Planning to Adapt: Johan Ivari on Strategy, Narrative, and the Set-Based Approach

Planning isn’t about precision—it’s about possibility.

In this episode, Mike Jones is joined by Johan Ivari—Swedish Armed Forces officer, lecturer at the Swedish Defence University, and author of A Set-Based Approach: Searching for the Problem–Solution Eclipse. Together, they explore how strategy and execution can remain viable in a world shaped by unpredictability and complexity.

Johan challenges the illusion of control, unpacks why detailed plans often collapse on contact with reality, and explains how the set-based approach protects adaptability by expanding options, not narrowing them. From mission command and viable systems to cognitive agency and feedback loops, this episode is a rich exploration of thinking, learning, and leading in real time.

🔍 In this episode:

• Why narrative—not metrics—should lead execution
• The danger of detailed plans and false certainty
• How viable systems enable distributed action and coherence
• Why leaders must protect their organisation’s capacity to act
• The value of affordances and ‘coarse’ planning
• Why set-based planning improves decision quality and learning

🎧 Keywords: Set-Based Planning, Viable Systems, Mission Command, Complexity, Strategy Execution, Feedback Loops, Agency, Command and Control, Adaptive Leadership

📘 Read Johan’s paper: A Set-based Approach
📬 Connect with Johan: LinkedIn

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🔗 Full episodes, show notes, and resources: https://www.lbiconsulting.com/strategymeetsreality-podcast

📺 Watch on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/@StrategyMeetsReality
🎧 Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Buzzsprout

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

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction and Leadership and Command
• 3:14 Understanding Command and Control
• 5:22 The Importance of Adaptability in Leadership
• 7:55 Embracing Uncertainty in Decision Making
• 10:25 The Role of Metrics in Strategy
• 13:10 The Set-Based Approach to Planning
• 15:45 Empathy in Strategy Development
• 18:21 The Viability of Systems in Leadership
• 20:53 The Narrative in Leadership and Strategy
• 27:53 Understanding Intent and Adaptability
• 30:23 Set-Based Approach and Its Applications
• 33:50 The Illusion of Control in Planning
• 36:20 Agency and Decision-Making in Organisations
• 39:23 Planning for Multiple Futures
• 42:34 Feedback Loops and Communication
• 45:24 The Importance of Coherence in Leadership
• 49:18 Embracing Uncertainty and Continuous Learning
• 53:06 Outro

Transcript

Johan Ivari (00:00)
in order to try, you need to be able to fail. So instead of fail fast, I say learn fast. But in learning fast, it's a cost of failure. And that needs to be in the calculus. And if you are steering the organizations to find grain, you won't have that wiggle room and there will be no affordances, no emergencies of new capabilities, no new

ideas.

So understanding is also about the meaning, the context. It's not the bullets on a PowerPoint. It's a narrative, it's a story. And that's, I think we lost that during the last hundred years

Mike Jones (01:04)
Welcome back to Strategy Meets Reality podcast. I'm delighted today to be joined by Johan Navari. It's a pleasure to have you on. We've communicated quite a bit recently over LinkedIn, but please for our listeners, it'd be great if you could give an introduction for yourself and a bit of context about what you've been up to lately.

Johan Ivari (01:22)
Yeah, I guess a short one is I'm a father of three, married and also an active officer in the Swedish Armed Forces and currently stationed at the Swedish Defense University where I teach the subject of leadership, command and control and organizing as well as planning and I have both civilian students as well as military higher staff students. So that's pretty much what's Occupy my week.

Mike Jones (01:47)
Mmm.

Awesome. I really like that point. I'm going to pick up on the point you mentioned about command and control because I don't know if it's the same, but in England, when you go into a lot of organizations, command and control was seen as the devil. Everyone says that, you know, oh, you know, they're talking about a bad leader. got all these, they're really command and control. But I know from me being ex-military in your perspective, command and control isn't a bad thing.

Johan Ivari (02:15)
No, I think you like Stafford Beer and all those other cybernetics and it depends on where you terminate the feedback signal. So come on, that's a hypothesis. What do you think is going on? What kind of direction do you want to try out?

Mike Jones (02:25)
Mm.

Johan Ivari (02:32)
And the control signal is, okay, was your hypothesis good or bad or was it misunderstood throughout the way, throughout the operation or not? So it's not about controlling your employees or your subordinates, it's controlling yourself and your system of strategy if you will. So that's kind of leadership to adapt and make you within the team, within the organization, actors and whole.

Mike Jones (02:56)
Yes.

Johan Ivari (02:56)
So

it's all depending on where you terminate the feedback signal. But if you terminate that on your subordinates then it's bad. But that's now how do we do it in the Army.

Mike Jones (03:03)
Yes, yeah,

No, and I think it's the different interpretations of what we mean by command and control and exactly what you're doing there. I always try and explain it's a dialogue. I'm giving my clear intent about what I want and I'm going to give you the space to assimilate that and come back to me and make sure that we're aligned. But often I feel a bit of frustration when all I hear on, especially online on LinkedIn, ⁓ Colin.

command and control bad, ⁓ all evil.

Johan Ivari (03:30)
Yeah.

And it's a hard struggle because I think you need to, with every terminology or label, you need to try to understand it in the context where you need to share. Like now we're in this context of your podcast. And since you're well versed in the Stafford-Baird's viable system model, there is the system two. And the system two is that's kind of...

Mike Jones (03:43)
Mm.

Johan Ivari (03:54)
between the team self-regulating mechanism and listening to you and you explained that I realized mission command, that's if you have mission command, you will have the system two, but if you have too much control, the system two will evaporate and be nothing. So that's what's the connection I made today when I listened to you explaining viable system model.

Mike Jones (04:05)
Yes.

Johan Ivari (04:16)
new thought and that's why I hope with this chat that we have that we will help each other to understand the world better and hopefully make it interesting for listeners as well.

