Strategy Is What We Do, Not What We Have: Donald MacLean on Emergence, Emotion, and Execution

Most strategy documents belong in a drawer. Real strategy is lived, spoken, and constantly adapted.

In this episode of Strategy Meets Reality, Mike Jones is joined by Professor Donald MacLean—physicist, strategist, and founder of Strategy Story—to unpack what makes strategy real, why we confuse it with policy and vision, and how governance is quietly killing adaptability.

Donald shares why strategy is emotional before it’s intellectual, why leadership is about enabling sensemaking, and why conversation—not control—is the engine of execution.

🔍 In this episode:

• Why real strategy is spoken, not written
• The difference between policy, vision, and strategy
• Why governance often strangles adaptability
• The human side of strategic commitment
• How to re-personalise strategy without dumbing it down
• What Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, and football managers have in common

🎧 Keywords: Emergent Strategy, Governance, Strategic Execution, Complexity, Systems Thinking, Organisational Design, Engagement, Clausewitz, Storytelling, Open Strategy

📬 Connect with Donald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/professordonaldmaclean/

👂 Enjoying the show?
Subscribe and leave a review on your favourite platform — it helps more people find the podcast.

🔗 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 to Donald MacLean
• 3:32 Emergent Strategy vs Traditional Planning
• 5:57 The Role of Conversation in Strategy
• 9:35 Navigating Uncertainty in Strategy
• 12:44 The Challenge of Defining Strategy
• 16:50 The Importance of Organisational Structure
• 22:18 The Role of Consultants in Strategy
• 25:42 The Historical Context of Strategy
• 30:41 Collaboration, Competition, and Platforms
• 34:03 The Strangulation of Modern Governance
• 39:35 Re-personalising Strategy
• 48:44 The Attention Economy and Strategy
• 57:33 Final Reflections

Transcript

Donald (00:00)
I've got this little saying but it's like formal strategy is written, actual strategy is spoken. So emergent strategy for me is a constantly spoken phenomenon,

Mike Jones (00:08)
I'm out.

Donald (00:11)
don't optimize your strategy on paper, optimize it through action.

frustrates many people.

is the strangulating effect of modern governance on many organizations.

Mike Jones (00:22)
Yeah, yeah.

Donald (00:23)
the idea that you have to get both engaged, the emotional and the intellectual side of the organization is not new. It's just kind of alien to some organizations at the moment.

Mike Jones (01:04)
Welcome back to the Strategy Meet your Relic podcast. I'm your host, Mike Jones. And today I'm glad to be joined by Donald McLean. It's great to have you on the show. We've conversed a few times on LinkedIn and it's been a pleasure to finally get you on the show. Yeah, well, welcome.

Donald (01:19)
Thank you very much, Mike. It's a great honor and pleasure to be here.

Mike Jones (01:23)
cool. So just for our listeners, do you mind giving a bit of a background about yourself and a bit of context of what you've been up to lately?

Donald (01:30)
Sure, so background, I actually started out life as a physicist and I think that's what kind of drew me into the field of uncertainty, which was one of the things that really interested me when I was ⁓ studying physics. I then did a PhD in laser physics and that's when I first experienced systems kind of doing their own thing. Like not what I designed them to do, that took me by surprise, but it kind of stayed with me as a

as possible something that could be worked on. Then I moved from that side of the business, I worked for a US owned multinational and I kind of moved through the production and then sales and marketing and the commercial side of the business. So I kind of cut my strategy teeth in the, what was then called the advanced products division where we were commercializing technology for the fiber optics and telecoms and data coms.

kind of revolutions of the day, they're kind of old hat now. So that's me. Then I got a real call to come back to Scotland. So I took a temporary job at the University of Glasgow about 30 years ago. I'm still there on a part-time basis. And all of that time I've been researching a particular type of research, action research. So basically probably going back to my origins as a scientist, it's all experimental work.

Mike Jones (02:36)
Ha ha ha.

Donald (02:50)
with organizations in different parts of the world who are keen to try new things, reflect on it and figure out whether or not we've hit on something useful for the business or the organization or the social enterprise, whatever it is. About 10 years ago, just under 10 years ago, with my co-partner Kate Hooper, my co-, my business, you need to edit that, about 10 years ago with my then business partner Kate Hooper we set up

Mike Jones (03:13)
Yeah.

Donald (03:17)
Strategy Story, which was kind of coming out of some of the research and some of Kate's interests. Ran that for about 10 years and then recently I have come out of Strategy Story, Kate is still taking it forwards and I'm kind of back into strategy landing, figuring out what my next moves are actually. So that's me in a nutshell, that makes sense.

Mike Jones (03:36)
Alright.

Yeah, yeah, that's good.

You've been around researching strategy a lot. You've written a book and you've done some work with Ralph Stacey. When it comes to strategy, what's new or is it new or is it the same old? What's your view on how strategy is developing?

Donald (03:54)
Great question. mean, in some ways it is the same old, old. I'm listening to a brilliant book at the moment. I picked up a long time ago, but I've gone back to it, Strategy by Lawrence Friedman, which is like a history of the field forever. It's an incredible piece of work. And in some ways the core things are still there. I still think it's this really ingenious weave of intent, capability, something you're really good at, and then something out there that you've spotted, know, some kind of foresight, and it's weaving these things together. So it is that.

I think the big changes really are so much in the process side of strategy, the how rather than the what. And there, there seems to be a growing acceptance, if you like, of the benefits of looking at strategy as an emergent kind of phenomenon. So I think emergent is coming to the fore more than it has done in the past. And for me, that's a good thing. The other thing I've been part of a...

Mike Jones (04:32)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Donald (04:52)
kind of part of a movement which is originated in Europe maybe 20, 25 years ago called Strategies Practice. And that's increasingly looking at strategy as something that people do rather than strategy as something that organizations have got. They're the two kind of key changes I'm tuned into.

