What do I do? I help people think through big decisions, individually or collectively, when situations are uncertain.
It’s strategy, not therapy, but there’s kinship between the two.
Learning about “what goes on within and between us”, the psychology of individuals and groups, nourishes the work – and you can find that nourishment in unexpected places.
Sometimes it’s pretty conventional: a journal article, a course at the Tavistock, formal professional gatherings such as a group relations conference.
Sometimes learning seems to find its way to you: a challenging event in your personal life yields a nugget of wisdom, a conversation with a musician provides an unexpected metaphor, or maybe you get an unexpectedly helpful book recommendation from a chatty shop assistant. (That’s how I first encountered the work of Irvin Yalom).
Sometimes you can learn a lot just from getting stuck in a transit strike.
As Ellen Ramvi puts it, “learning is getting involved in what one doesn’t know” — and there’s plenty of ways to get there.
When you take Ramvi’s journey into unknown terrain, you get to see the world anew. In strategy, Rafael Ramírez and Angela Wilkinson talk about “reperception”. George Burt and Anup Karath Nair talk about “unlearning”, or the surrender of old assumptions – even if only temporary.
The late Richard Normann went beyond the well-worn metaphor of leaders moving back and forth between the operational “dancefloor” and the strategic perspective of the “balcony”. Normann described how you could manufacture “cranes” of such great elevation that you got a fresh sense, looking down, of what was really at play in your strategic context.
(It makes you wonder if, as well as attaining new perspective from great height, you could also descend into the depths, go spelunking; see what was going on “under the surface”, drain the water from a flooded territory to reveal hidden features beneath…perhaps that’s what happens when we look at books like Robert Marshak’s Covert Processes at Work).
To think a bit about reperception, I’ve put together this listicle with five observations, like rungs on a ladder. We can use them to climb towards the unknown – whether that’s an ascent or a descent, I’ll leave to you.
- Value the disagreeable voice
When it comes to strategy, we benefit from diversity and difference in our discussions, especially when trying to get a sense of what is really going on around us. Stereoscopic vision lets us see perceive depth and integrate different points of view, so we take in more than we possibly could from monocular tunnel vision.
In a strategic context, that means avoiding homogeneity and groupthink, ensuring that a range of experiences and identities are represented, and facilitating discussions in such a way that discomfort and anxiety are tolerable.
If we imagine that, when groups form, they act almost as a single mind, with different members of the group dynamically adopting different roles or aspects on behalf of the whole – I’ll be the leader, I’m the joker, I’m the questioner, I’m the enforcer of rules – then it’s worth reflecting on how someone who voices objections or appears contrary may in fact be serving the needs of the wider collective.
That’s not just some noble character like Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men, a thoughtful figure who keeps questioning when others rush to judgment; it could also be the distasteful or abrasive figure who is doing the group’s work for them by expressing unpleasant feelings they wish to disavow. Their voice needs to be heeded, and to be considered in the context of everything the group might be thinking, feeling, and wishing to “say without saying”.
For those of us convening such conversations, this means explicitly asking for the group to attend to differences and disagreements from the outset, to reflect on them as they arise, and use them productively. Warm-ups, ground rules, and getting-to-know you exercises all provide opportunities to practice working with difference in a way which avoids harm, enriches the group, and benefits the task at hand.
- Go beyond the safety net
If we follow Ramvi and think of learning as a journey into the unknown, there’s a great temptation to clutch some kind of security blanket — a set of rules, a rigid method, an assumption we don’t want to challenge. Of course structure is important – there’s a reason why this article takes the form of a list! – but we should never let a process get so rigid that it impedes useful exploration. Knowing when to let go of a cherished procedure in order to reach out in new ways, for new insights, is an art which merits cultivation.
That’s why, for example, the Oxford Scenario Planning Approach is an approach, not a method. It might seem like academic hair-splitting, but the difference is this: while a method would impose strict steps and procedures, an approach offers a way to understand the choices we can make when designing and delivering an intervention. These choices should meet the practical needs of a specific user in a specific setting. Such an approach demands more creativity, more agency, more thought – but delivers something tailored to the situation and the moment, rather than an off-the-peg service which may not suit what is actually needed.
After all, do you really want to copy-and-paste your strategy?
There’s something that troubles me here about the ways in which we are choosing to make use of new developments in artificial intelligence. Like all tools, these are only as good as their user. As Oxford’s Chris McKenna puts it, AI can be helpful to explore ideas, but with the caveat that it is “like a border collie that is happy to fetch anything, since it will connect the dots based on a false premise.”
