Seeing in systems is an unnatural act.
We are essentially linear creatures -- Western society fosters and rewards linear behavior and performance from kindergarten on. Our educational system teaches and grades on it; our market strategies are positioned and executed on it; and it drives policy decisions throughout government, non-government, and business settings.
A linear frame of reference is part of our subconscious bedrock.
But 2021-2022 is demonstrating that we are living through something very unusual -- a historic break, enervation at an epic scale, a stark and sudden shift in our awareness of the rules of real reality.
And it's raising deep and concerning questions about leadership and strategic fit across the span of human endeavor.
What's troubling is that in trying to answer these questions, even at a technical level, the underlying regime of power is thematized, the calcification becoming thicker, the institutionalization of decay and decomposing economic theories stronger.
In a mostly unselfconscious way, the managers of The System articulate their preference for a particular configuration, or non-configuration, of market forces. It's a default conceptual pattern born from generations of experience and education on the division of labor as the path to optimization, of breaking things apart to study and improve.
And so a fragmented past is confirmed as portal to the future.
Legacy narratives have veto power over the new, the same assemblage of words controlling the conversation and the content. This helps explain the methodological persistence keeping us tweaking the edges of obsolete modes of being, and then being surprised when "strategy" fails.
We're confusing power with PowerPoint.
Our fears become images, images become projections, and projections as they expand blur into indistinctiveness and empty discourse, the cliche that swarms at high altitudes, inaction hiding behind a halo of virtue and empathy.
But at some point, we need to get off the comfortable mental furniture keeping the Standard Model alive and start seeing and thinking with a new set of attitudes toward the real reality we all share. A whole new taxonomy is needed, not for its own sake, but to semantically separate conventional approaches from novel ones, and to generate different strategic concepts that have leverage to create new value.
Seeing and thinking in terms of systems is the mother lode to mine for a new imagination, the kind of creative leadership that solves for strategic atrophy. This isn't a moral argument about "doing the right thing,” but an understanding that radical forces are changing not just the rules of the game, but the game itself.
The skill in short supply is not technical, but visionary, able to articulate and propagate a new direction, and manage the transition to market innovation. Because simply hanging loose at the crap tables and hoping for the best is the low-probability path to strategic (and professional) success 🤘
/ jgs
John G. Singer is Executive Director of Blue Spoon Consulting, a global leader in Strategy and Innovation at a System Level. Blue Spoon was the first to apply systems theory to solve complex market access and integration challenges in the pharmaceutical industry.