Mike Jones (05:08)
Yeah,

I like that idea of something that organisations do, not something they've got. Because strategy becomes this thing that like, is that, ⁓ in that time I get called and go, we need a strategy, what for? And it's more that they need a strategy because it's the dogma of they have to have a strategy of where they seem to be not a business. And the do part resonates me because

To me, I find that strategy has to be an ever evolving process. It's not one thing you've done one year and then you put it in the drawer until the next year. It's a consistent practice. You talk about emergence, it's viewing that stuff that's happening, how are we interacting, what's changing, what's adapting. But yes, that really stood out to me there.

Donald (05:55)
Yeah, I mean, I think in a way what's happening there is that the root metaphor of strategy and organization as well is moving away from mechanism. It's taken a long, long time, but it's moving away from this idea of the organization as some kind of machine. We're kind of getting more into the ideas these days. It would seem of the organization as some system.

Mike Jones (06:18)
you

Donald (06:19)
possibly under the influence of other folk that I've worked with, like Patricia Shaw. I like the idea of conversation as an emergent phenomenon. And in some ways, strategies, this kind of purposeful conversation that continues and continues and continues as things out there change. And does the consequences of your own actions become clear? Because we can't always know in advance what's gonna happen.

Mike Jones (06:44)
No, and I think that's the typical challenge that people have. My challenge with the orthodoxy is that, you know, it's thing that we do and we, because we believe the world is stable, then what we say we'll do will happen. Where we know that won't happen, you your work in complexity, it can meet the external environment in loads of different ways. And that conversation is crucial because it's just...

your staff that you have conversation with is people and you listen to the different perspectives and it's by listening to different perspectives and having an actual conversation, do you see how things are actually turning out rather than just sitting back and just thinking, well, my KPI says it's green, so it must be all good.

Donald (07:28)
Yeah, I totally agree with that Mike. In fact, I've got this little saying which I keep to myself most of the time, but it's like formal strategy is written, actual strategy is spoken. So emergent strategy for me is a constantly spoken phenomenon,

Mike Jones (07:42)
I'm out.

Donald (07:45)
which is part of the logic behind things like strategy story. We have to pay attention to what people are saying. And interestingly, I think often what people are saying is not.

Mike Jones (07:52)
and then

Donald (07:56)
that things have gone according to plan, they actually talk naturally about surprises, about plot twists, or about really good things, or about really bad things. These are the things that we need to pay a lot of attention to. And that critically is almost entirely in the present. So one of the things that kind of gets in my goat slightly with strategy is this obsession with the future and where do you want to be in 200 years time or 20 minutes time or whatever. For me, it's much more.

Mike Jones (08:01)
Yeah, yeah,

Donald (08:23)
Where are we now? Yeah, okay, where are we trying to get to? But what can we do based on where we are now and where we think we're trying to get to? It really is much more attention paid to the present and all the tiny little things that are happening, all the things that are being said, because that's the gold dust, I think, of strategic management.

Mike Jones (08:45)
Yeah, and I think it's right. It's like, talk about the adjacent possibilities or, you know, what's the next move or you think about, you know, always acting in a way to increase your options. These are all good things because it's, I know it's easy to say, oh, let's look to the future and see what happens, but it's inevitably uncertain and unknown. And I think that, like you like you said, I think people then forget about what options do we actually have now in the present.

and where do we need to go next to start unlocking those things? Otherwise it really does just become sometimes an abstract idea rather than something that's actually tangible that the organization can do through building certain capabilities, making certain decisions, moving resources somewhere and so on.

Donald (09:29)
Totally.

so like something like a game of football or a conversation or whatever, but a game of football, you make a move and the people you're playing against react. And until they've, you don't know how they're going to react. Until they've reacted, you can't really know what your next move is going to be. So real strategy for me is a highly interactive phenomenon, which is why we need to pay so much attention to what is going on in the here and now. Of course.

Mike Jones (09:39)
Mmm, yeah.

Donald (09:57)
We need to be good at things. We need to have cultivated strengths and superior abilities. Of course we need to want to win. We need all that kind of stuff. And of course we have to take advantage of the environment. these are the starting points for a strategy. What actually happens, the actual navigation through uncertainty is a minute by minute, day by day process. It's live. That's what's good about it.

Mike Jones (10:21)
Yeah. I think that

comes back to what you're saying about strategy being something that organizations do. and when I reflect on a lot of strategies I've seen from organizations, they don't, I don't think they really appreciate that dynamic nature. I know it's not your players on the pitch, but it's, you know, it's your competitors, it's your, um, suppliers, it's your regulators, it's those.

And until you do something, you don't know how they're going to react, or you don't know how you're going to react to when they do something. And it's like you said, it's constant minute by minute having a look at seeing what's happening. If we do this, what are they going to do? If they do that, what can we do? And it's then realizing, well, how would we know that that's going to be done? And it's sense making for those. ⁓

Donald (11:09)
Totally agree.

So we're back to this amazing phenomenon, uncertainty. It's not that amazing, I mean, it's everywhere. But uncertainty is, that's the reason for strategy in a way that it's a kind of constant navigation. I've done a lot of competitive sailing and that's what the skill is. It's sailing through this uncertain weather pattern that makes it strategic, of course.

Mike Jones (11:17)
Yeah.

Donald (11:36)
drawing on your strengths and making the most of the weather and all these kinds of things. So much of what you see out there, would say roughly 80%, you know, Pareto, yet again, about 80 % of what you see out there purporting to be strategy, isn't strategy at all really, it's policy. And increasingly I've seen that policy with pillars. So here's the four or five things that we prioritise and that we're going to put all our resources and attention and action into. And that will get us from here.

Mike Jones (11:47)
Mm-hmm.

Donald (12:05)
to here and that's, there's nothing wrong with that if you're in a nice, relatively stable situation where your progress through the environment is relatively under control. But that's not where we are just now. Policy's good at that kind of stuff, but that's not what we are. The thing that gets in my wick slightly is them calling that strategy, because it isn't strategy in my book.

Mike Jones (12:19)
Mm.

No, no,

it's not. And you see people not understanding the different levels of strategy. Cause same as yours with policies, mine's with grand strategy is that you see organizations that when it comes, we need to do a strategy. And it's like, well, what's our purpose and what's the end? think, whoa, whoa. What you do is not changing.

you know, it's probably not going to change for a very long time unless something's directly changed. We're talking about strategy here. And I think that people get confused around, you know, policy, grand strategy, and then actual strategy that we're talking about. And then they wonder why.

