x Introduction

xi In our research, we saw that winning at the fast strategy game hinges on a few deciding differences. One such difference is high strategic sensitivity: the early awareness of incipient trends and converging forces, the acute perceptions of their importance, and the intense sense-making and reflective efforts they trigger.

p.1 Part 1: Being strategically agile

p.3 Chapter 1: The fast strategy game

p.10 Insight needs to replace foresight. The game you play appears only over time... In these emerging strategic situations, fast pattern recognition... becomes key. The world around us keeps emerging, and our perception of it keeps reshaping itself as we play... If you are fast in fitting pieces, the overall structure of the puzzle will evolve your way: you create your own future and shape the markets and the competitive landscape to your advantage.

p.17 Chapter 2: Strategic agility: the challenge

p.17 Strategic agility is most needed in markets characterized by fast changes and growing systemic interdependencies... More lasting value may come from identifying areas where complex, evolving, shifting interdependencies are likely to endure

p.20 In sum, strategic foresight remains important. It remains important to anticipate the consequences of key trends, to identify disruptions and discontinuities early, and either affect them to one's advantage, or have the lead time to adjust to them effectively and in a timely fashion... Yet, where change is fast, complex, and systemic, and stable sources of strategic advantage short-lived, strategic foresight needs to be strongly complemented by strategic insight: an ability to perceive, analyse and make sense of complex strategic situations as they develop, and be ready to take advantage of them. Heightened strategic sensitivity is required.

p.22-23 When uncertainty is extreme, and the complexity of the environment cannot be gauged, conventional strategy making and decision models no longer apply. Even developing insight becomes impossible. Simple rules of variation and selection may work better in these situations... But in the absence of enough foresight... a breakthrough can also be achieved by just probing randomly at the enemy's positions along a broad frontline, and having the simple rule to concentrate one's forces and attack where the enemy's reactions to exploratory probes are the weakest... rather than attempting to develop a comprehensive understanding of a strategic situation simply devising action rules... may well be all what can be done, and yield much better results than a late or wrong attempt at making sense of the environment.

[JLJ - Yes, when uncertainty is extreme, and the complexity of the environment cannot be gauged, simple rules of variation and selection may work better in these situations. Even better still would be if we become skilled at constructing reliable diagnostic tests of adaptability - we assume an adaptive stance, then change as our informed and intelligent guesses suggest what 'might' work better.]

p.24 Think of strategy as a theory. A theory of how to compete, how to create and capture value, and developing strategy requires theory-building skills... strategy is a theory of the future applied to an all-important sample of one... and its likely validity, before it's implemented, can only be assessed based on the quality of the process that generates it. In other words, the quality of the strategy making process is fundamental, yet it often receives little attention.

[JLJ - Perhaps strategy is theory combined with operational abilities - perhaps it is about managing all kinds of resources to develop and execute a scheme to produce an effect - profit say, or victory on the battlefield.]

p.24 Discipline in logical thinking when developing a strategic commitment, and systemic attention to a detailed "How plausible is this really?" question, help improve the quality of choices.

p.29 Strategic sensitivity and collective commitments are of little value without resource fluidity, the ability to redeploy resources quickly toward strategic opportunities as they develop. Fast decisions in complex environments call for rapid resource deployment for their implementation.

p.33-34 Strategic agility calls for three fundamental shifts in the emphasis of top management, in how they steer the firm. First, it requires a shift from foresight-driven strategic planning to insight-based strategic sensitivity, putting more emphasis on making sense of current situations as they develop than on anticipation of future strategic interactions... Third, strategic agility needs a mindset and behavior shift from resource allocation and "ownership", to resource sharing and leverage, and from a focus on budgetary games and tournaments around capital allocation to a commitment to sharing and exchange around intangible resources

p.36 Chapter 3: The dancing elephant

p.48 Agility stems from decentralized initiatives... Strategic strength stems from the ability to mobilize quickly and deploy significant resources against opportunities identified from decentralized initiatives.

p.50 According to Sam Palmisano, values are just about the only means to manage a complex multidimendional organization... The emphasis on values, therefore, and their very strong role in providing meaning and strategic direction, allowed the management process of IBM to shift from the tight control and discipline process put in place by Gerstner to a more autonomous, delegated, customer-facing process, controlled by values and norms, rather than top-down hierarchical process.

p.53 Part 2: Fostering strategic agility

p.55 Chapter 4: Sharpening strategic sensitivity

p.55-56 insight results from connection, from a rich network of creative interactions... Connectedness, experiments, and modeling do not pay off unless you are really smart about learning from external stimuli. Results come from experiments, and from playfulness with one's own position.

