (18:52)
you

Norman Chorn (19:05)
And of course, if the organization faces multiple...

parts of its environment as well, those parts can't adapt quite as freely. So I think the argument about coherence and high levels of adaptation close to the customer or close to the interface with the environment is particularly important. So yeah, that's a massive insight that I've actually had in the last sort of 10 years. And so people still want to buy my book and always have to sort of issue a cautionary tale about strategic alignment can actually go wrong.

Mike Jones (19:23)
Yeah, yeah.

Norman Chorn (19:35)
as well.

Mike Jones (19:35)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think that's the thing, this thinking moves on quite quick. You know, I look at even in the short time since I left the army, my thinking's adapted, you know, immensely since I started. But it's that, I think it's that willingness of leaders and us consultants and, you know, researchers to constantly be open, have humility for new ideas and to

to reorientate quite quickly, which this is probably my bugbear with strategy. It hasn't really moved on. We're still using 1980s typologies and I don't really think that it's really lasting. There's a lot of useful stuff. I'm not saying that it's all rubbish, of course it's not, but there's a lot of useful stuff there, but I don't think many people are really open to an alternative conversation about how we develop and execute strategy.

Norman Chorn (20:31)
Yeah, what do they say, Mike? That every general...

fights like the last battle he was in, of how ever long ago it might have been. Yeah, it's quite interesting. And I mean, there's a lot of interesting things around that in the work that von Clausewitz did when he observed Napoleon as well. But I think, you your comment about sort of leadership and the almost static view that they develop, I mean, you know, I'm a great fan of Adam Grant.

Mike Jones (20:36)
Yeah, yeah.

Norman Chorn (20:59)
⁓ and his view that wisdom is the ability to change your mind when new evidence presents itself. And I think obviously the challenge here is ego.

Mike Jones (21:00)
Yeah.

Norman Chorn (21:09)
And it's quite interesting, you know, in my work in Asia, for example, this concern about face. You know, if I change my mind, I'm seeing as admitting that I've made a mistake or I'm showing weakness.

Mike Jones (21:10)
Hmm.

Norman Chorn (21:23)
And I'm not saying it's confined there, but the thing that really helped me get a grip on this, at least in Asia, was that the face thing was openly spoken about and openly manifested. And so being open and not under the surface, we find, I often find in sort of, and I'm going to call them more mature.

strategy systems like we have in Australia, in the UK, and in the US, for example, in Western society. This thing is embedded deeply in the form of ego. And that's much harder for people to kind of say, well, you know, actually, there's nothing wrong in saying, I don't know the answers. And there's nothing wrong in saying, you know, maybe you've got a better idea than me. And there's nothing wrong in saying, let's get my people involved. And more heads are better than one. And that's

Mike Jones (21:55)
Hmm.

Norman Chorn (22:14)
And surprisingly why I've had a lot more success in these Asian countries actually using scenario thinking. Because we can deal with the face issue because it's actually visible and known and spoken about and we can deal with it. And yes, I have a face problem, people will say, or maybe not in those terms, but you can then deal with it. And I think that I'm starting to learn a lot of lessons about different ways of strategy conversations occurring.

Mike Jones (22:30)
You

Norman Chorn (22:41)
the sort of way in which they can take place at multiple points in the organization and really, you know, the coalescing that takes place in a very dynamic and organic way, which produces the real answers and quickly too often. ⁓

Mike Jones (22:54)
Yeah,

yeah, that's a really good point around, you ego and we see it and I come back to that point about, you know, coalescing with multiple levels. But in I don't know what it's like in Australia, but in British politics, there's a lot of moment around flip flopping and U-turns of decisions and stuff like this.

I think that permeates into organizations to think, I've made the decision, so I must stick to it, where there's a very distinct difference between having no coherence, i.e. you're just going into entropy, you're chaos, because you have no, yeah, you just drifted along, to, yes, it was our assumption looking at what we were faced with that these would be good decisions or good policies to go forward. But as...

Norman Chorn (23:30)
Drip thing along here.

Mike Jones (23:43)
as new information came to us, we've now adapted, we've realised actually there's better options or alternative view or that didn't work. And I think that's a distinction that needs to be made when people are looking at leaders thinking, are they just flip-flopping or is it the fact that they've got humility, they're open to new ideas and new information as it's presented? Yeah, feedback, yeah.