Donald (13:06)
Totally. And I mean, you'll know this

from experience more than most that strategy really comes into its own when you are faced with a challenge. Now that challenge can be positive, can be a big opportunity, or it can be negative. It can be some kind of threat. But that's when strategy comes into play. And so the idea that an organization should have one strategy is a bit like saying only ever faces one challenge. It just doesn't make any sense to me. Strategies belong to challenges and opportunities.

It's not something that should be set in stone and you've got for all time. That would suggest that you're never moving.

Mike Jones (13:40)
Yeah, or what we tend to see is that the strategy is what we've done last year plus or minus 10%. Or what really gets me upset is when I say, let's have a look at your strategy. And it's essentially just a vision statement with, like you said, policy priorities as the pillars.

That really upsets me.

Donald (14:05)
Yeah, frustrates me a little bit. You know, you're on this kind of slightly delicate territory when you ask people what strategy is and they say, I'll go and get it. Well, that wouldn't really work if you were doing it all the time. You

Mike Jones (14:13)
Hahaha.

Donald (14:17)
wouldn't need to go and get it. So that's what I've often said is that I don't want to turn into one of these old guys on LinkedIn that's completely ranting about things I don't like about strategy. But since I've started, the other thing that frustrates me slightly

Mike Jones (14:26)
No, no, no.

Donald (14:32)
It's the idea that strategy is the cure for everything. So quite often you'll see somebody news taking over a business or somebody news and power and politics or whatever it is, and we've got a new strategy. And again, 80 % of the time strategy is not what's needed. You maybe need better general management or you need better business model, but not necessarily a new strategy. I think it's been the whole construct and concept.

Mike Jones (14:36)
Mmm.

Donald (14:59)
has been thinned out and kind of distorted a little bit to the point where it's almost becoming meaningless. And that's the thing, because I really believe in the idea of strategy at its heart. That's the thing that I find frustrating because real good strategy is something special and can have you kind of punch in the air saying, wow, we did it, we did it. And that's a phenomenal feeling.

Mike Jones (15:07)
and

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that's why I like, definitely when I'm helping people to develop strategy, is that moment where it's bit cathartic, it's emotional, they've seen a way through a challenge and they know how to maneuver. But I totally agree where I see it's just thinned out. I always say that it's being captured by marketing. And it comes as marketing thing.

rather than actual strategy. It becomes about sound bites and how can we make shiny slides rather than actual strategy. And you're right about this. Sorry.

Donald (15:54)
I think,

no, that's an interesting point. I think that in fairness, there are quite a lot of organizations have got a published strategy, which is the one in the glossy document that probably very few people actually do. And then somewhere in that organization, there is actually some strategic behavior, but it's not the one that's being published. That is the emergent strategy that is live. If it's this ingenious combination of...

Mike Jones (16:18)
Yeah, yeah.

Donald (16:22)
intent foresight capability blah blah blah

Mike Jones (16:25)
Yeah, yeah. And you're right about the strategies and the answer for everything because you can speak to a lot of people and they go, oh, we've got this HR strategy. We've got this innovation strategy. We've got this strategy. And you're thinking, well, it's not really, it's not strategy and two, it's not what you need. And a lot of the times, and I've had it before with clients and that, you're looking at and go, we need strategy.

Maybe, yeah, but you also need to sort out some fundamental things in your organization. You're not structured. We could create or help you create this great strategy, but you would have no way of achieving that because your structure in a way that will limit you, it constrains you too much to do anything actually worthwhile chasing for.

Donald (17:12)
Totally agree. I do agree with that. So the first thing is check if business model is okay, check if your management practices are okay. And then if big challenges come out of all of that, maybe it's time to engage with a strategy. And then for me, there's two kind of key things. One is the logic. Strategy is a really simple logic. So the logic has to be right, not over complicated, pretty straightforward. It's basically just an ingenious version of ends, means and conditions on quite a big scale. And then...

get people involved. If the folk who are actually going to do it don't get it, how can you expect them to do it? So you need to get folk involved and be part of it. I think with technology that's becoming increasingly possible. And it's still a bit of a mystery to me as to why it's not taken off more quickly. I mean, I know that there'll be answers like defensive routines and habits and all kinds of stuff, but.

Mike Jones (17:49)
Yeah

Donald (18:07)
But the scope for involving more people and rapid creation of strategy has never been higher, I don't think. That's a really exciting development. It's also where, for me, because this emergent stuff is spoken, once you kick it off, it then takes on a life of its own, if you're lucky. Then you need to this attention and listen to what people are saying. You need to listen to the stories that people are sharing with one another, because that's where all the...

Gold dust is. The power of the human voice and all of that kind of stuff, I think is absolutely key. So the way people talk to one another, what they say, all that kind of stuff, storytelling. And I think this is something that partly because of the machine metaphor, it's been very difficult for us to grasp. And lots of people will still say, no, you're wrong there, Donald. But what makes people do things strategically?

Mike Jones (18:40)
Yeah.

Donald (18:59)
is emotionally compelled, not intellectually. So one of the things about sharing stories, yeah, we need to get the logic, but in actual fact, people do things because they make them feel good or because they're really scared and not doing it would make them feel even worse. But most of the stuff that propels people to action is emotional. And I think we're pretty inarticulate in our organizations about the processes of leadership that engender.

genuine commitment to things together.

Mike Jones (19:29)
Yeah, but that actually comes back to that conversation piece, isn't it? It's the, I see it where we've got someone that's developed the strategy. I'm all for open strategy, a bit more involvement, but they made the strategy. The strategy is not communicated. All that's communicated down is that we're now doing this, or you're doing this, and there's no...

There's no conversation in between. There's no rationale. There's no like, we are trying to do this for this reason. So if you could do this, that can help us achieve this. And there's none of that assimilation. So in that conversation, this is what we're thinking about and allowing that space for conversation or proper planning, know, that proper space between, right, this is the initial idea we've got. Let's have this conversation. Let's have a...

know, kick around some thoughts, which one gives you the rationale, but also gets you invested in actually delivering something rather than just being told, yeah, we're now doing this. And then it gets rolled down. Why are we doing this? Well, I don't know, we've just been told. That doesn't really scream investment or commitment to me.

