Dr. Earl R. Smith II

Dr. Earl R. Smith II
Managing Partner, The Federal Circle
DrSmith@Dr-Smith.com
Dr-Smith.com

When you are facing a vexing challenge, sometimes the best strategy is to get on the phone, gather a brain trust and meet over drinks. These casual and unstructured session will often give you the key understandings that will make the challenge far more manageable. It’s a simple idea with powerful potential.

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Whenever I encounter an interesting or particularly vexing problem, I draw together people whose intellect and experience I trust. Over the years I have formed dozens of these ‘mission-impossible brain trusts’. They focus on what I consider important issues – particularly ones that have become a burr under my saddle – if you know what I mean. It helps me sort out complex challenges and keeps me from drinking my own bath water. The quid pro quo for the team members is that they get fresh thinking on challenges that they may not even have recognized. It tends to be a win-win all around!

The format of these sessions was set long ago – I bring a question of substance – lay it out on the table – everybody takes a first swipe at it – then the floor is open. The rules are simple but enforced. There is no such thing as a bad idea or bad place to start. Every idea is considered – we never want to discard a potentially productive line simply because it was poorly stated or initially described from the wrong angle. So, after the initial forays, the group generally gets down to following each of the approaches. Sometimes sub-groups will break out and with really good questions people start swapping chairs.

These groups are much more productive if populated by experienced hands. But the mix needs to include both conservative and explosive thinkers. And, as moderator, one of my jobs is to make sure that the latter does not charge too far ahead of the former. Balanced dialogue that dives deeply into the challenge put before the group is the objective. Sometimes that is a tough goal to achieve but, for the most part, the group helps me move toward it.

First Round

A while back I organized a discussion group to focus on an issue that had been bothering me. I suspected that some really heavy lifting might be involved so I assembled a particularly serious group – a kind of mission impossible ‘A’ team. We met for the first time over drinks. There were several current and past CEOs, a VP of Planning, a couple of process consultants and a person who had run a major non-profit. When the group assembled, the question that I placed before them was:

“How do you effectively assure the holistic integration of strategic and tactical planning?”

Everybody’s first cut was fairly predictable. There were mutterings about ‘optimization’ and ‘seamless integration’. Lots of focus on the need to make sure that the strategic and tactical plans meshed – grousing about silos and insular perspectives – and more than one reference to this or that system for planning. But, the longer the group talked, the less useful these approaches seemed.

The group quickly realized that the question was far more complex than any of us (including me) had initially assumed. We also came to see that it was a far more important and subtle question than it had seemed on the surface. This was clearly not a question about what kind of dressing you want on your salad. It was more like asking ‘what kind of a person do you really want to become and why aren’t you becoming that person?’

We came to the conclusion that there was a serious flaw in the way the discussions about planning from a holistic perspective were being framed. Interestingly, the consensus quickly developed that this was not so much a question of inadequate process analysis or design. A suggestion was made and accepted that we should focus on the roles of various ‘visions’ or ‘world views’ in the overall planning process. This required a return to some very basic issues and the evolution of a new vision. But I am getting ahead of my self.

The initial session ended up with an agreement to work the challenge and to tap into our various resource networks. We agreed to adjourn for a week and try to get as many responses as possible prior to the next session.

I assumed the role of secretary and within seventy-two hours results started pouring in. For my part, I posted the question on Linked In and got a pile of responses. I also circulated it to selected contacts. Other group members were doing the same. By the time the second meeting approached we had some one hundred and sixty-plus pages of comments and suggestions. From the phone and e-mail traffic alone it was clear that we were onto something important.

Round Two

For our second meeting I arranged a large conference room. We were going to need lots of space and fewer distractions. There were at least three slide presentations summarizing data and lots of hand-out materials. As the group assembled I caught a sense of excitement in the air. Intense conversations flared up here and there – people became animated during them.

I called the meeting to order and outlined the ground rules. Our first objective was to present findings – no rush to conclusions until all the data was on the table. So during the next hour or so each member in turn displayed their ‘haul’. Much of it was similar to our initial, discarded focus but every now and then a more ‘global’ vision would show its face.