Mike Jones (04:26)
Yes. And I, that's why I love this podcast because we get to have interesting conversations and throw about ideas and see where it takes us. And that's a really interesting thing about control and you know, enabling teams to have decision rights, to be able to act. You know, I, I recently just wrote something about, you know, for execution it's an, it's an imperative to protect.

the organization's ability to act.

so that, you know, they can deal with the variety that's presented with them. They can absorb that complexity and adapt to situation changes. But all too often, like we talk about system two there, there's too much control and it's too much bureaucracy. Yeah.

Johan Ivari (04:59)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, I'm with you again. So

I think that goes back to the system too. It needs to be some wiggle room in order to have some agency for you as an employee or as a team or as a part of Sweden's defense, I guess. And if there isn't any wiggle room, it becomes mechanic. And then you become a cog in a wheel. And I think that's the linear very...

mechanistic way that we don't think is suitable to address uncertainty. War and any social relation is an interaction with an uncertain environment. Even with my wife and kids, that's uncertain how they... I start to learn some kind of tricks, but I never really know. So need to be in tune with them in order to understand. And when I'm not, when I'm acting mechanically, that conversation never goes well.

Mike Jones (05:51)
Ha ha ha.

that's right though, you've got to be in tuned, because we can't just go through life and go, well, I'm gonna get up and I'm gonna do this, and I'm do this set thing, because they're independent actors, just as your wife is, just as your children are, just as in organizations we have suppliers, we have...

customers, have various actors, all these are independent and they're not going to align to your rigid process or your defined plan. So we need to have that space to adapt otherwise we'll just fall apart.

Johan Ivari (06:29)
Yeah, and that goes back to the definition of command and control, at least as we two see it. My command is what I'm guessing that my wife intend to do or ask me or my kids intend to do. And then as a response to that, hypothesis I don't know, but I think I know, and then I try it. And if it falls in well ground and she's happy and or they are happy, then I can relax and move further. But if...

and my wife or my kids react strangely, then I need to control myself and simulate what went wrong in order to adapt. So I think that that's also going to Jon Voids' Oude Loop. Everyone's orientation is based on your genetic heritage, your cultural upbringing and your previous experiences. And the next experience is always new.

So it's always something different there and that's why I think it's really good to be open, curious and go with Socrates or it was also Emmanuel from Faulty Towers. They know nothing. I mean that's the right approach to address uncertainty. Those are the only two wise guys in the world I guess that stated it so clearly.

Mike Jones (07:14)
this.

Yeah ⁓

Yes, yeah.

And that's a good point because when you think about leadership, it's always defined that the leader has the answers or in their orthodoxy and that, you know, they must know the answers. You see it in politics. If they get it wrong, how dare you got it wrong? And that's a real difficult thing to wrestle with as a leader of an organization or organization anyway, is that I don't know.

Johan Ivari (07:56)
Yeah, and I have friend and author who wrote a book and he wrote it. The political politician that admits that he or she doesn't know what remain politician long. So I think, but that's not their fault. It's our fault because we want some kind of false security. We want some leaders to hold our hands so we can feel safe. But we only want that as long as...

Mike Jones (08:11)
Yes.

Johan Ivari (08:21)
it ends well. And I think...

If you are aiming for a democratic society, we need transparency. And in transparency, it's also what you know and what you can't know that needs to be clear. So I think that kind of going for certainty, it infantilizes the citizens of countries. So I think we need to mature and embrace uncertainty in a better way and not try to fix everything because that only ends up in a bad way.

Mike Jones (08:33)
Mm.

Yeah, yeah. And it's just this thing, wrestling with certainty all the time. It'd be great if we had it. I'd love to be able to go into organisations and give them the gold-plated solution and go, just play that and it will work. But we can't have it. But there's always this wrestle for it, which makes things really challenging.

Johan Ivari (09:02)
No.

It is. Also now in the university and we need for every course we need to have certain

goals, what they to achieve and what to read and so on. But there is another system, the German word Bildung. And I think the Bildung definition is that's what you have in your body after you have forgotten all you were taught. And that's what I'm striving for. So I tried to develop some Bildung goals. And that's the first one there is to acknowledge complexity, acknowledge that I know nothing. But the second one is to maintain composure.

Mike Jones (09:29)
You

Johan Ivari (09:37)
There is no people that know this because it's complex. So I have every opportunity that any other has to deal with it, to enact with it, to learn from it. And the third one is to, I'm not alone going back to your leadership with a big crystal ball looking into the future. That's not the case. In any...

Mike Jones (09:46)
Mm-hmm.

Johan Ivari (09:54)
a certain environment, we want to probe the environment using Dave Snowden's word and using all the sensors in order to triangulate and see what kind of meaning emerges from that. And that's also how you should need to use your employee or your soldiers or whatever environment you're in or your market if you're a market leader or struggling for market shares in order to make sense.

where you can exploit the environment in order to be in tune with the environment, to sell more products or protect your country or educate your students. So embrace uncertainty, maintain compulsion towards uncertainty and strive for a generative culture. And that goes back to Ron Westrom's looking at the Boeing example that ruined a really great culture.

Mike Jones (10:36)
Yeah, yeah, they did. I've often been looking into that bowing around what happened, what started to crumble bowing from inside out.

Johan Ivari (10:50)
Yeah, I think maybe that's not something that we can avoid forever because...

luck comes and go but it's also something with the, at least if you're reading what the Investorum investigated going into, I think it's also a Netflix documentary, going to the being on the stock market and driving for metrics, treating the system like a dead system instead of a living system and then it becomes, then it isn't viable anymore. It becomes a machine, a machine doesn't address uncertainty and then you are in a very shallow water sailing.

Mike Jones (11:09)
Yes.

Yeah, I'm wrestling with something at the moment that I'm writing with. I'm glad you mentioned that. And it's all about my challenge with these measures and metrics, especially like the OKRs and KPIs and the balanced scorecards. And I see that they, I'm not saying they don't have a purpose, but my fear with a lot of them that I've seen is that the metric becomes the goal, not the outcome.