Donald (20:45)
I do agree with that. I mean, I think if you look at strategy content, what people are doing, what the strategy is about, then it has to have this good logic. For me, that's intent foresight capability and some ingenious weave that surprises people. Kind of thing you think, I wish I'd thought of that. That's a sign of something really good. The process side of it, think, is another really familiar framework. Basically, why, what, who,

Mike Jones (21:04)
Yeah.

Donald (21:14)
when, where, how. And people have to continually touch base on that because this thing is now moving. And so when, you know, I've been working with organizations, all you do is gather people together from different silos, different bits and say, right, let's talk about what's actually happening. Why, what, who, when, how, where, blah, blah, blah. And home in on the bits that really strike everybody.

Mike Jones (21:16)
Yeah, yeah.

Mm.

Yay.

Donald (21:41)
It's actually remarkably straightforward. It's sad that it's not more prevalent because it's natural and it's quite easy.

Mike Jones (21:46)
you

Yeah, that's the thing that surprised me digging out in the, I've said this before, when I left the military, I thought strategy was one thing that civilian organisations had completely nailed. And I thought, you know, what can I add to this? I'm from the military, it's completely different. But then I realised it's not. And there's a lot of,

Not all bad, you know, sometimes I'm worried that I come on here and just say, there's all rubbish and I'm the only one with the answers, not true. There's a lot of good stuff out there, but there is this over complicated nature of strategy, very mechanistic. I think we, leaders are outsourcing that to strategy teams, in my opinion, are just effectively PMOs. And that means then you miss,

all the conversation and that real understanding about how the strategies connecting with the external environment. And then it becomes strategy by management by green lights.

which I think lose all the connection from it. And it's just like, well, is my KPI or my OKR green, red or whatever. And that's how they seem to manage it. They lose the conversation.

Donald (23:03)
agree with that. Mike, we have to be honest here and say outsourcing it to strategy teams and sometimes strategy consultants. And yeah, it does become like this, I think, an intellectual exercise. And of course, because it doesn't work, because the conversation and the emotional energy isn't there, the kind of habitual response to that is, try harder.

Mike Jones (23:13)
Yeah.

Donald (23:28)
So the try harder is make it more intellectual, more complicated, more bells, more whistles, more measures, more this, more that. And in actual fact, what's needed is a radical simplification and a much more organic conversational process that everybody feels part of.

Mike Jones (23:42)
Yeah, yeah.

You got to have that ownership even with consultants. If you get consultants in, really, the consultant has to be very wary about the boundary that they're in and what they're there for. And to facilitate that strategic conversation, you can't move out that room can't, if you get a consultancy and they go, we're developing a strategy and they go off in a dark room and start looking at benchmarking and all this stuff.

then you know you're not in a good place.

Donald (24:09)
Yeah, I agree with that. Please don't get me wrong. There's a definite role for consultants because they bring different perspectives, different experiences, lots of expertise, but all the good ones. mean, hopefully I'm putting myself and you in this category is that when we're engaged, we do strategy with the people, we don't do strategy to the people. I think there's a lot of the, there are some out there.

Mike Jones (24:21)
Hopefully.

Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Donald (24:36)
usually bigger organizations that have got off the shelf solutions basically. And yeah, I'm just not a fan of that.

Mike Jones (24:42)
No, it can't be off the shelf. And that's what it is. But it's the same with just that same thing that you said there about with the people, know, that that's extremely relevant for consultants. It's got to be with the people. But it's also without consultants there in your executive team. You've got to do that with the people in the organization.

Yeah.

Donald (25:06)
Excuse me.

So you're a military guy, and I am not an expert in military strategy, but of course that is really the origin and home of strategy and organizations and businesses, a relatively recent phenomenon, know, 50, 60, 70 years in terms of the formal side of things, whereas in the military it's been, you know, thousands of years. But I'm pretty sure it was the military that articulated the phrase hearts and minds.

Mike Jones (25:22)
Mmm.

Yeah, and

Donald (25:36)
And so the idea that you have to get both engaged, the emotional and the intellectual side of the organization is not new. It's just kind of alien to some organizations at the moment.

Mike Jones (25:49)
Yeah, it's even down in our principles of war. the first Principle there's nine of them. Don't tell me to say all nine, but it's a bit rusty. But the first one, the very first principle of war is maintenance of the aim, maintenance of morale.

Donald (26:03)
Yep. Yep.

Mike Jones (26:04)
first

two principles, sorry, maintenance of the aim, maintenance of morale, first two principles. And that's where it's really important because they are up there on the two principles. And it is, we, and it's, I suppose it's obvious because in the strategy that you're in involves, directly involves people because we're young men and women into battle. We need to make sure that we've,

we've thought about it and we have people engaged to understand what we are trying to achieve.

because that's where we get the adaptability. You're not gonna get any more complex or volatile than frontline military. And that's where at the very heart of it, we've learned that you can't treat people like machines because you need the people to be adaptable and to be adaptable, they need the resources, they need the information, they need to have that understanding to what you're trying to get them to achieve so they can adapt.

as the circumstances change, as things emerge that we weren't quite expecting.

Donald (27:03)
as we weren't quite expecting. Yeah. And that is the key, isn't it? So that it's this uncertainty again. I think it's this ability to deal with uncertainty and take people with one in a strategically meaningful way that is the real hallmark of a leader. We're going to make the most of this uncertainty rather than just try and cope with it or run away from it. We're really going to work on and with it.

Mike Jones (27:18)
Mm.

Donald (27:27)
I mean, again, I'm not an expert in this field, but my very limited understanding of Clausewitz who was a massive military strategy influence. I've seen various people kind of replicate his ideas, but one that I can remember, because it was three P's, was policy, passion, and probability. And he basically saying there, okay, so we've got whatever it is we're trying to achieve. The passion, but as you've got to...

contend with the fact that people are engaged emotionally either positively or negatively and you know, it's part of our job to manage that and then probability of course is the chance but that you just can't program So in a way where we are with strategy now isn't that much different at all

Mike Jones (28:04)
No, no, no.

