Strategisk Ledelse

Strategisk Ledelse 12. undervisningsgang – 26. november 2012

Lectures, Autumn 2012

In a nutshell • According to Complex Responsive Processes, Strategic Management is the governance of organisations on the basis of global second-order abstractions as gestures made by leaders and managers which evoke many, many local responses constituting the ordinary politics of everyday life • From this perspective, the word strategy refers to the sometimes articulated, generalised, thematic patterns of governance which people are taking up and making particular in their many, many local interactions across a whole population over long time periods

In a nutshell • Changes in strategic generalisations emergein the local particularising activities of people in a population, and leaders and managers becoming aware of this evolution may articulate these changes in the further development of their abstract maps and models. • When people belonging to a small group interact with each other locally in ways that affect larger populations over long time periods we can classify this interaction as strategising

SCT as Second order abstraction • SCT is not based on a notion of the ‘whole’ as a imaginative construct • It is based on a notion of the ‘whole’ organisation as either a system ‘thing’ with a boundary that actually exists or as a powerful hypothesis according to which an organisation thought about ‘as if’ it were a system or thing with a boundary • Whole organisations are thought of as agents independent of the people actually acting

SCT as Second order abstraction • The move of thoughts, in terms of stereotypes such as industries and markets, does make it possible to talk in much simpler ways about the strategic actions which groups of people in each organisation are taking or might take in the future, and it makes it possible to measure generalised activities as well as carry out highly sophisticated forms of analysis • These second-order abstractions do affect what people do, but the danger is that our attention is so exclusively focused on abstractions that we no longer even aware that they are abstractions and so we become blind to we as people are actually doing

SCT as Second order abstraction • SCT is based on the idea, that leaders and managers can choose both articulation and imaginative constructs and also, t some extent, the outcomes produced by people acting upon these generalised themes, a possibility denied by the theory of CRP • All prescribed steps in SCT are therefore abstract operations on abstract simplifications and standardised categories • Looking at these activities from a CRP perspective, we could understand them all as formulations or articulations of generalised patterns of interaction emerging across a population

The role of strategic planning • In literature and in the ways managers talk, strategic planning means deciding on some kind of population-wide outcome for some long-term period ahead. • Once formulated, the plan is then implemented • The assumption is, that it is possible to design population-wide patterns well before they are realised and this in turn implies that is possible to predict the outcomes of action taken now to a degree useful enough to enable a choice now between one action and another • Local interaction is then understood as the processof implementing the plan or design

The role of strategic planning • A CRP Perspective emphasises the unpredictability of long-term, population-wide patterns, holding that any design or plan for these patterns – that is, for the organisation as a ‘whole’ – can only achieve with regard to short-term, repetitive and thus reasonably predictable activity • Strategic plans are second-order abstractions taking the form of maps and models

Possible roles of strategic plans etc • Instead of being causes of what happens, plans and designs may well amount to fantasies whose main function is to serve as social defences against anxiety • The process of formulating long-term strategic plans may themselves form a particular organisational game in which people are unreflectively preoccupied • Strategic plan documents may also serve a purpose as rhetorical artefacts. They may be used in the ordinary daily politics of organisational life to persuade others to agree on certain actions

The role of strategic planning • We must think much more carefully about what we think we are doing when we articulate long-term plans for whole populations and believe that we can thereby change those whole populations • The CRP view turns the dominant discourse on its head. Instead of change occurring as the result of the plan, change programme or vision of leaders or dominant coalitions, change emerges in many local interactions in which leaders and the most powerful are very influential participants, but participants! • The CRP theory does not lead to a prescription of abandoning strategic planning

The learning org as 2nd order abstct • Just as with SCT, the theory of the organisational learning processes also cast in terms of the abstract notion of ‘the organisation’ • Particular abstractions involved: • Systems thinking • Personal mastery • Mental models • Shared vision • Team learning • The learning organisation is therefore as much as an abstraction of SCT

Knowledge and organisations • The notion of intellectual capital is clearly an abstraction as are the models of knowledge underlying it and the proposals of ways to measure it • The theory of CRP is based on the argument that meaning, and therefore knowledge, arises in the local, detailed, ordinary communicative interaction of people in organisations in the living present • Knowledge cannot be grasped, owned by anyone or traded in any market, and its creation is a process of communicating and power relating that is both stimulating and anxiety provoking at the same time

Knowledge and organisations • It may serve some purpose to talk in abstract terms about knowledge, but our attention really needs to be directed to the wider processes we actually experience if we are not to undertake knowledge Management actions which are almost entirely fictions • The CRP perspective, on the other hand, holds that tacit and explicit knowing are facets of the same communicative process and, therefore, that it makes no sense to talk about them separately or to believe that one is converted into the other

Institutions and legitimate structures of authority • The dominate discourse on organisations often proceeds in terms of the second-order abstractions of markets, cultures, social forces and social structures where these abstractions are generally reified so that we slip into the habit of regarding organisations, cultures, societies, forces and structures as things • We may even anthropomorphise them and come to think of them as organisms with their own lives quite apart from out own • The perspective of CRP avoids such anthropomorphising and reifying and does not regard routines and habits as causal powers with regard toour interactions

Institutions and legitimate structures of authority • Social forces, social structures, routines and habits can all be understood as generalisations that are particularised over and over again in each specific situation we find ourselves in • From a CRP perspective one understands institutionalised instruments, or technologies, of power to be just such generalised / idealised / habitual figurations of power relations • They too are iterated and particularised in each present and is in such particularisations that they evolve • They are not to be found as things or forces outsideour experience of interaction but only in that

Institutions and legitimate structures of authority • Local interactions form and are formed by population-wide patterns of power relations expressed in the identity creating dynamics of inclusion and exclusion which are always reflections of ideologies • Ideology is constituted in the paradoxical interplay of people acting on desires, norms and values as restrictions, compulsions and voluntary commitments to choices of action • It is these complex responsive processes of relating that constitute the game in which we are all daily immersed

Strategy as identity narrative • Earlier we saw, that strategy having to do with how and what an organisation becomes whatever it becomes, which fundamentally is a matter of identity • Identity answer the questions • Who are we • What are we doing together • Strategy can be understood as the evolution of the iterated and potentially transformed patterns of identity emerging in local interaction • All organisational activity can be understood as conversational interaction, and this includes the activities of strategising

Strategisk Ledelse