So they become internally focused to try and achieve a metric rather than understanding what's the outcome we're trying to achieve and then thus trying to adapt to achieve that rather than performative metric playing.

Johan Ivari (11:58)
think measurement could be a good thing because you need some kind of feedback control signal for everyone but I think the main struggle is when you're trying to take that overall metric for the company to be viable. That's what everything is about and trying to take that into bits and pieces that's what it implies for you Emma and that's what implies for you Mike and then you

Mike Jones (12:11)
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Johan Ivari (12:22)
It's then you go from the eastern way of looking at wholeness into the western and it becomes static because machine-like and I think that that's the problem so if you keep it on the Last row that we made from profit last year and everyone shares we celebrate together, but but if you divide it into all those pieces then I think the product would become good. It's like a dot stemming. You know me to talk to and was it

Russell Aykhoff, if you take the best engine and the best chairs or the best carburetors and try to merge that into a car, it won't be a good car. Because they are interdependent, so you need to be in harmony and interdependent and to take those goals away, it's like building that car that Deming and Aykhoff was talking about and it won't perform on the racetrack.

Mike Jones (13:00)
Mmm.

No, this is where the challenge comes around. And back to a previous point about giving the organization protecting its ability to act is that we're trying to keep a cohesive whole to make sure that the organization viable. But we're always fighting with that tension that we need to decentralize and give, you know, components the decision rights and resources so that they can act independently, but as a coherent whole.

And that becomes a real tension that's hard to play with as a leader of an organization.

Johan Ivari (13:44)
It is, and maybe you can connect that back to your very great definition of system 2. Because being too precise with the matrix reduces the system 2, so it... it vanish. And when you don't have a system 2, the system is dead, it's not viable anymore. So there's a connection there to be too mechanical and it dies. It's like strategy. As soon as you write it down, maybe strategy is to be viable, to understand...

Mike Jones (14:00)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Johan Ivari (14:08)
In what context are we in? What's the meaning with our value adding to the environment? And that is never the same from one year to another. You need to adapt to be very in tune with the feedback signal. And as soon as you write it down, it becomes dead. And I think that's the problem. taking too much things, write it down and then also going back to Russell Aikov. He stated that looking at...

Mike Jones (14:17)
Yes.

Mm.

Johan Ivari (14:33)
How did they frame it? Looking at previous experience, last year results or whatever, it's like driving a car.

backwards steering in the backwards mirror, driving a car steering in the backwards mirror. You need to be in tune. So I think Russell Aykoff, Edward Stemming and those people had everything. They were on the track at least and I think we forgot about that with all those digital system, Excel spreadsheets and control SAP that we can control every nitty-gritty of everything and then we have the illusion of control. But what we have the control of is a dead system, not a viable living system.

Mike Jones (14:57)
Yeah.

Yeah, and that's the key about that. Yeah, I like that, the dead system. But that brings me a really good point around your set based approach research paper that you sent me. There was a piece in there that jumped out at me and it was called, I think it was around empathize with your adversaries. And I think that's that bit around strategy and it goes.

Johan Ivari (15:27)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (15:34)
a bit about my dislike for aspiration first, i.e. we just come up with this, know, where are going to win or where are we going to play, whatever the thing is. And they get focused on a goal that we're going to be the best about this. But really what we're looking at is, let's understand the context we're in. Let's understand the situation. Let's understand what's happening in the external environment. And you put adversaries, but adversaries, you know,

I just call that any actors in your extended environment. They're not all adversaries, but they're actors in extended environment. And we need to empathize with them. We need to try and see it from their perspective. What are they likely to do? What are they trying to do? What does that mean for us? If we've done this, what would that mean to them and how would they likely respond to that? And it's this dynamic interplay that I think is really important and gets lost in strategy and strategies becomes, like you said, just a thing. It's like...

Johan Ivari (16:14)
No.

Mike Jones (16:22)
we're going to achieve this thing and it has no relation to the environment or the context you're in.

Johan Ivari (16:29)
And I think we tried to tone it down because we were inspired by...

Robert McNamara And he when he was like 83 years or big because he was one of the whiz kids in the 50s I think he was the first person outside the family afforded to He was offered to be the CEO of Ford, but I think then he went to the Pentagon instead or something like that But he thought everything could be

Mike Jones (16:34)
Yes.

Yes.

Johan Ivari (16:55)
measured in metrics like we talked about the other minute and everything with bombing in Japan, strategy bombing how much napalm do they need in exactly what time to give up and so he was maybe the best mathematician, statistician, statistician and mathematician with kids from US and then when he became like 83 years old and met his adversary from Vietnam as well as Japan he realized

We had at the phantomist idea what Vietnam was about. So his number one lesson at 83 years of old age is empathize with your enemy. So that was our inspiration where we took it from and then we changed it slightly to adversary. it should be...

Mike Jones (17:32)
Yes.

Johan Ivari (17:35)
Empathies with whoever you're trying to influence because it's a relationship. It could be together with my kids, with my wife, with you Mike here. And it doesn't matter. I think we, especially in the military branch, we are too focused on what we want to do instead of putting ourself in an adversary's mind or perspective to understand what pain...

Mike Jones (17:50)
Yes.

Johan Ivari (17:55)
are they in? What threat are they viewing? How could we affect, if we don't agree on that threat, how can we show another perspective to stimulate his or her perception in order to recalibrate his or her orientation in order to find this Herbert Simon term, zone of acceptance. So we can live

Mike Jones (18:15)
Yes.

Johan Ivari (18:18)
close enough to fit in this little planet that we have that's called Earth without killing each other. I mean, that must be the end goal. Or at least the meta-stable state that we are aiming for.

Mike Jones (18:26)
Yes.

Yeah, and I agree because I think a lot of strategy gets boiled down to win or lose and it's, there's more to it. Yes, you know, like as an organization, you are trying to keep viable and when we viable would mean that you can continue to self create and exist within the external environment. But that could be partnerships that could be.

know, relationships, there's different way collaboration of doing it. I think the modern orthodoxy of strategy is all about, you know, where am I going to win? What's our winning aspiration? Where it's more about how do we achieve fit? So what's our relationship with all these different people? How do we need to shape the dynamics of these relationships so that we can maintain viability?