No,

he isn't. I've looked all the way back into Sun Tzu, who was I think 300 years before Christ, you know, that's, we're going a long way back now. And he talked about strategy is this emergent adaptable thing full of uncertainty. And he talked about morale in there as well. He talked about all this stuff back then. It just seems that we, we sort of went through this

stage I think that we forgot that, especially adaptability thing. I don't know, it was, we got comfortable with bit of uncertainty.

and thought things quite certain.

Donald (28:46)
I don't know, think a funny thing's happened, kind of post Michael Porter, who I think made a really interesting contribution to strategy and quite a helpful one in some ways, is that particularly in some larger organizations, the competitive dimension of strategy seems to have lost a bit of its traction. And for me, however unfashionable it is, that's what strategy is all about. It's about trying with this ingenious combination of

and Intent, Foresight capability to nudge up the odds of you succeeding when the resources that you require are in no infinite supply. So there's some kind of scarcity and that necessarily brings about competition, whether it's in the private sector for market power or market share or orders or whatever it is or the public sector for funding and support. It's competition's a massive part of it and it kind of.

Mike Jones (29:25)
Yeah.

Donald (29:41)
really strikes me that so much of the strategy document that you see now, competition hardly gets a mention. I mean, it hardly gets a mention. It's more like, this is what we want to do. This is where our three or four pillars are. We'll see in five years time. And of course, by that time, most of the folk that wrote the strategy document will have gone.

Mike Jones (29:47)
No.

I think people, yeah, I think it's like, is it not in fashion, not in vogue now? I don't know why, but you see most strategies and it's about, we want, it's all about, it's niceness, isn't it? It's like, want, this is why I'm talking about marketing capturing strategy. It becomes this external projection of being nice, where we talk about strategies to your advantage.

And that can be, you still can be competitive through collaboration or thing like that, but it's always to your advantage. How do I shape the extended environment to my advantage? Yeah.

Donald (30:33)
Totally. so

that says that for me anyway, great analysis of the Cuban missile crisis when Alison looked at it through the lens of rationality, culture and politics. And for me, I still think the most compelling way of looking at strategy is a political process. It's a power game. And that means that there's two real dimensions. One is the competition one, which we've just touched on, but the other critically important one, of course, is the alliancing dimension.

Mike Jones (30:53)
Mmm.

Donald (31:02)
Who do you collaborate with? And with the emergence of platforms and massively scaled organizations, I think this dynamic is undergoing fundamental change at the moment. If you like the balance between competition and collaboration is changing in strategy and it's gonna change it quite a lot I think. So that's one of the things that excites me that I'm watching at the moment.

Mike Jones (31:22)
Yeah, yeah.

Is it? Yeah, Yeah. We will get on to that. The work sites you and frustrates you, but yeah, I think you're right. And you, yeah, you're making me really reflect on this thing about people losing this sort of competitive edge of strategy. And you know what I find the real beauty of strategy is you mentioned it about limited resources. Is that constraints?

is it, because if there was no constraints and the world was perfect and you had all the resources in the world and all this stuff, you wouldn't need strategy because you could just go do stuff. the strategy is about, you know, making those decisions and, you know, creating an advantage through those real limited resources and constraints. And it's Clausewitz that talked about that. Klautsvitz said, you know, strategy is, and, you know, any organization, regardless of size,

has limited resources. Therefore, strategy is about exercising limited resources to your advantage.

Donald (32:21)
totally agree, absolutely. And using whatever's out there in the environment to maximize the extent of which can leverage them in a really clever way. And that's why it's so clever and it's so creative. And that cannot be algorithmically captured because you get some geniuses that just say, how's about this? And everybody thinks, yeah, that was clever. Wish we'd thought that. That's what makes an exciting subject for me, I think. The eureka moment.

Mike Jones (32:27)
Yeah, yeah.

No.

And you.

Yeah,

I mean, and you get the, you know, it really frustrates me when I see those strategies that like, we're going to be the most inclusive collaborative, blah, blah, best. And I'm like, well, you can't, well, do that then.

Do that then, why? know, because they're missing the whole element around, well actually what is happening, that dynamic relationship with the external environment, the constraints they're in, you know, they're missing all that in that conversation.

Donald (33:18)
So

it's really interesting what's happening there. I mean, one of the fundamental things in human behavior, according to some people, is mimicry. We mimic one another. And I think organizations do the same thing. So there's a big line in institutional theory within social theory that talks about the way in which organizations copy one another. And there's a brilliant term, I'm going to use it, or probably everybody will start turning off your podcast right now, mimetic isomorphism.

So that through copycat behavior, all organizations eventually become the same. And I think that you can see that in a lot of the big strategy documents that you see being produced by all kinds of organizations at the moment. They're all basically saying the same thing. Particularly when you get into kind of governmental strategies, they're all A, obvious and B, probably downloadable. And yeah, well, that's actually.

Although it's called a strategy, that's not, that's the anti-strategy, that's not strategy at all, that's just copycat behaviour, it's so obvious it can't possibly be strategy.

Mike Jones (34:17)
Yeah, yeah. I totally agree. So on that theme, what else is sort of frustrating you view with strategy at the moment?

Donald (34:25)
How long have you got?

Only one other thing and then I'd rather talk, because I'm generally an optimist. I actually think I'm a designer because a friend of mine once defined a designer as somebody who's continually dissatisfied but perpetually optimistic. So I think I am still optimistic. A few things frustrate me, but that's the beginning of the change process possibly. So the final thing that frustrates me, and I'm not alone in this. mean, I it frustrates many people.

is the strangulating effect of modern governance on many organizations. So because governance is largely about the organization delivering what it promised to deliver

Mike Jones (34:56)
Yeah, yeah.

Donald (35:05)
in the interest of its stakeholders, by definition almost as a controlling thing. And I think it's a real, I think that is the biggest barrier to break through.

at the moment. think there are people working on new models of governance that are about collective learning and trust and all these kinds of things. And brilliant, keep going with that. I do think we need to replace this control freak version of governance. It's a big problem, especially, especially in some of our large public sector institutions, incidentally, you know, and you can understand it because the press are being there waiting for something terrible to go wrong.

