Strategy Knotworking: A Vital Skill To Quickly Respond To Change
How shared sense-making helps us deal with “Black Swans” in times of crisis
Strategy Knotworking: A Vital Skill to Quickly Respond to Change
How shared sense-making helps us deal with “Black Swans” and other moments of sudden change.
How is that multi-year strategic plan working out for you? How does your product strategy fair in the face of a market that is suddenly upside down?
In a globalized society, seismic shifts can happen overnight. We’ve seen many examples of this in the past. But they can also happen more locally. There are many ways to respond to sudden change, but they usually don’t tap into the wisdom and experience of groups. In this post, we offer an alternative.
Black Swans and Immediate Adaptation
A “Black Swan” is an almost unpredictable event that has a huge impact and demands immediate adaptation. 0ne example was the recession of 2008 which began with the collapse of several large banks. Recessions are a good example. In our increasingly complex and interconnected world, it is increasingly likely to encounter “Black Swans”. And not just on a global scale, but also on a much smaller scale; per country, state, company, and team. Black Swans can take the shape of rapidly emerging technologies, new laws, competitors, or sudden technical problems. For example, when a serious vulnerability was discovered in Citrix in December 2019 that took more than a month to be patched, companies had to move fast to prevent hackers from penetrating their networks. On a more local scale, the GDPR Privacy Law seriously impacted the business model of companies that depended on the collection of personal information.
“In our increasingly complex and interconnected world, it is increasingly likely to encounter ‘Black Swans’.”
Constrained adaptation
Unfortunately, most organizations lack the skills to rapidly respond to sudden change. Adaptation takes a long time. Information about a crisis first has to travel up the organizational hierarchy, to be decided on by the people in the board room, only to trickle back down to the people doing the work. Or adaptation first requires the formation of specialized “task forces” or “change initiatives” to analyze, plan and then implement a solution. In the meantime, the world has moved on.
And worse, the skills to rapidly inspect and adapt are never developed throughout the organization. We can do better! But what is the alternative?
Liberating Structures & Strategy Knotworking
Liberating Structures are a coherent repertoire of 33 microstructures that exist to unleash and engage everyone in shared sense-making and problem-solving. They are curated by HENRI LIPMANOWICZ and Keith McCandless together with a large community of practitioners around the world. With their deep roots in complexity science, they offer a powerful approach to un-constrain adaptation in times of crisis.
Rather than relying only on the skill of the people in the board room, Liberating Structures make it possible to include the perspective, creativity, and experience of everyone in the organization - without necessarily losing speed.
Within the realm of Liberating Structures, Strategy Knotworking is a framework for shared sense-making and strategizing. It can be used on any organizational level, by entire organizations or even groups of organizations. It purposefully uses Liberating Structures to include as many people (and thus perspectives) as possible in answering six core questions:
- Purpose: What is the fundamental justification for the existence of our work?
- Context: What is happening around us that demands creative adaptation & change? What is critical and uncertain about our future?
- Challenges: What are the paradoxical realities we must face in order to make progress?
- Baseline: Where are we starting, honestly? What are the current assets, positive deviations, and areas of strength we can build from?
- Ambition: Given our purpose, what seems possible now?
- Action & Evaluation: What are we going to now spend time & resources on? What do we need to stop doing? How can we measure & evaluate the health & vitality of our practice moving forward?
These questions are answered with a string of Liberating Structures. This can take a morning, a day, or multiple days. It can also be done incrementally and iteratively over a period of time. Participants bring in warm data from their work areas and work together to make sense of what it means and where adaptations are necessary.
“Rather than relying only on the skill of the people in the board room, Liberating Structures make it possible to include the perspective, creativity, and experience of everyone in the organization — without necessarily losing speed.”
Liberating Structures can easily scale interactions to groups of any size. Teams can use Strategy Knotworking to reassess their work in relation to what is happening in their environment. And entire organizations can use it to evaluate and shift strategies and identify new possibilities.
A vital skill
Strategy Knotworking is hugely interesting as a conceptual approach to shared sense-making and strategizing. More importantly, it helps groups of any size build the skills they need to adapt to sudden change. And we need a lot of that right now. When these skills are no longer constrained to the board room, organizations become more antifragile to black swans.