Johan Ivari (19:00)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah,

absolutely. Several key terms there and I think we start to agree that it really suit... it was suitable name, viable system model, because viable is such key term for something living adapting. And that goes also to Ross-Espi's requisite variety.

That goes to your term fit. Because whatever is striking your leadership, you need to find that kind of fit. Like in order for the communication or relation to cog in. No, I don't want to talk about cogs, but you understand the metaphor to be in tune, to dance together.

Mike Jones (19:41)
Yes.

Johan Ivari (19:44)
And if you are closed, just aiming for this prisoner's dilemma, what can I win in order to manipulate that person so I have every effort? That's a very short-term side. And then you have James Carr's book. He's wrote about the infinite game. Because when you try the prisoner's dilemma repeatedly, you see that you can pay a lot in order to...

Mike Jones (19:55)
Mm.

Johan Ivari (20:07)
punish someone that isn't fair. So the prisoners dilemma just works the first time around. the more you play it, the more you understand that in order for me to be viable, survive in the system, I need to collaborate. I need to adhere to the other wishes, whatever, out there. So I think that's a much better way of looking at it. We are in an infinite game, and with that regard, how will I play my...

chessboard or whatever, that's also a bad metaphor. But what move will I make now so I don't lock myself in the corner tomorrow? And that's what I think it's important to get for our higher officers that when they learn all those standard operations or procedures, doctrines or whatever on the next level when they're becoming majors or lieutenant colonels.

They need to understand complexity in order to not paint themselves into a corner. They need to understand and then what? When I kill the enemy, when we take that hill and then what? And if you don't think like that, you will never come to this new buzzword, multi-domain operations. Because in multi-domain operations, you see the end goal is to change someone's will. And that will is constituted by

Mike Jones (21:03)
Mmm.

Johan Ivari (21:22)
perception, behaviors and beliefs. And then you need to plan in a bit other way than we're currently doing, at least commonly doing.

Mike Jones (21:30)
Yeah.

And that comes with too, but Voster's, I shall act in a way to increase my options. And I would say to, you know, leaders, we must always think that, we must always act to understand what options does this give us? Does this give us options or does it take us down a rabbit hole that's going to be difficult to get out of? And I think this comes back to looking at things like path dependence, you know, what decisions do we make now?

Johan Ivari (21:37)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (21:55)
and how can they constrain us in the future? A lot of leaders don't think necessarily in the sense of, well, most strategy development I see is not done this way, but they don't take into consideration the context, the external environment, the actors, and they make choices, but with disregarded to understand how they're going to constrain people in the next sort of one, two, three, maybe five years time.

Johan Ivari (21:57)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, and I think that that also goes back to the paper referring to the set-based approach to operational planning. That instead of you had this course selection decision brief usually have three options and the commodity chooses one of them or some combination of those. But what we state, it's totally unnecessary to take away viable.

solutions for a future you don't know what will happen. instead of everything is viable as long as it isn't falsified. So it's like more of a game of hockey or something like that. You're thinking what can the opponent do and the whole thing with planning is going from the product to plan that's quite useless to marinate the team and yourself in the contextual understanding and

thousands of situations in order to hopefully a percentage of that or more could be used in reality, but you don't know which percentage of that. So the...

The aim of all the planning is to expand that space of possibility, your cognitive mental models in order to take up cues from the environment, say, this was what Mike and I talked about. We called it viable and it's what's connected to system two. And in order to have that wiggle room for mission command, you need to adhere to Ross Aspys requisite variety in order to fit your act with the opponent's act and so on.

Mike Jones (23:15)
Yes.

Yeah, yeah. That's key. I've used it in an article and it's a saying in military that the plan is nothing, planning is everything. I think it was Eisenhower that originally said it, didn't he? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Johan Ivari (23:46)
Yeah, the different versions, Malk and Klausowicz as well, and Tyson as you

referred to in another pod I heard.

Mike Jones (23:52)
Yeah. and that's crucial. What you're talking about that is the, it's the planning is the process of planning. It's that, that ability to step back, um, and to, you know, red teaming, looking at different courses and actions, sense making, um, you know, being really exploratory about what's going on, you know, really testing it, push out and go, well, if we do this, what could happen? We're not saying

Johan Ivari (24:14)
⁓

It is, but it's...

Mike Jones (24:19)
Yes, I.

Johan Ivari (24:19)
Also, when you refer to red teaming, that's not bad, but it's also mechanical. Okay, now we will have a red team, you will have the role of a devil's advocate. I think that's also very ritualistic. You need to make it organic. Everyone needs to...

Mike Jones (24:31)
Mmm.

Johan Ivari (24:34)
Because you know, think they Snowden likes to show this radiologist that didn't see the gorilla in when they're looking for metastasis in the lungs and that investigation realized that it's only 70 % of a team or radiologists that see the gorilla and since

Mike Jones (24:46)
yeah.

Johan Ivari (24:54)
It's only a minority of a team that sees those little sudden cues or weak signals. Everyone needs to. You will miss them if you say, today you might will be the devil's advocate or something. That's everyone's role. So soon as you see something that irritates you, doesn't resonate with you, feels like there is something there, you're responsible to take it up and you should have it more organic instead of ritualistic. And I think we're missing out on that because we think if we're following the rituals in the planning doctrine,

Mike Jones (25:00)
Yeah.

Johan Ivari (25:21)
then we'll get everything right and then we think it's like a machine and that's what I'm trying to steer away from with a set-based approach because I think that's the wrong way. You think those clever guys and girls that come up with this very advanced planning tool or doctrine 500 pages that they must have thought of everything but they haven't and if you don't put your effort into understanding why you do a SWOT analysis or why do you do something and you just follow the rest

you won't become the chef that are needed in order to enact with the environment when things doesn't go as you have planned. So it's pretty much flawed.