Mike Jones (35:33)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Donald (35:46)
So the whole architecture and practice is one of fear. It's not a good place to be when what you need is innovation.

Mike Jones (35:53)
No, I totally agree. And I see at the moment, especially we talked earlier about emergence strategy and all this and complexity theory and system thinking that's coming. It's almost, that's moving forward and having a good effect. But the governance is, it's almost got it on the leash. It can only move so quickly away from governance. You can see in, I was looking at these, was it board?

how to be a board member, how to be a CEO. And he looked at governance and I was thinking, wow, if you actually followed that to a T, your organization cannot or would not have any adaptability.

Donald (36:31)
That's right, Which is another way of saying you'd be in complete control. And unfortunately, these two things go in hand. So yeah, if you're in complete control, what you've got there is a relatively simple mechanism. And I keep saying to people, the defining characteristic of a mechanism, by the way, is that it's dead, right? So according to the second law of thermodynamics, a mechanism will proceed from order to disorder. My car.

Mike Jones (36:36)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Donald (36:58)
unfortunately does not spontaneously improve, right, it gets worse. And so organizations that are designed as mechanisms increasingly...

need more and more managerial overhead just to hang together. Because they've got decay built into their architecture. Every time they do something, it gets wobblier. And so they get more and more top heavy with management and the people who are delivering services at the bottom are under more and more more pressure. And the complaint is we've not got enough money. I'm afraid I don't buy that. We need radical.

Mike Jones (37:21)
Mmm.

Donald (37:34)
redesign of a lot of these organizations and the government processes would be where you'd have to start.

Mike Jones (37:37)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I agree. I love the term that Stafford Beer uses for that, is pathological autopiasis. that... No, no, no, no. I think it really sums it up. So yeah, I'm totally agree with that. Governance really does need to match what we're trying to do with the real world, which is be adaptable, be flexible. And it's that coherence, it's having enough coherence so that...

Donald (37:47)
It's a good place to be.

Mike Jones (38:09)
people can be self-organizing and adapt to changes without falling apart. So yeah, I totally agree. So what?

Donald (38:16)
⁓

I picked up a great term in LinkedIn and I'm sorry the originator because I can't remember exactly who said this but I know it wasn't me the original idea but it's a good one which was that a lot of our larger bureaucracies suffer in the governance domain particularly from what they call the Gulliver effect. So from Gulliver's travels, know, Swift's novel, there's massive big giants tied down by millions of little threads.

Mike Jones (38:35)
Yeah.

Yeah, true, true. And I wrote about that not long ago. Well, not about the Gulliver effects, but about organisation needing to protect people's ability to act. Yeah. And that's about it. It's about, we putting too many constraints down that, you know, we remove all freedom of action, all initiative for sake of the belief of stability and control.

Donald (38:51)
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike Jones (39:05)
or do we remove some of those unnecessary and enable freedom of action? Because I know which one is going to help.

Donald (39:13)
The interesting thing, Mike, is that each one of these threads, probably 80, 90 % of them, on its own was the rational response to a particular situation. It's just that cumulatively, they're paralyzing.

Mike Jones (39:27)
Yeah. Yeah.

Donald (39:28)
And because the organization

is so fragmented, nobody can see that.

Mike Jones (39:31)
No, it's interesting when you try and shine a mirror up and it's a complete shock to a lot of them. Or the shock becomes when things start to fail pretty quickly.

Donald (39:44)
Yep, there could be a lot of that going on soon.

Mike Jones (39:45)
Yeah, but so

let's move on to something, because you're an optimistic guy. What energises you about Strategy at the moment? What's the stuff that is making you smile?

Donald (39:57)
Okay, so.

With the business strategy story, with my research before that, my thing has always been to try and, sound like I'm trying to be cool here, know, to keep it real and make it real, but I don't mean it in a cool way. I just mean, could we ditch 80 % of the gobbledygook? Of course we still need some technical terms as shortcuts, but could we ditch a lot of the gobbledygook? Could we ditch a lot of the unnecessary procedures and practices and just be more natural with each other as people?

Mike Jones (40:08)
Hahaha!

We

Donald (40:27)
Respect one another, trust one another a bit, critique one another, contest things, just be normal people. So can we do strategy like people? It's a very simple request. And of course this in itself was a movement in the strategy field. It was called unpeoply, the re-personalization of strategy. And I think that's going on, but it excites me that the human being, and in my view, the fully embodied human being,

is coming back into view. And so we're beginning to say, okay, so yeah, we're rational, but, you know, sorry, all the neoclassical economists out there, that's not my defining characteristic. I can be rational, but I am not an out and out utility maximizer. I do mad things. Sometimes I'm irrational, sometimes I'm non-rational. I do think sometimes, because I feel them, do what I think, blah, blah, blah.

I'm intuitive, instinct, experience, all that kind of stuff, I think is beginning to count a little bit more and people are beginning to take it more seriously. And of course, neuroscience is saying that we have to do this if we want to save ourselves from, you know, bad places. So I think the reemergence of the person at the center of strategy is really good. I think that does present some challenges for certain versions of systems theory, by the way, but that's a different story. I think that's a different story.

Mike Jones (41:49)
Yeah, I'm on board with that. I do fear with that, because I think we need to get people back, that with the rise of AI that people are automatically trying to go straight to AI for the answer, rather than having the conversation with people and bringing people back into the...

the mix of strategy. Definitely when you think about, you talk about the emotion part, where I talk about the cognitive behavioural and the effective means of strategy. Like if you get people together, you get those, and if you get those, then you've got more chance that people will be invested to deliver that strategy.

Donald (42:30)
Totally agree. And I think there's a real big challenge for organizations post COVID because home working and hybrid working has become so normalized. We don't really understand fully what it is that connects people and generates this emotional energy between people when they're together. excuse me. I think there's quite a lot of work to be done still on how to promote social cohesion and kind of intent when we are.

Mike Jones (42:45)
Mmm.

