How To Lead A Quest

8 Intriguing Incoherence

So, the first step of pioneering thinking is to know your current business model and identity, and the context in which you operate (covered in chapter 7).

When a business model and identity are coherent with their current context, magic happens. There is a clear purpose and relevance: an enterprise generates value to serve market needs. The business model and identity make sense within this context.

But what happens if the context changes?

Will your current business model and identity remain coherent within this context? Or will this new context render things incoherent?

COHERENCY IN CONTEXT

Kirsten Dunlop and Luca Gatti — strategy consultants and authors of The Strategic Risk Framework — suggest that this coherence is the true object of strategic thinking and decision-making. This elegant framing of strategy is simply profound, and has influenced my own thinking and approach to strategy immensely.

Dunlop and Gatti highlight that this simple approach — framing strategy in terms of the coherence between a business identity and its context — has the effect of empowering decision-makers to deal with extremely high levels of complexity.

Within this ...