insights

The essence of sustainable growth management is the conscious understanding of where an organisation is in its lifecycle. At each stage different dynamics are in play. Knowing what they are and should be makes them manageable.

For those that have seen many organisations at all their different stages this meta-perspective is easy. For most, to see it from within their own organisation, is very hard. What is happening is just the here and now.

Dr. Ichak Adizes is one person with that meta-perspective. He wrote the book on how organisations grow and die and what to do about it. His organisational lifecycle uses 10 stages. There are others (like Robert Jones or Lawrence Miller ) who have similar models. What is important and different about Adizes work is he identifies the key dynamics that exist and must be sustained in the organisation at each stage.

For example, he uses the four dynamics of Purpose, Administration, Entrepreneurship and Integration. An Infant (Paei) reactionary business does not shift to its prime growth phase until its dynamics change. Until it develops its ‘Administration’, sales may go up for a while but growth will stop. At the later stage of Bureaucracy (pA_i), removing the ‘Administration’ handcuffs is vital to survival.
The insight is that all the management theorists are right - even those that contradict each other - it is just that they are right for different stages of the lifecycle. Knowing how the stages work means you know which part of the bookshelf to embrace, and those to avoid, for now.

But getting the stages right is only part. Despite what change management models may suggest, healthy organisations don’t often change character in jumps, but in gradual transitions, as tensions emerge and are resolved in a continuously reforming dynamic equilibrium. This process of transition will be uniquely different in each organisation.

The final part to sustainable growth management is in understanding the subtle dynamics in the transitions between stages. We then seek not to manage change, but to allow emergent change.

When we do this, development is less painful and more natural, relying not on survivalist shifts, but moving instead towards conscious sustainable growth. We achieve this when we go beyond the flatline leading to decline and begin truly emergent development.

If we can learn to do this in our organisations, just perhaps, we might be able to do this as a species.

“All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions, is called a philosopher” - Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

When in 1994 Henry Mintzberg, one of the fathers of strategic thinking, announced strategic planning’s demise the business management community mourned. If the world outside of an organisation could not be objectively determined with certainty, what hope was there for strategy?

In the meantime new tools and new schools of strategy abounded. After everyone had developed different approaches and discussed their relative merits, Mintzberg (and his co-authors) again helped us out identifying within the confusion 10 different schools of strategy.

At least we now know when asked ‘What is strategy?’ the answer will depend on which school we went to. But which one to choose? Everyone claims to be strategic and each approach claims to be right.

In exploring the question ‘What is strategy - and does it matter?’ Whittington discovered another part of the answer, identifying that the classical planning school was one perspective in four quadrants: Classical, Evolutionary, Processural and Systemic. What Whittington found, but could not yet see, was the four quadrants were a match with those in Ken Wilber’s integral analysis.

What we realise from this is we do not have (or need) one right approach to strategy, but multiple approaches, all of which are valid, depending on the circumstances, and the appropriate worldview. Four quadrants, ten schools and multiple lines of enquiry. We only need to choose the right mix to make the complex simple.

So how can we bring all the disciplines together in one frame?

For the last two weeks, I have been in Melbourne, studying with Chris Cowan and Natasha Todorovic connected with the National Values Centre in the U.S. looking into values management in large-scale systems change and the work of Dr C.W. Graves. In an insightful article they provide one example of many applications for this type of work and review the levels within worldviews of the 10 schools of strategic analysis.

When an organisation does not understand its external environment in cannot successfully grow. What we find is a ‘one paradigm - one tool’ approach may work, but if it is the wrong one for that organisation, it never will, regardless of how sophisticated an approach it might be. What we ideally need to do is be able to work across all ten disciplines to create a careful selection of processes from all the available tools, with respect for the operating worldviews.

To be strategic we need both insight and foresight. We also need to select from the best options, consciously and with clarity of the unknowns. Our strategic approach will always reflect our approach to strategy.

If our strategy approach is not making sense - it probably isn’t increasing our learning either - however we can always change schools, or at least play for a while in a different school yard, if we want to graduate - and that is what the 11th discipline - or integral strategy - is all about.

(Read more: Mintzberg’s views and his biography- and Ken Wilber)-(pdf)

“The art of progress is to preserve order admist change and to preserve change admist order.” -

Alfred North Whitehead