Donald (42:59)
virtualized for so much of our time now. So I think although the human being coming back ends good, it's not without its challenges. But I have to tell you Mike, AI, I'm quite excited about AI and the algorithmic version of strategy, the kind of logical version, which is really, really important. I think AI can be a big help with that. I mean,

Mike Jones (43:02)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Donald (43:20)
because of the way it can go out there, grab data, process data, blah, blah. It's very, very good. And also even more excitingly for me, all the memetic strategies that are produced through sheer algorithm will render that form of strategy completely meaningless, because everybody will have it. So it will disappear. I think that's brilliant. And then it will be left to people to take what AI has given them, work with it, inject some...

Mike Jones (43:39)
Yeah, yeah, Yeah.

Donald (43:48)
human and human only creativity and social energy and strategy might become a really exciting, fun, gobbledygook free experience for people again. I think, know, that's quite exciting. finally, you can see I'm getting excited now. And I might have 200, 300, 500, a thousand colleagues in the West of Scotland or the Highlands. We think we want to develop a strategy here for our region. Let's all get online.

get AI helping us and we're going to take all our ideas, sift them, focus them, talk about them in an afternoon. So the scale that's going to be available to us is phenomenal, that's exciting.

Mike Jones (44:27)
Yeah. And I totally agree. Having it as an enabler, as an input to strategies is fantastic. Especially what you can do, because like you said, AI can go and get loads of scenarios and stuff that's going. It can pretend to be a competitor. can pretend to be a collaborator. You can give it a persona of all sorts of things to test people in the room.

That utility of it, I think is fantastic and should be utilized.

Donald (44:56)
Yeah, I think I saw you and LinkedIn saying once that, you you get the power in stories and storytelling, but it can't just be a story about anything. There has to be a logic and a capability and some ingenuity at the heart of that, or it's just a story. So what makes for a strategic story? I think AI can really help drive the strategic logic at the heart of some of these stories, but never to the...

Removal of humans. I mean, that's just nonsense

Mike Jones (45:27)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you're right. And I think, yeah, I really like this idea of repurposing or bringing back humans. And I think it's a constant thread we've been talking about throughout numerous podcasts, know, all the way from like Julia Hautz talking about open strategy, getting people involved. Like you said, there is perfect in the sense that, you know, across the Highlands, you can get all this input. You don't necessarily have to be in the room, but you can get all that input, which is fantastic.

all the way to actually taking space before the execution to get people around to understand and to plan and to have conversations about the strategy. You know, to that connection with people that are actually delivering it to the sense making of the people that are enacting the strategy throughout. I think there's the common thread there about that reconnection with people listening, understanding sort of sense making.

that really brings the richness to strategy, which you need that human connection for beyond your team's meetings, these actual ⁓ purposeful meetings.

Donald (46:35)
Hear, hear. That

was beautifully said. Hear, hear to that, Mike. And it's not that in an afternoon you're going to come out with a perfect strategy. Of course you're not. But you are going to come out with enough to get people moving. The great resource-based theorist and strategy voice, Jay Barney, I once had asked this question, which is, what would you rather have a 90 % strategy with 30 % buy-in or a 50 % strategy with 90 % buy-in? And of course it's a good question because the answer is,

I think I'd go for the second one because we can change it.

Mike Jones (47:06)
Yes.

Donald (47:06)
And what I really want is everybody to be on board and we get moving and then together we change it and we focus it and we flex it.

Mike Jones (47:07)
Yes.

I think that's...

you're right though about we can change it. And I think that's the crucial thing. And I suppose that comes back to the governance issue. In reality, if you had that 50 % strategy that 90 % people are brought in onto, that's gonna be a lot more powerful because there's no such thing as a perfect strategy because we can sit there and

⁓ Star gaze at all, want to try and create the perfect strategy. By the time we've left the room, things have changed anyway. So I'd rather people, essentially do something, can observe and reorientate to what's happened and develop it over time, rather than think we've got to try and get everything perfect, all the financials, everything done. Because by that time people have forgotten about it or lost interest, where if you can get that engagement and you can go and you can adapt and adapt, that's...

I think that's good way to go.

Donald (48:01)
Totally, it's like don't optimize your strategy on paper, optimize it through action.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (48:07)
Yes.

Yeah. Because like you said before about the teams, know, football, it's like, well, we don't know what's going to happen. We can assume and we can, you could think and we could make plausible things, but until we actually kick that ball and see how it reacts and who reacts to it, but I don't really know what my next move is.

Donald (48:28)
Yep. Yep.

Mike Jones (48:28)
So think there's a

lot in there about that. Yeah, that's, I like that 50 % and 90 % on. That's a really good way to look at it and gets people into that action. I get really sort of drained when people want the perfect thing that's like all polished and everything's got to be worthy. I'm not very conscientious. I'm naturally, I'm like that anyway. I'm just like, yeah, but that's good enough. Let's go.

Donald (48:51)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (48:52)
The spell of mistakes, Mike. Yeah, be right. It's good enough. Let's go.

Yeah, I think that's cool. Is there anything else? Anything else you think about where strategy is going now that's standing out for you?

Donald (49:05)
Well, I think there's two other things. One is, I mean, the growth of things like LinkedIn and the likes, you know, the fact that we're doing this and I hope that there's going to be just more than me and you listening to it. Maybe my mum out in the island of Dura. So I think attention is becoming a much bigger phenomenon. It's always been big, of course, but people are beginning to think about it. And I think in strategy,

in the strategy academy itself, the attention based view is rising and beginning to gain prominence. So I think the ways in which we.

I don't know if manage is the right word, but in the way we think about and deal with attention as a resource, probably the fundamental resource is really interesting. So that's the development that'll be, you know, hopefully keeping my eye on at least and maybe even getting involved with if we are entering into what some people are calling the attention economy, which is right down at the level of individuals.

Mike Jones (50:01)
Mm-hmm.

Donald (50:03)
You know, in LinkedIn, nobody really cares that much about what organization you're part of. It's all about you. And so on the one hand, we've got these massive platforms that span the planet, which is another interesting development, because all kinds of changes are happening there and different ways of collaborating and competing. So we've got this massive scale on the one hand, and then we've got the micro right down to individual people day by day. So.