Norman Chorn (24:04)
And feedback as well. Look,

you opened the Pandora's box when you mentioned, when you asked me what it's like in Australia. I think we have a very serious problem in Australia with the same issue. I mean, we have a government at the moment that is ideologically committed to a certain form of energy production, which is by and large renewable, which all the evidence suggests is not necessarily very sustainable if there isn't a very solid

Mike Jones (24:12)
Hahaha

Mm.

Norman Chorn (24:32)
baseload provision of power and we just ideologically refuse to consider nuclear, even though, you know, left leaning governments around the world have embraced it. And, you know, so in thinking about that, I think there's an interesting issue here about the fear of doing a U-turn or the fear of changing directions. And I think we're wedded to what I like to call Cartesian logic, you know, this

Mike Jones (24:42)
Mm.

Yeah, yeah.

Norman Chorn (24:57)
French

philosopher that developed this notion in the 1500s where things are in very much binary, they're either right or wrong. And it's either left or right or one or zero or black or white. And so there's a sense that if you're not doing what you say you were going to do and change, then you're wrong. And Cartesian logic doesn't really have space for, I suppose, what you might call fuzzy logic. And I often use this example. say,

You know, my missus loves and hates me. My children are good and bad. And both those possibilities exist at the same time. And that kind of possibility thinking is really what you need where we see new evidence emerging. say, gee, there's a possibility that this might work rather than what we're doing at the moment. Then we're not sort of blowing our whole binary system apart by changing our view.

Mike Jones (25:27)
Yeah

Yeah.

Norman Chorn (25:49)
you know, in the face of new evidence, we are simply adjusting and adapting in kind of an organic, biological way to changes in conditions. yeah, I mean, I think that I find that getting back to scenarios again, I find that one of the things that is a very strong psychological advantage of using scenarios is it allows people to explore these alternative views of the world, which is so different.

from the world they're living in at the moment in a safe way. They don't actually have to admit, gee, they've been wrong all along. They're just saying, these are possibilities. And then the question is, what would you do if you faced yourself in that possibility? And now you can use your logic and say, well, logically, what are the capabilities I might need in that environment? And then secondly, what are the capabilities I might need in the second or third or fourth environment? And so in a sense, you break down that.

Cartesian binary way of looking at things, but in a gentle way, which doesn't bother the ego too much. ⁓ And so I find that the biggest difficulty I have in getting a scenario project underway is getting the chief executive to agree that a lot of other people, very diverse set of people are going to be, and some of them really close to the customer, are going to be involved in developing the scenarios because they've got

Mike Jones (26:50)
Yeah, yeah.

Norman Chorn (27:11)
you know, alternative views, controversial views of what the future might hold. So yeah, I think you're quite right is that fear of having to do a U-turn or having to be admitting that you were wrong, but it's not about right or wrong. It's...

Mike Jones (27:15)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

No.

And there's, we're often dealing with paradoxes or, you know, duality. And I often laugh with people because even with that same logic, the logic is around good or, you know, it's got to be amazing or not. And they're always looking for this perfect answer. And they go, well, it must be perfect. Where I was trying to get my...

clients I work with to go, no we're not looking for the perfect answer, we're looking for the least worst. To get, yeah, yeah, the least worst. The one that's like, you know, out of all these things we're looking at, these possibilities, there's never going to be a perfect solution that's gonna solve all our problems. I wish then life would be a lot easier, but it's not unfortunately. And there has to be this, what I call strategic ambiguity.

Norman Chorn (27:56)
The optimal,

Yeah,

I mean, and I think that's the price you pay for living in a complex environment. There is no best practice or right or wrong. It's just the one that does kind of seem to cause the least harm. all the stakeholders are equally prepared to kind of have a bit of their preferences kind of avoided kind of thing. it's very interesting.

you know, how you do that. And, you know, the ability for a senior leader to kind of, you know, accept that I think is key to the whole thing. And the senior team to accept that as well is pretty key as well. Yeah.

Mike Jones (28:51)
Yeah,

I think the key to understand that there are going to be things that they dislike and try to not get them so focused on the things that they dislike and look at it more objectively around what are the limitations of this approach, what are the strengths.

