In its essence, truth is complex. You can’t take the complexities and idiosyncrasies of the world and reduce them to black and white numbers and hope to gain any real understanding. I see this happening all the time in the sales department of many companies. Naturally the focus of salespeople is to consistently hit their goals.
In many instances I’ve seen salespeople count orders that aren’t really tied down or withhold excess orders until the next month, just to meet these rigid, predetermined goals. Instead of focusing on the needs of the customers, or even on the reality of what’s sold and what isn’t, the salespeople focus on the numbers that supposedly represent reality. Numbers can be manipulated; real people with complex wants and needs cannot.
The real problem is that quantitative tools for building strategy can’t capture the complexity of human life. They provide a wonderful rear-view mirror view of the world but it’s hard to drive a strategy into the future by looking backwards. Think about the stock market.
We’ve become so enamored with the ups and downs of the markets that we tend to forget the complex reality of what they represent. The best market analysts are not the ones who can merely recite the percentages of growth or decline, but the ones who can use their intuition to correctly interpret the reasons behind these movements.
Even the way most companies view their own structure – as a pyramid – suggests a static, top-down entity. Companies must recognize the complex world in which we live and begin to see their involvement in it in a new way.
Instead of looking at the corporate structure as a pyramid, consider seeing it as a tree: a living, growing tree whose roots are planted deeply in the reality of its environment, that has the sturdy support structure of a thick trunk, an efficient delivery system from the nutrients of the ground to the tips of the leaves and back again, and the ability to populate the ground (or market) with its products, its seeds.
The only way to welcome the role of complexity in your strategy is to rely on more organic strategic methods.
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Posted by: jonn1 | July 05, 2011 at 01:58 AM