Skills For Expanding Strategic Thinking

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Skills For Expanding Strategic Thinking

• 1st April 2004
• Sarah Lewis Stuart Schofield

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Course Objectives

• By the end of the day, participants should
• Be able to use physical constructions to express
  existing mental models and to explore future
  possibilities
• Be able to use Appreciative Inquiry to
  co-construct attractive possible futures
• Understand the relevance of such activities to
  strategic development
• Have identified other opportunities to use these
  methods to create possibilities

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Outline

• Introduction to the Theory of Appreciative
  Inquiry and LEGO Serious Play
• The A.I. Process - Discovery
• The A.I. Process - Dreaming
• Lunch
• The Science of Serious Play
• The A.I. Process - Design
• The A.I. Process - Destiny
• Reflections on the Day and End

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Theoretical Basis

• Constructionism
• Constructivism
• Social Constructionism

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Constructivism and Constructionism

• Constructivism
• Developed by Jean Piaget
• Knowledge is not acquired bit by bit, it is
  constructed into coherent robust frameworks
  called knowledge structures
• we are theory builders, constructing and
  rearranging knowledge based on our experiences on
  the world
• Constructionism
• Developed by Seymour Papert (based upon Piagets
  work)
• Learning happens when we are engaged in
  constructing products external to ourselves
• Better learning does not come from finding better
  ways of teaching or instructing, but from giving
  the learner better opportunities to construct
• Concrete thinking complementary to abstract
  thinking

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Social Constructionism

• Reality is socially constructed
• We create our realities in relationship and
  communication
• We see what we talk about
• Its a multi-verse not a universe
• Meaning is context bound
• We seek always to make sense and to go on
• Organisations are networks of conversation
• The future is socially constructed
• Strategy is a particular form of talk

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Social Constructionist based methodologies

• Working with metaphors and Stories
• Lego Serious Play
• Appreciative Inquiry

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• Metaphors and
• Story-Making

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Story-making Storytelling

• Storytelling
• The preferred sense-making currency of human
  relationships among internal and external
  stakeholders Boje (1991)
• The lens though which action is understood
• Socializing, bonding and organizational
  identification

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Metaphors

• The Metaphor
• Understanding experience in terms of something
  else
• Generating new ways of understanding
• Metaphor for a metaphor
• The torch
• Casting light on some perspectives, but leaving
  others in the dark

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• An Introduction To Appreciative Inquiry

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Appreciative Inquiry
Discover and Value the best of what is
Affirmative Topic Choice
Dreaming What might be
Destiny What will be
Design through Dialogue What should be
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The four D model

• Discovery Discover and disclose positive
  capacity
• Dreaming A sense of how things could be
• Design Creation of the ideal organisation
• Destiny An inspired movement

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• An Introduction To Serious Play

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(No Transcript)
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LEGO Serious Play

• What is LEGO Serious Play?
• A dynamic approach to utilising metaphors and
  story-telling to generate strategic ideas
• Why Use LEGO Serious Play?
• Stimulates imagination in order to solve real
  business problems
• Provides new insights into how your company
  operates today and challenges executives think
  about the future
• Enables executives to communicate their issues
  and share perspectives - Making the most of the
  knowledge present in the room

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• Strategy As Socially Constructed

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Strategy As Socially Constructed Stories

• Both describe a sequence of events with classic
  archetypal figures (E.g. champions, sponsors, old
  guard and change agents )
• Theres an implied author (traditionally the
  boss) an implied reader (us).
• The telling of a story or strategy can
  fundamentally change peoples choices and
  actions, often in unconscious ways
• Strategy is a creative process, not a deductive
  process
• Emotions, beliefs, relationships and all things
  human play a part in strategy processes

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Appreciative Inquiry
Discover and Value the best of what is
Affirmative Topic Choice
Dreaming What might be
Destiny What will be
Design through Dialogue What should be
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• Discovery

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Discovery

• Identifying the best of what is, what works
• Creating and amplifying accounts of the good, of
  peak experiences
• Affirming good things (by paying attention,
  appreciating)
• Creating data
• Creating a launch pad for the future
• Creating strategic possibilities
• Generating hope and other good emotions

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• Dreaming

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Dreaming

• Imagining possible futures, in detail (positive
  anticipatory images)
• Using discovery launch pad
• Affirming good things (by paying attention,
  appreciating)
• Playing with possibility, creating data, creating
  change
• Shared positive experience
• Creating strategy
• Generating hope and other good emotions

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• Strategy
• The Science of Serious Play

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The Building Blocks
Play always serves a purpose Metaphors StoryMakin
g
Play
Construction
Learning and Development Theories
Imagination
The source on new knowledge
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Strategy As Imagination

• Descriptive
• Evoking images to describe the outside world
• Identifying patterns and regularities in data
• Creative
• Seeing what is NOT there
• Creating new ways of being
• Challenging
• Overturning the rules, wiping the slate clean
• Starting afresh instead of building on what is
  there
• De-constructing the known
• New knowledge is created in the dynamic and
  unpredictable interaction between the three
  dimensions of imagination

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Strategy as Mental Models Shared Visions -
Peter Senge

• Shared Mental Models
• Bring key assumptions about the business to the
  surface
• Shared Vision
• Top-Down visioning is always disappointing
• Visions that are truly shared grow as by-products
  of interactions of individual visions
• Advocacy an Enquiry
• Advocates who can inquire into others visions
  open the possibility for the vision to evolve and
  become larger than our individual visions

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• Design

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Design

• Linking future and present
• What are we doing now that makes that future
  (those futures) more or less likely?
• Affirming good things (by paying attention,
  appreciating)
• If we were like that, how would we be organized?
• Shared positive experience
• What can we do now, what can I do now?
• Living strategy

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• Destiny

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Destiny

• Achieving coherence and co-ordination
• Appreciating social nature of change, working
  with energy and flow - creative messiness
• Appropriate processes of coherence (story, story
  board, action plan, provocative propositions)
• Appropriate processes of co-ordination
  (communication, relationship, working parties,
  meetings)
• Strategy in action

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Destiny - Taking this forward

• How will what you have done today affect what you
  will do tomorrow?
• How will what you have done today affect your
  practice?
• How would you describe any strategic
  inspirations,
• affects, developments from today?
• Work in pairs and present back any way you like
  talk, poem, mime, LEGO etc.

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Role of consultant

• Creative not curative
• Focusing on what works, seeking the best
• Working with stories, language, words, emotions,
  images
• Affecting relationship and belief systems of
  meaning and action
• Generous, curious, appreciative, systemic
  helping create useful accounts in the present
  about the past to enhance the future

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Implications for managers and leaders

• What you look for is what you will find
• What you talk about is what you will create
• More than one account can exist, none is the
  truth, all may be true
• Conversation/communication contains moral order
• Affect action through communication
• Pull is more powerful than push
• Emotion, belief and values are the bedrock of
  motivation
• I want (desire) is more generative than I
  must (compulsion)