The question I find myself asking is: when are we using it as a comfort blanket? It’s good to automate some tasks potentially, even if only at the outset, but when are we unwisely outsourcing our thinking?
Fear of the blank page, of course, is not uncommon. It affects almost every writer. Some of us have experimented with using AI to “get us started” on a new project. I can see the value in that, but also the value in staying with the trouble and the anxiety, working it through for ourselves instead of scooping up some predigested text from a large language model.
Something similar is true of the “blank page” in strategy. As Richard Rumelt writes in the magisterial Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, “Serious strategy work […] may not take place until the wolf is actually at the door—or even until the wolf’s claws actually scratch on the door—because good strategy is very hard work.”
Yet facing the blank page, or opening the door for ourselves to spy the wolf before it arrives, might be better done directly, with all the anxiety that implies, rather than by automating a stage of the process. This is especially true if the automation is something of a “black box”, its workings and its blind spots not subject to our scrutiny.
A final thought on safety nets: it’s difficult but necessary to remember that any one of us can become loyalists, our thinking calcified by valuing allegiance to one approach over truth or insight. Schools of strategic foresight sometimes squabble like rival schools of psychotherapy. It’s easy to believe that “my way is the only right way, and there’s nothing to be learned from the others” — this is also something to watch out for. And it leads in nicely to the next rung on the listicle ladder…
- Embrace bricolage
Bricolage is one of the words used by the late Claudio Ciborra in his wonderful book The Labyrinths of Information, in which he reminds us how even the most formal or technical systems are often also characterised by hacking, tinkering, and improvisation. (He gives the example of the MIR space station).
In the social sciences, bricolage is used to mean the pragmatic appropriation of tools and techniques developed in other fields — approaches which can work alongside and together with different methods, philosophies, procedures and techniques.
My old MA supervisor, Tim Beasley-Murray, won me over to study with his institution when he made a deep-cut academic joke while presenting at an open day:
The French theorist Roland Barthes wrote about the Guide Bleu travel guides and how, when they use the word “picturesque”, they really just mean “hilly”. The convention becomes so strong that ultimately, Barthes jokes, the guide describes a tunnel going right through the heart of a mountain, and still describes it as “picturesque”.
Well, if you read a university prospectus and you see the word “interdisciplinary”, it’s like Barthes’ “picturesque” – what it really means, is just “good”.
Tim’s words let me know that studying with him would involve eclectic thinking and a willingness to cross disciplinary bounds (as well as some fairly highbrow dad jokes). This approach stood me in good stead (and, indeed, my first ever academic publication, off the back of work with Tim, was read by a book editor who then commissioned me to write travel guides).
This is another aspect of the stereoscopic vision discussed above: the embrace of difference and diversity of discipline and training as well as identity, experience, and background. A good strategic discussion can accommodate the perspectives of the engineer and the medic, the sociologist and the lawyer, the accountant and the marketer, the artist, the activist, and the auditor.
In such situations, scenarios can serve as “boundary objects” where professionals using very different frameworks and approaches can come together on the common ground of the unwritten future. The Information Security Forum, a leading cybersecurity organization, uses scenarios in their Threat Horizon product, precisely in this way – offering up visions of the future context which are useful, not just to cybersecurity professionals, but other parts of the organization, and other members of the C-suite.
Often strategy work is strangely like writing a travel guide: what do we need to know about the environment? How do we find shelter? Where do we find sustenance? What are our options? What will be a rewarding venture? Of course, you may want to know the precise elevation above sea level and the demographics of your destination – but chances are you’ll also be keen to know some history, the climate, the public transport options, the best places to eat, and the hotels to avoid.
Bricolage means finding an effective way to assemble knowledge from different sources and potentially very different, even apparently incommensurable approaches – it doesn’t mean surrendering all judgement or being indiscriminate. Knowing what to pick from different sources and how to usefully juxtapose it is, again, part of the art. Nobody looks at the restaurant menu, hors d’oeuvres through to dessert, and says: “Stick it all between two slices of bread, I’ll have an everything sandwich”.
- The learner sets the pace
Some time ago, earlier in my scenario planning career, I had the experience of spotting a powerful strategic insight – Richard Rumelt would’ve called it “the crux” – that I couldn’t get the client to truly accept. They acknowledged the point, but then shied away from fully exploring the implications; it was like watching the ends of two magnets slide off each other.
Finally, a more experienced colleague had to explain to me: “You can’t go faster than the client is willing to learn; with your experience, you may see something before they do, but until they see it for themselves, they won’t take it on board.”
