TMS Consulting
Clearly, the purpose of a strategy is to plan for some desired future state and planning is important. However, most work in strategy makes a dangerous assumption; that the future state is predictable and therefore reachable directly by the deployment of the strategic plan.
TMS-Americas Consulting work in strategy is founded on different assumptions:
- The future is highly uncertain and unpredictable.
- Change happens through the local interactions between people in an organization.
- Detailed plans, beyond 3 months often inhibit the ability to respond effectively to changes in the organizational environment.
Given these assumptions our strategy work focuses less on the actual plan, and more on the local interactions between people where the ideas and intentions of the strategic plan are discussed, made sense of and acted upon. Even when the organizational reality demands something like a 3 or 5 year plan, we focus on what can be done at the local level to create interactions that are informed by these plans.
We emphasize the ‘process’ of planning and assisting managers to stay present to the patterns of interaction that are emerging in their environments so more effective responses to an uncertain future can be acted upon.
Areas of Focus
- Where an existing strategy or plan exists, helping the senior manager or team rethink their role in terms of an uncertain future and how they can affect local interactions to more effectively focus those interactions on the strategy at hand.
- Helping senior management reflect on the patterns of interaction within their organization and how their own behavior can affect positive change that is aligned with their strategy work.
- Development of intentions that will act as filters to inform day to day behavior to help focus on the strategy.
- Coaching senior managers to help them understand and act into an uncertain future while still being accountable for the results of their organization.
Basic Framework
We like to use the model below to depict the flowing and emergent nature of strategy within organizations, emphasizing that nothing happens in organizations outside of the interactions between people.
Applicable blog posts: Problems with the Creative Tension Model; Problems with the Creative Tension Model – A Recent Story; An Alternative Approach to Strategy – What We Do at TMS Americas