Mike Jones (25:58)
Yeah, I think it's taking that space because too often they have a strategy and you can probably question if it's a strategy, it sort of thrown over the wall and a team is just told, I need you to do this. There's no context to what they're trying to do. And I suppose that's what forces people to then, as you said earlier, act as it's a dead system.

Johan Ivari (26:16)
Mm. Mm.

Mike Jones (26:24)
look at the metrics, well I've just been told to do this, so I'll make sure that I do this pit, rather than understanding what that part constitutes as a whole. And what is the assumptions around why we've chosen to do this?

Johan Ivari (26:38)
Yeah, but there is hope because you see in the LI joint publication, the doctrine number one that everyone in NATO need to adhere to from 2022. They talk about behavior centric approach, narrative led execution. And I think those are two key terms. Narrative led execution is and they say narrative isn't propaganda. Narrative is

Mike Jones (26:55)
Hmm.

Johan Ivari (27:03)
What you say, what you do, and the response from the environment need to cohere, to be consistent. So if what you say and do isn't coherent with the response from the environment, you need to adapt. And that's something that I really could...

Mike Jones (27:12)
Yes.

Johan Ivari (27:14)
I like that and I can work with that because then the system becomes viable again, then the system becomes living again and then it's a dance with the customer, with the competition, with the adversary or with your wife or kids. So there is hope and there is also a whole annex in the AGP one about...

Mike Jones (27:19)
Yeah.

Johan Ivari (27:34)
understanding, 10 pages of understanding and they separate understanding from knowledge. So understanding is also about the meaning, the context. It's not the bullets on a PowerPoint. It's a narrative, it's a story. And that's, I think we lost that during the last hundred years

Mike Jones (27:40)
Mmm.

Johan Ivari (27:53)
because mission command is the commander's intent. That's kind of a storytelling on a very abstract level.

And then when we got computers out in the field and everything, we forgot about that. And order become too voluminous. have Jim Storr that says the headquarters are too big and they write orders that takes too long to write. And there are too voluminous in pages. So they are useless. You need a story, a narrative that you can remember without the computer, without the paper. It's in your body. Like the building I tried to have for my students. When you forgot the order, what's left in you? That's the narrative. And that's why I like the narrative.

Mike Jones (28:05)
Yes.

Mm.

Johan Ivari (28:29)
led execution in AGPU 01.

Mike Jones (28:32)
Yeah,

I remember, comes out, I intent, it used to be rigid that the intent could be no longer than 36 words. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I remember being a young soldier thinking, oh, is this just like, I don't know, I this was a bit of a dogma that was going through and not to actually realise that no, it's 36 words is enough to get enough detail across.

Johan Ivari (28:41)
Okay, that resonates.

Mike Jones (28:57)
but not too much detail that it becomes lost. And it comes to that point is that I want people to understand the intent so that they can adapt, not be a slave to volumes of ⁓ work. And if something happens, they then got to go back to the volumes of PowerPoint decks or.

orders that have been given to think about, well, what does it say for this? I don't want it to become dogma. I want it to go, well, I understand what they want, so I can sense and use that cognitive capacity to sense-make rather than to second-guess.

Johan Ivari (29:31)
Yeah, and I think the set-based approach is inspired by Toyota's set-based congruent engineering. think it's labeled. And Toyota, are dealing with the customer, but the set-based approach in Toyota is delivering the next version of Toyota Corolla, for example.

Mike Jones (29:39)
Mmm.

Johan Ivari (29:49)
Instead of planning everything from start that they have a set of like eight transmissions three engine options 20 exhaustion systems and they start to Try out the different combinations of the set how they harmonize or not harmonize and when they don't not harmonize they fall out of the set and then you see so from like Maybe five or components for five or six cars from the beginning

things gets out from the set because it doesn't harmonize, it doesn't resonate with the other parts of the new Toyota Corolla. So the new Toyota Corolla emerges throughout the...

wiggle dance with all the components and in the end you have it there. A total car in harmony and the exhaustion system that's more about the sound, it sounds but you can't calculate the sound in a cab program. You need to listen to it. So they try different sounds and the chief engineer decides what exhaustion system that sounds like the new Toyota Corolla. And that you see that's a dead system and even a dead system it's very hard to fully control from the start and we trying to affect an opponent in a war

Mike Jones (30:24)
Yeah.

Johan Ivari (30:52)
or a conflict and think that we can do it in a classroom or planning room if it's in London and other headquarters around the globe and think that we know anything about what will happen after the time the plan hits reality.

Mike Jones (31:08)
Yes, that's key. We can sit there and, you like you said, we can have empathy with the adversaries or actors and we can try to see it from their perspective. But we're never really going to understand what the actual response is. We could plan, we could play about with it and do it. But this is where we talk about Conan Ashby theorem. The model in which you regulate the system is only good as the model that you're...

Johan Ivari (31:21)
No.

Mike Jones (31:29)
or your ability to regulate systems only good as the model you're using to regulate the system. And for that to happen, it's going back to Oodaloo, you need to constantly be observing and reorientating, re-sympathizing what's going on and keeping connected, keeping harmony with the external environment and be willing to know you've got it wrong and move on.

Johan Ivari (31:51)
And you need to enact and try the hypothesis. If you frown a second now, then I can, okay, did I say something stupid or why did Mike frown at me? And I can simulate that. Maybe I go back to this, look at this and think of everything I said instead of just going the shortest way, direct to choose it. Did I say something? I thought you were frowning. And then you say, no, I just tried to dampen the sneeze or something. So sometimes we, instead of...

looking for the shortest path to wisdom and that's the same they do in Toyota instead of sitting in a steering board room and speculating so as soon as start to speculate in Toyota they abruptly close the meeting say okay stop your one since it's great that you admit that you don't know but how can you find out

And then we adjourn our meeting a week from now and then you have found out what we're speculating on instead of building assumptions and assumptions and assumptions and then the only thing that you know that four assumptions stacked on each other will never happen because that's unlikely.

