Limits - Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything - page 100

Organizational Strategy
Strategy is everyone's business. It's not just a corner office, ivory tower abstraction. It shapes be-
lief and behavior at all levels. A strategy is a plan to achieve a goal. It's easy to have a bad plan,
but is it even possible for an organization to have no plan? Of course, it's also easy to get hung
up on semantics. Strategy and planning are often vilified by people with narrow definitions who
fail to see that Agile is a strategy and Lean is a plan. These folks are blind to the next larger con-
text.
In Strategy Safari , Henry Mintzberg uses the blind men and an elephant to kick off a tour of ten
schools of thought within the discipline of strategic management. He shows each school is valid
but incomplete. A strategy is a plan, but it's also a pattern, a position, and a perspective. No real
strategy can be purely deliberate (prescriptive) or purely emergent (descriptive) since one pre-
vents learning while the other prevents control.
Strategy formation is judgmental designing, intuitive visioning, and emergent learning; it is about trans-
formation as well as perpetuation; it must involve individual cognition and social interaction, coopera-
tion as well as conflict; it has to involve analyzing before and programming after as well as negotiating
during; and all of this must be in response to what can be a demanding environment. Just try to leave any
of this out and watch what happens! cxxxiii
Strategy is a balancing act that's as difficult as it is unavoidable. While we tend to focus on cor-
porate strategy, every team and individual is responsible for strategy. Of course we should
know and align with the overall strategy. And we can serve as sensors by providing feedback
during rollout. We might also offer insight before implementation, because strategy and tactics
are intertwingled. If a plan is invalidated by reality, it's our responsibility to speak truth to
power. At the same time, we must make plans to achieve our own goals. There is no such thing
as a purely tactical unit. When we pretend there's a boundary between strategy and tactics, we
grant people permission not to think.
As information architects, it's vital we embrace this challenge given the intimate relationship
between structure and strategy. Even in the industrial era, structure played a larger role than
most folks realize. Alfred Chandler's Strategy and Structure, one of the most influential manage-
ment topics of the twentieth century, defined structure as follows.
Structure can be defined as the design of organization through which the enterprise is administered. This
design, whether formally or informally defined, has two aspects. It includes, first, the lines of authority
and communication between the different administrative offices and officers and, second, the informa-
tion and data that flow through these lines . cxxxiv
Chandler described in painstaking detail the growth and administration of the largest corpora-
tions in the United States over a period of one hundred years, and his bestselling topic gave rise
to the familiar expression that “structure follows strategy.” Sadly that wasn't his point. Thirty
years later, in a new introduction, he set the record straight.
Structure had as much impact on strategy as strategy had on structure. But as changes in strategy came
chronologically before those of structure, and perhaps also because an editor at The MIT Press talked me
into changing the title from Structure and Strategy to Strategy and Structure , the topic appears to focus on