Category: Strategy

(P4): Some Examples of Bad Strategies

An illuminated medieval page of a beheading with a large audience.

There are two major revolutionary action frameworks and one default outcome:

  • Take over the levers of government and use them for good, in any way you imagine that as possible.
  • Destroy the social framework as completely as you can and start over again from scratch.
  • The default for broken CAS is one form or another of collapse.

An example of the first is Stalinism. An example of the second is Pol Pot. Also, Mao tried to do both more or less at the same time.

The default (collapse) is the typical way that overly complex and brittle systems become simpler (in this case simpler doesn’t mean nicer). Collapse can be anything from a slow cascade over centuries to a financial collapse over a few weeks. Or the asteroid that killed a high percentage of life on earth 65 million years ago.

The first two don’t work. We keep coming back to them because we still, in our heart of hearts, think that our world is a machine and that if we treat it like a machine, we can fix it in the same way we would fix an engine that isn’t working. Maybe we will use new parts and a great mechanic. Maybe we will trash the engine and get a new one.

The default ”strategy” of change produces real simplification, but no control over how the replacement evolves or develops. So, collapse is not really a strategy, but what we get when we do nothing or ineffective somethings.

Our world isn’t a machine. Every time we try to force a complex adaptive system into a complicated one we make the same error that so many others have made and continue to make. You can’t effectively change a complex adaptive system by treating it like a machine. When you try, you make the overall system worse.

Every time.

Also, it isn’t possible to create a complex adaptive system that works and you can’t do anything to make it work. Only an evolutionary context and a significant period of time can make a complex system. To repeat, the way evolution does that is by making a relatively simple adaptive system that works first and then allowing it to evolve.

I used the John Gall Systemantics reference in this post because it is the single best resource there is out there to gain an understanding of why our immediate ideas about changing or improving systems don’t work. If you read nothing else, follow the link to the summary of John Gall’s framework. John’s books are still available, but as far as I can tell, only in paperback.

You will see echoes of John Gall’s insights in the later posts in this series.

Part 4: What Is a Strategy?

A famous, large, incoherent systems diagram of Afghanistan Stability and Counter-Insurgency Dynamics. Impossible to understand.

The slide image is NOT a Strategy!

A strategy is not an operational plan, like the one you might put together for a grant using a logic model. Instead, a strategy is a way to deal with two unavoidable realities:

  • The inherent unpredictability of the future
  • The universal scarcity of resources for what we wish to do

The further we attempt to see into the future, the more uncertainty we face, and the more our decisions to commit resources will be wrong. We try in various ways to work around this reality.

One way is to reduce the scope of the changes we try to make, using such tools as logic models.

When we create an outcome that is easy to measure, we are contracting the possibilities of change, and undermining our ability to create change that is truly strategic, that won’t be washed out by changes and trends in the larger system.

Another way is to describe in some detail the changes we want to seek over the short term while using delusional thinking to describe the ones we hope for further into the future.

A third way is to ignore some or all the larger forces we already know are out there, but which we can’t quantify or parse effectively, or that we believe we can’t change.

And there are many more non-strategic assumptions we make to help us get through our day-to-day life.

Future Strategy: The Struggle for Disability Rights in an Era of Decline and Constraint

A large number of ADAPT members discussing strategy for their Action in Washington, D.C.
ADAPT Members Preparing for Active Resistance

I believe that the core of life is the creation and sharing of meaning. It is easy to forget this core when things are going along smoothly and we can ignore most of what passes before us without any great risk.

That time is past.

We live in a period of intense volatility, and we not only lack tools for dealing with such rapid and unpredictable change, we carry with us a set of assumptions about how our society works that might have been useful as rules-of-thumb in the past, but are no longer so.

In fact, these assumptions drive us to make poor choices, triggering changes and consequences we can’t predict, and forcing more poor choices on us.

The only way to manage this astounding level of uncertainty is to craft a strategy that will provide us with a framework for making difficult and tentative decisions over and over.

Nowhere is this change in how we make choices more important than in the disability community.

As all of you are aware, our struggles to build access, inclusion, and choice into our society have stalled and retreated at the Federal level because of the actions of the current administration. But, our progress has always been incremental and hard-fought, requiring persistence and a relentless commitment to our values over decades.

Now, while persistence and relentless commitment will still be very important, there are many forces that will actively work to undermine and destroy the progress we have made.

I want to talk to you about our struggle for rights in the larger context of long-term changes in our society that are now and will be constricting our community’s social and political capacity to innovate and expand freedom and choice for ourselves. The legislative and regulatory frameworks we have used for progress in past decades are currently eroding, and it isn’t clear that we can stop that erosion, much less reverse it.

In addition, there are large social forces that will make those legislative and regulatory frameworks less effective even as we succeed in defending them against attack.

In the future, it will not be enough for us to demand our rights. We will also have to create the social frameworks within which our rights will have real meaning and through which we can live fulfilling lives of choice.

We will not be able to depend on others for the success of these efforts.

Overview Over: On To the Feature Presentation!

Big Screens of young man showing his software in a Serbian competition.
On To the Deep Framework

I’ve made my last post in the FutureStrategy Overview. Obviously, the posts from the Overview will remain available for review if the going gets tough with the deep framework posts coming next.

The full presentation of the deep framework is 56 slides long and each slide is packed with notes, resource links, quotes and what have you. I’ll be reformating the slides so they work better in a blog post. If you have questions, you can put them into the comments and I’ll answer them.

Although I would be happy to do presentations on the ideas in this deep framework, the reality is that it is a long slog as a whole, and I divided it into a number of parts, each being a presentation in itself and running about two hours per part.

I hope some of what follows will prove useful to you and our community in the years ahead.

We Need A Strategy!

What is a Strategy? It is hard to show your skill as a sailor when there is no wind. ― Richard P. Rumelt
We Need a Strategy!

Our community’s struggle in regard to the larger society is very much like the situation described in the quote. Constant efforts at resistance, while necessary, and unavoidable, will not resolve those large forces that are gradually degrading the foundation of our current forms of personal and community support.

We need more than a set of advocacy and resistance techniques, and we need much more than any savior or ideology that might exist in the larger complex system could offer.

Our usual approach to big-picture barriers is an operational plan, with tasks and measurable outcomes. But an operational plan is not nearly enough. An operational plan simplifies and reduces potential outcomes by its very nature, and ignores available resources in the pursuit of apparent predictability.

We need an approach that actually fits our community, that values our freedom and choice in support of the unique dreams of each of us.

We need a Strategy.

A strategy is a way to organize our change efforts around two unavoidable realities:

  • The unpredictability of the future.
  • The relentless scarcity of resources (in all the forms those resources might take).

Aligning our change efforts means that we match all our available resources to all of the outcomes we dream of achieving and is called a Grand Strategy.