Mike Jones (32:51)
Yeah,

yeah. And the thing is you could sit there and make the best plans you want, but as you said, when it meets reality, that could fall apart pretty quickly. And plus, I don't think really have time nowadays to warrant this long, long planning process that we've become a company to. And actually we just need to have good orientation to our tent.

and give clear direction and learn, get good feedback loops, allow our entities, our teams, our functions to start enacting and learn quickly and get them into that learning, that orientation, the reflexivity rather than the traditional assumption. And by the time we finally get out to execute our assumption, everything's changed.

Johan Ivari (33:36)
Yeah, I think when we all learn math back in school, the first or second grade, maybe it's a third grade, soon understand if you're using the calculator, it's irrelevant after the comma sign or how many decimals you use. It's maybe you should use one or zero depending on the wiggle room, the system choose to speak. But when it comes to planning, it's like you forgot about that. So we think we can plan in a more fine grained

Mike Jones (34:03)
Yeah.

Johan Ivari (34:03)
details

than the uncertainty that is there. I think that would be a good skill to understand to be more coarse in our planning because I think we have this illusion of control, illusion of what we see in serenity, what's out there. Otherwise, just take a step back and see, okay.

This is only a hypothesis, even if you call it a strategy, leadership or whatever you call it. Let's try it on this level and from the feedback then we will adapt instead of taking it 10 steps further and realize it didn't work. So we try something new next year.

Mike Jones (34:32)
Yeah, I like that term, course. They have a more course approach to strategy, but in this attempt to get the fine-grained strategy and that control, that's where get strategy teams have started to proliferate, they sort of become project management offices. They just look after the plan and...

Johan Ivari (34:50)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (34:52)
keep to milestones rather than that thing of learning and adapting and getting those feedback is all obsessive about reporting metrics.

Johan Ivari (35:02)
Yeah, and that goes back to this. Again, I really like the system two of... If you're going too fine grain, you kill the system two. If you kill the system two, you have a machine. You don't have a living organization. So that's the skill in order to... That's the fingerspitzing you feel to use Boyd's or the German term. To understand to what level of coarseness or fine granularity is relevant in this context.

Mike Jones (35:14)
No.

Johan Ivari (35:27)
And I think we are quite immature of understanding that and I think we need to put some energy in order to understand that. And if you are too fine-grained, it's like taking a goalkeeper out in an ice hockey game, you know. So you have one more player on the ice, but it's so little tolerance for mistakes there. And that's exactly same...

Mike Jones (35:28)
Yeah.

Yes.

Johan Ivari (35:50)
thing that happens with a company or an army or whatever when you're going in too much detail then you risk that your open goal will be hit from another angle and you can foresee.

Mike Jones (36:01)
Yeah, because you remove all ability for any cognitive capacity of your people because as soon as you go too strict, too fine grained, you're removing all decision rights and any ability to act. agency, yeah.

Johan Ivari (36:18)
Hmm, the agency. And the agency

is taking, in order to take ownership, you need to have agency.

If I'm treated like a cog in a machine, I don't have agency. That's not the place that I want to be. And I will protest silently with obedience or not being as smooth as the higher level think I will be if they take all the agency away from me as a person. And that's also taking the system too away, to killing the agency, to make me into a cog rather than a human being with agency.

Mike Jones (36:49)
Yeah. And I just, I didn't ever see it. I released it on Tuesday talking about agency and that ability to act and, ⁓ that often people, organizations go onto mindset, you know, they've got a belief they can do it, but they can't have, they can't have agency, unless the structure is there to support them to have that agency. I, they've got the right decision rights. They've got the resources.

Johan Ivari (36:58)
Hmm.

Mike Jones (37:14)
They've got the information to make decisions, but often they neglect that and just think, well, I've told you what you do, let's just go. Well, I can't, I don't have any the ability. And that's where system two, coordination is really important because it's going, well, I'm going to give you the agency, be it as an individual or as a team, to do what you need to do. I'm just going to be here as a system two to make sure that

your agency doesn't conflict with this other element of the organisation, the team.

Johan Ivari (37:46)
And the agency is also about the communication. Like in the beginning of my career, you were spending your time in a tent. When the battalion commander gave you an order, you wrote it down. And then he, usually it was he, said, repeat. Then I could repeat it in my own language. then said, question, is there any problem for you? You want to deliver this in the next 24 hours? And I could give some...

Mike Jones (37:49)
Mm.

Yes.

Johan Ivari (38:09)
new perspective that he didn't have. And then we could find each other again in order to dance together, in order to take the uncertainty away. But that's also a bit of disappeared when we introduced the email system and the PowerPoints and Excel spreadsheet. We lost that.

Mike Jones (38:23)
Mmm.

Yes, there's no, that's what I find. You get these, they have meetings and it's like, it's so hard to get teams together because they're just rammed, all these leadership are just rammed with back to back meetings. Often it's looking at that five and brain stuff that I'd probably argue you don't need to be looking at. But they have no, they're no space capacity to have this dialogue.

Johan Ivari (38:43)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (38:49)
for a leader to go, this is what I want.

Johan Ivari (38:50)
And they're not evil people,

but it's a spiral that occupying them. And they are just looking strategy-wise as far as their toes goes in order to keep the higher perspective and see what's coming up next. So now the biggest issue is to, how do we get ammunition? How do we come up to 5 % of GMP in order to be a full member of NATO without US being too angry with us?

Mike Jones (38:54)
Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

you

Johan Ivari (39:15)
But then we need to understand in order to be viable, we need to say, five years from now, is this a viable planning? Those platform that we buy now, with those...

uncertainty that are in those calculations and you know every system becomes much more expensive than you say. But in order to have the decision you fool the system a bit, you take every risk down and make it more clear than it is and it will be a backlash. So I think that would be a strategy in the armed forces. Of course we need to have some kind of level for deterrence but you also need to think in the long term and then what? In the infinite system.