And if there's limitations, then what we're doing to make sure that we can coordinate that or minimize its impact on what we're rather than just focusing what I often see, they just focus and go, well, this is bad. So it's just impossible. It's not impossible, but we need to do something to minimize it.

Norman Chorn (29:29)
Yeah, I mean, I think we saw that in the array of solutions that were used during COVID. ⁓ And you can't argue that any of them was right or wrong. They just were the ones that seemed to suit the circumstances in which they were in. And I sort of laugh when people talk about that as being a black swan, because I think we actually knew that an airborne

Mike Jones (29:36)
Mm.

Mm.

Norman Chorn (29:52)
respiratory disease was one of the possibilities. And we just did nothing to prepare for it. We didn't ask ourselves what capability would we need in that set of conditions. So. ⁓

Mike Jones (29:57)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and

it's not like it hadn't happened before.

Norman Chorn (30:07)
No,

mean, SARS was a classic example. I mean, I remember we did an exercise for a multinational hotel group in Southeast Asia. And the question was asked, what happens if there's a war in Southeast Asia? And everyone laughed. They said, nah, that'll never happen. But we began to explore what that might mean for the hotel business that really thrived on.

Mike Jones (30:10)
day.

Norman Chorn (30:30)
people traveling a lot and business people traveling. And it was one of the scenarios, although it was kind of laughed at. But of course, when SARS occurred, they knew this was the exact set of conditions. And there were a lot of very innovative approaches which had already kind of been thinking and working through and they'd built capabilities for. So there's some real examples where that kind of thinking will actually work.

very powerful results.

Mike Jones (30:58)
I think that's the key when we talk about, you I said earlier around the plan is nothing, the planning is everything. It's this opportunity for that thinking, that space to actually be strategic. I really see a lot of strategic leaders, executives, they spend a vast amount of their time on balanced scorecards that tell me what happened last month.

rarely is that thinking around, what if this happens? That really up thinking because the reason why the planning is everything is because, like you said, we were talking about war, but science happened, but there was a lot of commonalities that enabled them to shift rapidly because it's not new thinking. It's just like, that's similar. We can make the constructs in our mind quite easily and adapt, which I love that story. That's great.

Norman Chorn (31:27)
Yeah.

Mm.

Yeah, I mean, that was a real example and it sort of taught me a lot as well about persevering with possibilities. And incidentally, that's one of reasons that we like to keep the senior executives a little at arm's length in the initial stages of constructing these alternative scenarios because most of them struggle with a scenario in which they're

core skills aren't still the dominant ones. In fact, it's like sometimes one of the scenarios is that the airplane that they were flying kind of disappears in the Bermuda Triangle and it's never seen again. And somehow they managed to spurt themselves back into life and they take the organization back. So strong is this desire to project the future as simply a continuation of what

Mike Jones (32:14)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Norman Chorn (32:36)
the past has been. So it's very interesting.

Mike Jones (32:39)
Yeah, yeah.

And I like that because early you mentioned the word viable, keeping the organization viable. And that's a term I like and fit because when we're thinking about multiple futures, it's you've got to be open to the possibility that the you may not be continuing what you've always done, but you're adapting to be viable in the new world, the new context. And I think that's

an interesting frame to get leaders to think about viability. Viability doesn't mean doing exactly the same thing. There'll be lot of commonalities, but it's how do you continually create fit in that external environment.

Norman Chorn (33:15)
Yeah, and if the environment is continuously changing, then part of the solution has to be in letting go and decentralizing, creating multiple nodes of decision making. I often talk about there's the core strategy, which is kind of like the default mode. But then there's many overlays which you need to be prepared.

Mike Jones (33:33)
Mm.

Norman Chorn (33:43)
to as well, know, for as well, where if this happens, well then, you know, we are given greater degrees of freedom to really make a decision that meets the demands of that situation. And that just means, you know, again, coherence becomes important. And it's interesting, one of the kind of lessons I did retain from my work in strategic alignment is that culture isn't the unifying.

Mike Jones (33:53)
Yeah, yeah.

Mm.

Norman Chorn (34:07)
factor in an organization. A lot of leaders will talk to you and say, want to build a strong culture. We want one culture. And even today, we see some of these large multinationals, and they've got a culture charter. And it's kind of a one size fits all. And you will achieve alignment, but you'll never achieve coherence and adaptability in that situation.