[JLJ - This is true for game theory.]

p.61 According to Chris Thomas, Chief Strategy Officer of Intel's Solutions Marketing Group:

You have to first pick up the most likely winners from the 360 degrees opportunity space and start supporting these intellectually and financially. Then you gradually increase investments in the most likely winner.

p.69 Overambitious target setting and the wrong type of metrics can kill new insights and opportunities too early.

p.79 Chapter 5: Building collective commitment

p.96 Chapter 6: Enabling resource fluidity

p.96 Without resource fluidity, strategic sensitivity and collective commitments toward new strategic opportunities remain useless... resource fluidity is the ability to redeploy resources quickly toward strategic opportunities as they develop. Only the ability to mobilize and reallocate resources toward new strategic opportunities with maximum fluidity makes strategic agility real. Intelligence and commitment without swift action in fast-developing strategic situations bring no advantage.

[JLJ - ...perfect ideas for game theory.]

p.101-102 On the contrary, it is very important to have clear accountability and internal key performance indicators (KPIs) for all key organizational dimensions in order to see how efficiently resources are being utilized at any given time.

p.121 Part 3: Rebuilding strategic agility

p.121 The real challenge, after all, is not just how to survive and redirect your core business once, but how to weave strategic agility into your organizational fabric.

p.123 Chapter 7: Strategic agility - lost and found

p.129 Recognizing the importance of emerging strategic insight, on the other hand, naturally leads to a desire for resource fluidity.

p.143 Chapter 8: Mobilizing minds

p.144 Beliefs are hard to challenge, and even harder to change, particularly after they become translated into action rules and routines. It is easy to remember a rule, and follow it routinely, but to forget the underlying belief. Beliefs become resilient to contradictory evidence and, over time, they are invested with an emotional value. In other words, they are not only ways to assign meaning, they also become valued as part of the system of sense-making of key individuals and of the business model of the organization. Coherent systems of beliefs... become both all-encompassing and pleasing. Attempting to change them creates a sense of loss, before any new cognition can emerge.

p.146 First, how we, human beings, make sense of something is largely tacit (nearly all our cognitive processing is unconscious) and thus hard to change purposefully... The cognitive story we have built, which is just a way to organize and summarize our interpretation, is treated as if it was reality.

[JLJ - Part of our human nature is to manufacture reality where we are lacking information, or have conflicting explanations.]

p.167 Chapter 9: Energizing hearts

p.167 Emotions are a powerful source of energy for action

[JLJ - Interesting, what if we were to 'artificially' create emotions in a machine, and use the 'intuition' produced to drive action, or at least initial opinions and probings, ...? The goal would be to produce the heuristic equivalent of 'feelings', which would then drive subsequent intelligent action.]

p.183 Chapter 10: Flexing the organization

p.183 Organizational structure follows strategy, and is the main implementation tool.

p.184 New structures enable, and even generate new strategies.

p.197: Chapter 11: Depoliticizing top management

p.207 Conclusion

p.207 companies need strategic agility most when they face complex, interdependent, fast changes. Using the cognitive lever [JLJ - of leadership, from chart below] to increase strategic sensitivity of an organization is a key to improving its ability to handle complexity and emergent systemic change.

p.221 Appendix 1: The curse of success

p.233 This appendix described how and why strategic agility "naturally" turns into strategic paralysis over time - if companies do not put in place the preventive strategic agility enablers described in chapters 4, 5 and 6.

p.234 Appendix 2: Deciding on the path to take

p.234 The first thing you should do is to analyse your current strategic agility profile.