As the psychotherapist Erich Fromm put it, in the phrase which gives this post its title, “How I use the dream depends on what I think the patient could understand at the moment.”
This is resonant with Wilfred Bion’s notion that sometimes, there is a thought out there which we’re not yet able to consciously think: we need to become the person who is capable of thinking it.
Strategic consulting, as much as therapy, therefore becomes a matter of cultivating the capacities, attitudes, and inclinations which will allow our client to have the previously unthinkable thought, and let them be capable of tolerating new understandings – whether of dreams, scenarios, or any other input.
Sometimes, of course, it is the consultant who needs to be more courageous. Fromm admonished students who claimed that their patient could not tolerate some comment that they were, in fact, afraid to make:
The only one who cannot take it is you, because you are afraid of sticking your neck out telling something to the patient, to which the patient might react with anger, with disturbance, and you are not sure that you are right – it is not a matter of being right necessarily – but you are not sufficiently sure of your own interpretation.
Again, it becomes a matter of remembering that one is not in the business of consolation, but helping people to see something which they previously could not – a sometimes uncomfortable process of change, involving letting something go as well as as grasping something new. It may even involve the consultant or practitioner willingly offering up a controversial interpretation which may prove invalid, simply in order that a debate can be had about what is really going on.
It’s a reminder, also, that the practitioner or consultant is always a learner too, someone getting involved with Ramvi’s unknown, the scary but exciting space of things you simply don’t know: including not knowing for sure how your next interaction with the client is going to play out.
As Rainer Funk put it, describing Fromm’s attitude to therapy, practitioners should not hide behind method, but recognise that they are co-learning afresh with each new client. The analyst should have “learned how to deal with him or herself and […be] still ready to learn rather than to hide behind a ‘psychoanalytic technique’. The analyst is his [sic] own next patient, and, for him, his patient becomes his analyst.”
- Know how to say farewell
One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
André Gide
Reperception of our context can be a wonderful thing, but what we learn from it must be taken forward – otherwise, was it really useful?
The work of saying farewell to stances, perspectives, roles, strategies, and policies which are no longer valid can be painful and full of regret, yet it is necessary. We must free our hands to grasp something new, without losing the memory of that which we once held dear.
As Elizabeth Salzberger-Wittenberg puts it in her great book Experiencing Endings and Beginnings, “Unless we are able to mourn what we have lost or about to lose, we will not be able to internalise/preserve within ourselves what has been of value in the past; nor we will be able to build on what we have gained from the past.”
With Hayao Miyazaki’s new film The Boy and the Heron coming out, I am reminded of Karl Thomas Smith’s writing on grief, a common theme in Miyazaki’s films:
These are stories of loss, played out through fantasy, to show us the truth: to show us what we need to see: when, coming in plainer terms, we might flinch and look away, these films – in all their beauty and their humour and their artistry – ask us to keep looking. To fix our eyes on the uncomfortable truth; to accept what is most difficult to accept, giving us a way to process that chaos and that pain.
Grief, after all, is the biggest myth of all; not in the sense that it is a falsehood – sadly not – but in the sense that it is necessary; as a way to work through the brutality of loss, and in the sense it runs parallel to life as we know it. One does not stop happening while the other takes hold – they are entangled, for better and for worse.
Relinquishment, true seeing through speculation or fantasy, committing ourselves to reflection even in the midst of life’s ceaseless demands, continuing a process that lets us work through and work forward: this is also the work of the strategist.
The grief we feel in this work belongs not just to the client who may bid farewell to an old role, old belief, or old way of working. It comes also, inevitably, as a result of good consultancy, facilitation, or co-design processes: in the end, the consultant or practitioner should be able to say farewell, rather than having made the client endlessly dependent on external support. As the art educator Graeme Sullivan puts it, we should be “building our own redundancy” as we help our fellow learners to build their own capacity.
This means knowing how to end a process that honours what has gone before, and ensures that the fruits of our collaboration are of use and can be carried forward.
We don’t want our endeavours to be like the train which infamously passes through Thailand’s Mae Klong market without impact on the business of the stalls. Our business is lasting change. That means thinking, on a case by case basis, about what Claudio Ciborra called “hospitality“: the ability of an organisation to host and adopt a new idea in a way that is sustainable and useful.
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Here were five reflections on strategy and reperception, structured like the rungs of a ladder which you could ascend or descend to gain a new perspective. Thank you for climbing with me into the new year. See what stays with you – and what fresh ideas you might choose to host as a result of this journey. May 2024 bring each of you all the things that you need.
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 