Mike Jones (34:09)
Mmm.

Norman Chorn (34:30)
I tell them it's not culture that'll serve as the glue, it's purpose and an understanding that we have a range of things that we'll have to do and any of them may occur at any point in time depending on what the variations in the environment are. So coherence is actually much harder to develop than it is alignment. And it's very interesting, was just reading a very old

piece of work by Clayton Christensen. And he made a comment, said, 100 % is much easier than 95%. And he was referring to a personal habit. He was saying, if I've got a habit, or if I've got a thing that says I've got to go for a five kilometer run every morning, come rain or hail or snow or whatever, it's much easier to stick to that every morning. You just get up, you you have to do that.

Mike Jones (34:57)
yeah.

Norman Chorn (35:18)
But if I kind of say, well, yes, there are exceptions, that's a lot harder because you've got to make many more decisions. So in a sense, alignment is a lazy way. It's kind of like cognitive offloading, you where you say, well, we have to think about this because everyone's going to operate in the same way all the time. But as soon as you need to start looking at situations which vary and change and making decisions, you know, this kind of orientation process, which is quite cognitively taxing.

has to occur and has to occur at more places than one in the organization. So yeah, mean, it's a good argument.

Mike Jones (35:49)
Yeah,

And I've seen that recently with an organization that are very aligned. But the thing is, when things start to change or they need any adaptions, they have to adapt it across the whole organization the way that they structure themselves, rather than if they had designed themselves for coherence or adaptability where they made decentralized elements.

Norman Chorn (36:03)
Aeroid.

Mike Jones (36:12)
that have all the resources and capabilities to be able to achieve the outcomes and fit that they need for their part of the environment. Then when there's an adaption, they need to adapt that part.

Norman Chorn (36:22)
Exactly right. And you know, the funny thing is though that, is that when the organization is tightly aligned and has to go through a massive restructure or realignment in order to cope with new conditions in the market, you get the IKEA effect occurring where they put so much effort into the realignment, into the restructure, they then remain so committed to that, that they become almost impervious to further change. So in a way it just kind of snowballs. It gets worse and worse.

Mike Jones (36:45)
Yeah, yeah. And this

is where think people get confused with like grand strategy and strategy in a sense that, you know, a bit like you've talked a bit earlier, you know, some things don't change. if I'm a, if I'm a rail provider, I provide, you know, trains to move, that's probably not going to change. If I, if I, if I sell biscuits, you know, that's what we've done.

then that's not really going to change. We can have that coherence. What will change is how preferences are supposed with customers. Definitely the biscuit story. And we can adapt things there at the certain local levels. But I think people, when they come to look at transformations or the annual strategic offsite, it's almost as if they're trying to revaluate or rediscover or create a repurpose. That's what you're talking about purpose.

yeah, trying to find a new purpose every year. And I'm thinking, well, you your purpose is to run the infrastructure or your purpose is this. But they came to try and change it every year, which I think causes massive confusion with people.

Norman Chorn (37:40)
Yes, a new pub. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, if you've defined your purpose clearly, then I think you're quite comfortable with a wide array of alternative scenarios because you know that, I mean, your purpose is what ensures the coherence. The adaptability can occur within that coherence as well. And, you know, it's one of the reasons that I've discovered, for example, that again in Asia, the speed

Mike Jones (38:14)
Mm.

Norman Chorn (38:20)
with which organizations have adapted to changes in the technological environment and the effectiveness of the sort of execution of the adaptation and the changes they've made has just been phenomenal because their purpose is so clear, but their understanding of how they need to go about that is very much dependent on what's the evidence we have in front of us at the moment and as that changes, so they change as well.

Mike Jones (38:37)
Mm.

Norman Chorn (38:47)
I think in a way scenario thinking, look, mean, it's not the only way to deal with uncertainty, but I do think that this idea of we face multiple futures sort of continuously reminds you that the environment's changing and that in order for us to remain viable and relevant, we need to make sure that we have the capabilities across a wide array of environments to survive. And that's ultimately what

Mike Jones (38:47)
Yeah, yeah.

Norman Chorn (39:12)
resilience is not just about being stronger. It's actually about being adaptable and learning from the changes you make.