Mike Jones (50:09)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Donald (50:30)
the attention and then this massive scale of platforms. I think that's a really big thing. And then finally with tech, think if I, because I think of strategy primarily as a political process, I think governance will have to change because it's gonna be much easier for staff.

customers, interested parties to communicate with the organization's owners or governors. And I think, so I think because over the last 20 or 30 years, there's been a massive surge of what I would perhaps unkindly call managerialism. The extent to which an organization is being managed for the good of its stakeholders is always a question and always has been a question.

Mike Jones (51:00)
Hmm.

Donald (51:18)
think the ability of people to interrogate that and get involved in that could change quite dramatically. And you'll see that in government and local government and large corporates and all kinds of community organizations. think engagement is going to become a different level and that will bring with it both some incredible energy but also some significant challenges when things are not going well.

Mike Jones (51:44)
Hmm.

Donald (51:44)
So, you

know, think that's a really interesting space. And of course that does play into the opening, Richard Whittington's 19, sorry, 20, sorry Richard, Richard Whittington's, I think it was 2019 book, Opening Strategy, which is just how the field is gradually becoming more open. And I know you've featured that in podcasts. It doesn't mean it's gonna be democratic, there could be a lot more contestability and jostling than has been.

Mike Jones (51:56)
Uh-huh.

Donald (52:14)
the case in the past and that's going to be interesting because A, it will cost, but B, it might also bring about dividends if it's managed properly.

Mike Jones (52:23)
Yeah, yeah. I that opening strategy is really good in that sense of unearthing different perspectives and different tensions and, you know, like you said, Jocelyn, I like that idea about Jocelyn. But I think it's got to maintain that it's not going to turn out to be a vote. There still needs to be decision that needs to be made. yeah, yeah.

Donald (52:45)
Totally agree with that. Totally agree

with that. One of the things, and particularly in this part of the world, but in many parts of the world, is the role of, and you know, if we get back into military strategy again, if you look at our clan system, that you had the chieftain, who was usually a warrior, and they were all a bit nabbing territory or cutting one another's heads off, something like that. But a very important person in the clan also was the bard.

Mike Jones (53:06)
Yeah.

Donald (53:10)
And their job was basically communication, partly with the great out there in the supernatural, but partly also with people in the clan or the tribe itself. And I think we're also seeing, partly again, part of the logic behind the formation of strategy story. I think the power of communication in this more open field is ramping up. So strategy has been a bit of a fashion industry. gone from economics through marketing, through OB and HR.

I would say that strategy now is heavily drifting towards the importance of communication.

Mike Jones (53:43)
Yeah, yeah, I agree. Well, if people don't know what you want, then how are they going to enact it?

Donald (53:49)
Partly that, and if they can't tell you what they think, why should they bother what you think?

Mike Jones (53:54)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. Yeah, I agree. I was chatting about this earlier today and it was about that psychological, they're talking about psychological safety. And I said, one element of psychological safety that people don't really talk about is that bit where, well, why should I tell you anything? Because nothing's going to happen or no one's going to listen. And you can't get to that point in strategy because then

you essentially lose all your eyes and ears in your organization, the widest parts that are enacting with the edges of your organization, because they're just not gonna tell you anything. well, what's the point? One, there's no mechanism to communicate, and two, no one's listening to me anyway, so I'll just keep it to myself. Yeah, I like that. There's some really good insights, and I'm gonna reflect on those and think about that. Just really around the attention economy and how...

Donald (54:35)
No. ⁓

Mike Jones (54:47)
that's going to impact and shape how we do strategy or the point of strategy. That's gonna be really interesting. But it's been absolutely fantastic to have you on. I've thoroughly enjoyed this chat.

Donald (54:58)
Thank you, Mike.

Likewise, so have I. I've been fortunate enough to work with some ex-military people in the past, and as I've said to you before, you guys know how to get things done, and that's what strategy should be about.

Mike Jones (55:10)
Yeah, yeah, I agree. Yeah, and we are good at getting things done when we're on operations. But just for the guests, what would you like to leave the listeners to think about from this episode?

Donald (55:23)
That is a good question. I should have anticipated that. It shows you how rubbish at foresight I actually am. I would say...

Create spaces in your organization to get people together and reflect on what is happening, what that means for you all, and then get expert help within the organization or from outside the organization to take all that and keep iterating the strategic behavior of the organization. be natural, get people together, talk, share stories.

Mike Jones (55:53)
Mm.

Donald (55:57)
but keep the strategic logic at the heart of all the conversations and get everybody involved. That would really be what I would say.

Mike Jones (56:06)
Yeah, I agree. think that's and I think we've like we talked about the attention economy.

in organization, there's that perceived time economy where they sacrifice this precious time for just getting stuff done today where actually taking that time out and actually understanding from people that that can really help unlock really difficult challenges that gets the organization moving exponentially. But it just takes that little bit of time upfront. like you said, think, yeah. And in your point, naturally,

Donald (56:36)
Totally.

Mike Jones (56:40)
I've seen it so many. Yeah.

Donald (56:40)
Naturally.

It's the poor Robert Burns is a great, great line from Taylor Louse. Would somehow the gift he gives to see ourselves as other seers. So every now and again, we need to get everybody together so that we can share perspectives. It's these different perspectives that give us a complete picture. Strategy is about the big picture. Imagine a football match without a halftime talk. If you're getting beat, it's game over. ⁓

Mike Jones (57:06)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I

like that,

Donald (57:08)
So, you know, we just need to have many more halftime talks.

Mike Jones (57:12)
Yeah, yeah, that's really good. I like that analogy. Yeah, because you wouldn't, would you? No, no, yeah, that's just sort of really just, yeah, ⁓ yeah, spot on. I like that. Cool, thank you. and for the listeners out there. If you enjoyed the conversation as much as I have,

Please like, share and subscribe if you want to see our episodes that are every Tuesday we release these. So I look forward to hearing what your thoughts on our conversation is. But until next time, thank you Donald for joining me. It's great, great pleasure. And I'll hopefully catch up with you soon.

Donald (57:50)
Thank you, Mike.

Thank you and thanks everyone for listening.

Mike Jones (57:53)
Thank you.