Leading for Organisational Change

Chapter 10Evolution

You start a painting and it becomes something altogether different. It's strange how little the artist's will matters.

Picasso¹

You Say You Want an Evolution …

Strategy is dead! So says pretty much every business academic worth their salt these days. These days, it is all about VUCA – that is to say, our world is so volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous that it's a wonder we can put one foot in front of the other. I'm overstating of course, but it is certainly a while since any of the organisations I am closest to has undertaken meticulous months-long research and analysis and drafted a detailed five-year plan, running to hundreds of pages – an approach that was standard practice only ten years ago. This is primarily because we know that the pace and nature of change in our market and environment is such that we have to be able to change direction on a hairpin. The financial crisis in 2008 put paid to any complacency on that front.

That does not of course mean that every organisation just wakes up and reinvents itself every morning. However chaotic circumstances may feel on occasion, we are none of us, really, just making things up as we go along. Clearly, then, there is some sort of balance to be struck between a three-hundred-page gospel and some scribbles on the back of an envelope. But how to strike that balance? How much planning and articulating and fettering and tethering is ‘enough’? How can an organisation remain open to possibilities and ...