Mike Jones (39:18)
Yeah, and it's like the idea of wind tunneling, you know, over those scenarios. know, how does my organization fare under those? What's falling apart and a bit shaky and what's solid and can work? I think that's a good sort of analogy to think about your organization in those situations. But yeah, I think, again, it has to have that strong coherence because, as we said, if people are constantly flip...

go flip-flopping, bit chaos. And they're not really consistent with the art. It's even down to, you see, when we talked about culture, you'll get people go, we need to do culture, so we've got these new values, they'll throw values out like it's a once-in-a-year activity, and thinking, I've really challenged that.

you know, if you really understood your organization and what you needed to emerge from that organization at the start, again, with purpose, I really struggled to think that your behaviors or values or whatever need to change that much. It should be quite solid. And if they are needed to change, then I'll probably challenge the fact that you haven't got the structure, you've got leaders that are accepting stuff that probably they shouldn't be.

Norman Chorn (40:28)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, the values thing is, I mean, it's bit of a cruel thing, but I mean, if I'm in a forum with different groups of people, different individuals from different organizations, I'll just say to someone, I don't know who you are or what your business is, but I'll tell you what I can probably get at least five out of six of your core values, you know, and I'll say customer centricity, innovation, collaboration, teamwork, and they just, as you say, and,

Mike Jones (40:47)
Yeah

Norman Chorn (40:54)
The reality is those values should really describe the purpose of the organization. And therefore they are the bedrock of the strategy in some ways. It's very interesting because one of the things that we're kind of looking at at the moment is who should really steer or who should have ownership of the strategy process in the organization, not the content, but the process.

Mike Jones (41:00)
Yes.

Hmm.

Norman Chorn (41:17)
And I think there seems to be an argument to be made for the people that look after organization development are probably those that really should be doing that because I think there's a strong understanding of the values or the values that they need and there's a recognition that the strategy really needs to be faithful to that because if they've done the values exercise correctly, which in turn has meant that they've got the purpose correct.

The whole thing should remain coherent as a result of that. So early days, but we're seeing some interesting progress there.

Mike Jones (41:45)
Yeah.

I

think you're right, especially with the OD world, with the fact that they are the ones that will ensure the training of especially new capabilities. You want them tightly coupled with the strategy development because as soon as they start to pull apart and they start to do stuff that's not coherent with it, you're going to have all sorts of wasted opportunities. You see this though, because I look at

Norman Chorn (41:59)
Yeah.

⁓ God, Yeah.

Mike Jones (42:14)
organizations they tell me this is their strategy and I can argue that's strategy or not but then I go okay then so what else you got and they go oh we've got I'll go down the organization they go oh we've got a HR strategy we've got an OD strategy we've got this strategy and I'm like Jesus and I look at them and you know I could be pedantic and say well it's not a strategy because you've got a strategy and that's a plan rather than a strategy but I look at them and think they're they are not aligned this does not

Norman Chorn (42:25)
Yes.

Mike Jones (42:44)
in any way, shape or form, show me how you're enabling this to happen. Actually, a lot of the times they're conflicting.

Norman Chorn (42:51)
Yeah, absolutely. And like you, I bristle when they talk about an HR strategy, a technology strategy, because I'd argue that there's only the business strategy and then the functions which have to support that strategy. And what they're really doing is enabling the strategy and supporting the strategy or making the strategy work, you know, and just on the HR area, know.

Mike Jones (43:12)
Mm.

Norman Chorn (43:16)
My worst is where they'll go out and they'll do a skills audit and find, we have a big shortage in teamwork. We need to build teamwork. And yet, when you look at the organization, it's one that really is based on individual accountability and individual autonomy. It's just nonsensical. So yeah, mean, the coherence there as well. I'll stop using the word alignment as well, because I think you've...

Mike Jones (43:34)
yeah yeah yeah

Ha

Norman Chorn (43:42)
alerted

me and you know it's probably crystallized some of my thinking which has been a bit slower than yours but yeah it's good.