Mike Jones (39:32)
Yes, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Johan Ivari (39:52)
What will

the taxpayer say when 5 % of GMP will be 10 % of GMP without 15 years from now? That we need to plan for because if you doesn't plan for that now, then it will hit us like a wall and then It will be a problem then

Mike Jones (40:08)
Yes.

It comes back to your thing around, you know, marinating and not getting too fixed because remember we're not planning for a future. We're planning for multiple futures. And we saw this mistake with the British army where they restructured the army based on a future, the a future being cyber where

Johan Ivari (40:20)
Exactly.

The commander's future.

Mike Jones (40:33)
Yeah, yeah,

come on. And I was thinking, well, you know, that's not the future. That's an effect. Cyber was an effect amongst all our other effects that we needed to achieve. It wasn't the future. And we're now paying the price a lot of that, trying to recover because of that. didn't look further ahead and think, well, what could it be? What are the possibilities? Could we, with this decision...

Johan Ivari (40:55)
Hmm.

Mike Jones (40:58)
could we be viable under these different possibilities? And obviously that didn't happen, so we paid the large price of recovering.

Johan Ivari (41:06)
Yeah, and viable, guess, that's also to... that also clearing in the agile movement that... in order to address the uncertainty of complexity...

you take your bets down and make shorter interactions in order to test it in the real environment with the customer or something like that. And that's still valid even if they say agile is dead. But agile is about addressing uncertainty in order to address uncertainty, you need to enact with a real environment and then you need to make your bets smaller.

Mike Jones (41:32)
Yes.

Johan Ivari (41:33)
I don't see that and that we need to, even if Edge-L is dead, you need to adhere to that. When you are uncertain, you need to do like they did in Toyota, close the meeting, how can we find out, how can we take the uncertainty down and the risk down as well in order to not have a backlash next year or something like that.

Mike Jones (41:52)
Yeah, yeah. We need to make it.

Johan Ivari (41:52)
And that's also

to be viable, to be that that's viable or agile, it's pretty much the same. To adapt to every changing environment. It could be a new war, hopefully not. It could be a new disease, hopefully not. But it will be something that we didn't see yesterday. And it will demand new capabilities that we don't need to understand or know that we need right now.

And we can't plan that, but we need to marinate ourselves in adaptive thinking. And that's the best way to prepare for the not known future.

Mike Jones (42:26)
Yes, and you get that with, I said about before around that loop between observation and decision needs to be short as possible. If it's long and we see something or the people closest to the environment are seeing something, but they don't have any ability to act due to too much constraints, too much centralization.

Johan Ivari (42:34)
Hmm.

Mike Jones (42:49)
and then they have to wait for permission and that has to go all the way back up. By the time it gets back down, that option is gone more than likely because things would have moved up. And I think that's what we're trying to do to keep viable. You need to be able to enact that quickly.

Johan Ivari (42:53)
Yeah.

It is.

Yeah, and I start to see...

I don't know if it's true or not, but I start to sense that if you have the CXO level or you have generals or something, they have a really short span to give their brief or attend at several meetings every day. And what I see that many of them doesn't take the time.

Mike Jones (43:20)
Mm.

Johan Ivari (43:24)
to be with the audience or the recipients of the information in order to fine tune their message. So I guess the verdict, their own orientation isn't adapting because they think they have a success every time. As soon as they went out the room, you see all those questions and then you see, that information didn't get back to that person. So he or she can't adapt. And I think that's a trend that's also...

Mike Jones (43:38)
Yeah, dude.

Hmm.

Johan Ivari (43:47)
You are overbooked in your calendars so you don't have the control signal back to your own system in order to adapt your orientation in order to cybernetics steer the organization as it need to be steered or run.

Mike Jones (43:59)
Yeah. It's like, ⁓

Klauswitz talks about that, ⁓ friction and he talks about friction around, ⁓ it naturally exists. One of the frictions he's talking, he didn't call it this, but it's essentially, misinformation transfer. It's that because we are individuals in a collective system, will perceive things very differently. So that's why it's really the imperative is on, on the leader to communicate, but then go, like you said earlier,

Johan Ivari (44:03)
Okay. Yeah.

Mike Jones (44:25)
Play that back to me, what did you get from that?

Johan Ivari (44:27)
Exactly, and I think it was not well read into Wittgenstein, but I think he talked about the language game. That's like...

so situated in the context and that also goes back to John Boyd and his cultural traditions and your previous experiences. So you're so marinating in what you have seen so far and when you are trying to communicate with another person, now we seem to be an office both of us and we have John Boyd so we can share overlapping orientation but if you are from different environment or different level in an organization it's quite usual that we

Like Dave Snowden stated once that I really like, the power is in the interpretation. It doesn't matter what strategy I have. It doesn't matter what my order is. It doesn't matter what I think is the best thing because the power is in the interpretation. And that's why it's so important for me as a commander or leader or human being to see what is the response coming out from there. That's the control signal going back to me and okay, I need to phrase it in another way. I didn't see that perspective. I need to adapt. it's like,

Mike Jones (45:09)
Mmm.

Johan Ivari (45:33)
by

cutting that control signal and then leadership is just fire and forget. You've not got any feedback, you're just guessing, shooting out bullets wherever it goes. that's going back to command and control. It's closing the loop in order for you as a leader, as a person, to adapt in order to be more in tune with your environment or your own context on every level.

Mike Jones (45:39)
Yeah.

Yes. And that's the thing, I want that coherence. want to have the confidence that they've interpreted it in the way that it was meant. And I'm not saying I want to restrict them into this is the only way to do it, but be really clear that they've interpreted, know, what's the sort of outcome that I'm after? I don't necessarily care as long as it's within the constraints how they do it. I just...

Johan Ivari (46:18)
But then

we go back to the army tent in the 19th, the battalion, and it was there. The control signal was going back and forth. And we adapted to each other until we become one system, one living system. And then we could decohere and reconvene the next day without diverging too much, maintaining the overall narrative that we were trying to accomplish to some.