Mike Jones (43:49)
I love having these conversations. And the reason why I started this podcast is to find an alternative perspective so we can have this really challenging discussion. That's why I prefer it more of a discussion. But you're right. And I recently just wrote this week about seeing before aspiration. And what I meant by that was exactly what you said. It's that let's not think like in that

Norman Chorn (43:59)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (44:11)
in that scenario with the HR, they are just going off the typical tropes that they think they need because it sounds nice and it's what loads of people are saying, we need more teamwork, rather than going, actually, what is our organization for and then what do we need then to emerge? And if it's not teamwork, we don't need teamwork, then that's fine. It's fine. And then once you have that really good understanding of

Norman Chorn (44:34)
Yeah, absolutely.

Mike Jones (44:39)
What are your organizations there for? What does it emerge? What's its actual capabilities? Not what you think it is. That's when then aspiration comes really good and futures. Because I would question a lot of times when people are looking at multiple scenarios, the futures, they really actually understand what their organization's capable. And then when you're transferring that into, right, these are the multiple futures. Let's think today, what actions do we need to make? What capabilities do we have?

Norman Chorn (45:04)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (45:06)
I wonder if there's a bit of dissonance there in that process.

Norman Chorn (45:11)
Yeah, I mean, I think it sort of brings to mind, you know, the old Michael Porter comment about trade-offs and trade-offs are your friend, you know, maybe teamwork is not what we need here. Maybe what we need is, what was the term that was used?

Mike Jones (45:20)
Mmm.

Norman Chorn (45:26)
I just can't get my head around but there was a term that I used to use where I described the difference between a cricket team and a rugby team. I said a rugby team, each player, although they have a role, the team has to work in unison. Whereas in cricket, each individual has got a specific role that stands or falls irrespective of what everyone else is doing. The wicket keeper.

Mike Jones (45:41)
Mm.

Norman Chorn (45:51)
the fast bowler, the spinner, the opening bat, and so on. And what did I talk? I said there was teamwork and then there was collaborative individualism. That's right. So there's a big spectrum there. And I think, you know, when we talk about teamwork, you may be destroying the very thing that your organization thrives on.

Mike Jones (46:00)
yes good. Yeah. Yeah

it's the same with teams across the organization because they're saying, you know, this team needs to, after you get called in for working better together type thing. And I'm like, it's not working better together. Like, to be honest, I don't really care if this team has empathy for that team or can see objectively understand what they're going through. What I want to know is

What do they need to coordinate about? How often and by what means? And is that working? Yeah. Like I don't care if they... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But it gets always get stuck on that emotional level that we've got to really have empathy for each other across the piece. now I just, know, the humans they will have, but I don't want them to in detail really understand from their perspective everything that they need to do because they haven't got the cognitive capacity. I just want them to...

Norman Chorn (46:38)
Yeah, yeah, what's the interdependence between those teams?

Mike Jones (47:02)
focus on what they need to do but then the coordination between the two.

Norman Chorn (47:07)
Sometimes there's this view that too much communication or too much sharing can actually be bad as well. And often you find when you've got to tell everybody what you're doing all the time, it just doesn't make sense. Yeah, very good.

Mike Jones (47:14)
Yeah, yeah.

No,

like it. I love these conversations and the opportunity to have you on was fantastic. Just to have a chat really, because we communicate a lot over social media. Yeah, but it's good to just have a conversation. I really enjoyed it, but for our listeners, what would you like to leave our listeners with to think about from this podcast?

Norman Chorn (47:32)
Social media, yeah.

Thanks Mike, yeah, it good.

I think that the kind of core idea here for me has been that we need to accept that there is uncertainty in our environment and they do cause multiple futures to emerge. the kind of need to be aware of what capabilities are required in those multiple futures and to focus on the common ones.

really means that you are ensuring that you've built in adaptability in your organization. And to stop trying to predict the future, but to recognize that the future will emerge as you engage with it. And you need to be continuously learning from your engagement and changing your view about what's the right thing to be done at this point in time. That's pretty much it.

Mike Jones (48:27)
I like it and I think the whole conversation has really got to heart of a really pragmatic view of what futures is and how we as leaders can all and take free that. But thank you very much, Norm. And if you liked the episode, please like share across your network so others can get the value that Norm shared today and help us grow and really challenge.

how we can make strategy meet reality. Again, thank you so much for joining me, Norm. It's great pleasure.

Norman Chorn (48:57)
Thanks Mike, it was great to talk to you again tonight and good luck with all of this. Thank you very much.

Mike Jones (49:02)
Thank you.