Mike Jones (46:21)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Do you know what

I saw recently, this is last week, I was in an organisation and we talked about this coherence and this feedback loop, they got given direction. So instead of going back to the leader and you know, going, ⁓ we've thought about what you've said, this is what we're thinking. And then have that dialogue, they...

replaced it into Copilot and asked AI, and asked AI what it meant. And they believed what came out. I was like, so why are you doing that? Why don't you go and have this dialogue? And we haven't got time.

Johan Ivari (47:10)
Hmm.

Hmm.

No. I think I'm not paid by Dave Snowden, but I like his sense maker because that's...

Mike Jones (47:18)
Yeah. ⁓

Yes.

Johan Ivari (47:26)
you collect the micro narratives and even on the highest level you can zoom in on that little data point and see you can speculate what all this pattern is about and make hypothesis of them but then like the Gamba walk in Japan you can click on the picture and say okay no that's what we were completely wrong or that's like strengthening our hypothesis you're right it seems to be like let's check some more of those micro narratives so I think that's that's a really good way to

not have this game of whispers go being distorted way up in the organization. Because I think if you have five or six level it would be completely rubbish when it's abstracted to the highest level if you don't keep those micro narratives.

Mike Jones (47:57)
Mmm. Yeah.

Yeah, and it comes to...

Yeah, I think it's about the leader. I think it's the leaders protecting his orientation. Because the more that you have this dialogue and you understand and you're coming back, then your mental model of what's actually happening in your organization, how people interpreting your direction is really important for your decision making. So you can clearly make sense of when you're observing and you're seeing that your different entities are acting and they're...

now we're starting to get feedback from the external environment, you can make sense of it more, rather than just relying on is it green or red.

Johan Ivari (48:38)
Yeah, and that's...

Yeah, but that's also I credited Jeff Bezos in Amazon to let the most junior person in the room speak first, then I realized it was from the Pro-Ishan army, so probably you've read about it in Malki. But I think that's also a good way that we also miss because if the most senior man or the commander speaks first, then there is a lot of us that we would like to adhere because that's the hero. We don't want to diverge too much from his or her.

Mike Jones (48:52)
Yeah, yeah.

Johan Ivari (49:08)
statement and that's also to lock them in their own orientation and that's why I think it's so genius to let the most junior person speak first and then you are able to see things anew, have a new perspective, to empathize with this new employee, to see it from his or her perspective and then you're open to unlearn or relearn or reorient and that's also viable in order to be viable as a leader.

Mike Jones (49:32)
Yes. Plus, as we talked about earlier, you're provided agency into that system. I think it's good. Well, I've really enjoyed this conversation.

Johan Ivari (49:36)
Exactly.

Mike Jones (49:43)
What would you like to leave our listeners to think about from this podcast?

Johan Ivari (49:47)
Well, I think we, as we state in the paper set based approach, that we need to move away from the products to everything you put in paper and enjoy the process and see that the process is ongoing. Always ongoing. We have different labels if it's planning, if it's execution, it doesn't matter, it's ongoing. And also our perception are so framed by our, like Boyd said, our

previous experience of our cultural tradition, our genetic heritage. So we need to understand whatever we say or put down to paper, it's more a mirror of ourself than reality. And in order to make that more nuanced, we need to use the whole organization as a...

Mike Jones (50:22)
Mmm.

Johan Ivari (50:28)
human sense making system in order to not fall into a trap, order to span out this room of possibility, in order to train ourselves to adhere to adapt to uncertainty. And that's the ability we really need to train for. And I think that's also what we have seen in Ukraine when they are really inventing out in the environment. And we say, oh, we need to learn how they do it. OK, but they have special, the risk they can take because they are in war. But you also see the speed of innovation

Mike Jones (50:31)
Yes.

Johan Ivari (50:57)
Once you are allowed to enact with an environment with a lot of free degrees system to a big variety of solutions are possible there just because they are in the special situation. So there are things we can learn from there, but we can't copy it because we have regulations. So it will take more time, but at least inspired from that, see what could we do without taking unnecessary risk during peace.

Mike Jones (51:18)
Yes, I think that's that affordance, know, what's afforded to us. I think you bring a really good point around that about how do we get that decentralized sense making that builds structural autonomy and protect the edges of the organization rather than restrict them because we bring everything, say, fine grained, we centralize every decision so they have no ability to act.

Johan Ivari (51:22)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (51:41)
And that's where you see in Ukraine, they have maximum freedom of action to do it because the context they're in.

Johan Ivari (51:46)
And that's,

you mentioned Gibson's affordances there, I think that's a key term also to understand that if you are controlling the system too much, like too fine-grained, we don't have the system, we don't have wiggle room for affordances to emerge. We are like killing the oxygen from the system, so that backs the system too. To have it coarse enough in order to...

Mike Jones (52:02)
Yes.

Johan Ivari (52:10)
affordances to emerge, ideas to be tried out, something that they should be allowed to learn. And in order to learn, you need to be able to try. And in order to try, you need to be able to fail. So instead of fail fast, I say learn fast. But in learning fast, it's a cost of failure. And that needs to be in the calculus. And if you are steering the organizations to find grain, you won't have that wiggle room and there will be no affordances, no emergencies of new capabilities, no new

ideas.

They will be cauxing machine and that's not viable in the long run.

Mike Jones (52:40)
Yes.

No, and if do that, your strategy will never meet reality. Or never survive contact with reality anyway. ⁓

Johan Ivari (52:46)
No. No, it will

be a closed loop within your head.

Mike Jones (52:52)
Yes,

thank you very much, Johanna. It's been fantastic. I've loved it. And for the listeners out there, you've enjoyed this episode as much as I've had the pleasure of hosting it, please share, like, subscribe to everyone. And I'll link Johanna's paper set based approach to the show notes so you can have a read of that. I very much recommend it. It's really good.

Johan Ivari (53:04)
I sure did.

Mike Jones (53:20)
and I'll also put the details for Johan so you can connect if you so wish to. But it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you again and I look forward to speaking to you again shortly. Yeah, thank you.

Johan Ivari (53:30)
Thanks, Mike. Pleasure on my side.