After the presentations, the group decided to focus on and rough out that ‘global’ vision. It was an important step that allowed the insights that came. Our general agreement was:

‘Let’s not focus on the planning process – everybody does that – let’s think about holistic planning from a global resourcing rather than a structure and process point of view’.

This focus was based on a widely held suspicion. The group was concerned that starting at any point in the process would taint our approach to other parts. The research for my PhD thesis came into play. I had worked to develop an alternative to comparative cultural analysis – the rub here being that every comparison is done by someone in one of the cultures being compared – and you can guess how that informs their conclusions.

As a group, we were determined to avoid the ideology of particular disciplines or cultural biases. Early on I had introduced a quote from Lotfi Zadeh (the father of fuzzy logic):

“When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail”.

The Question Restated

The group went back to the original question and started to rework it. The idea was to try to frame it in such a way that a focus on the ‘global vision’ would naturally be forced front and center. By deciding to think about the resourcing rather than the structure of the process the group adopted the military maxim:

Amateurs talk about tactics – professionals focus on logistics. And, in this case the group decided, logistics begins with the question of ‘vision’ resourcing.

We began to think about the resources (visions or world-views) that had to be present (both quantitatively and qualitatively) if planning was to have any chance to be ‘holistically integrated from the strategic to the tactical’. The general consensus was that there were certain components that had to be present if planning was to have any chance of being productive and effectively integrated front to back.

But there was something else in play as well – a shadow focus. The group had also begun to think about the enormous costs of provincial or ‘faux-holistic’ planning. In a fevered diversion, we took turns describing how a minor error in judgment or a lack of consideration of this or that critical issue could set the entire process off on a very non-productive direction.

This idea was highlighted by a group member who had recently had a very expensive car stop operating because of a failure of a small and rather inexpensive part – which it turned out, was poorly engineered. In complex systems, the failure of apparently non-critical parts can have catastrophic effects.

So now the sub-question became:

What were the conditions a priori that could increase the chances of success for a holistic planning process?

Logistics first – then strategy and tactics! As a first step we tried to find the knots at the two ends of the ‘rope’.

The Knots at the Ends of the Rope – Visionaries and Theater Commanders

The conversation took a decisive turn when we agreed that there were at least two fundamentally different understandings of the world implied by the restated question. The first we labeled the ‘strategic view’ or the ‘view from 60,000 feet’ while the second became the ‘theater commander’s view’ or the ‘view from 6,000 feet’. We agreed to work under the assumption that these were the major terminal ‘nodes’ in the process.

We first considered the ‘view from 60,000 feet’. Our first effort was to identify people who were successful practitioners in it space. Most of them are called either futurists or visionaries. We discarded the former and decided on the latter because a suggestion was made that there were people who, by focusing on the past, were visionaries for the future. Many names were bandied about. Some of them were Gene Roddenberry, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, Henry Kissinger, Buckminster Fuller, Isaac Asimov, Margaret Mead, B.F. Skinner, Nicholas Negroponte, Arthur C. Clarke, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Newton, Einstein and Descartes.

We decided to apply a set of screens to help identify those ‘visionaries’ who had, or currently were, providing insights that would be useful in driving the process of holistic business planning. This turned out to be much more of a challenge than we had first thought. The question quickly became ‘is apparent relevance or demonstrated accuracy more important’? In other words, when you are betting on the future, would you follow the lead of a ‘visionary’ that seemed to be making sense within what you understood to be the current trends (even if they were mostly unproven as a seer) or would you go with another who is saying things that only marginally make sense but who has a history of being right when it comes to identifying serious disruptive shifts or abrupt course changes?

The group decided to bet on the latter – primarily because we considered the problem of ‘faux visionaries’ or ‘legends in their own minds’. This decision lead us to require that, in order to qualify as a true ‘visionary’, a person would need to have a track record of being right and a reputation for truly independent thinking. Keep in mind that we were working on the problem of designing a holistic approach to planning that would effectively integrate the strategic and the tactical. Our judgment was that if the process did not begin with a truly visionary understanding of the advancing world, the process was going to be fundamentally flawed.

Two degrees off course and you miss paradise and sail off into the vastness of the open ocean!

All of the people that we initially named were proven sources of insight into the likelihood of this or that new development becoming the new norm. But in order to arrive at the true ‘upper end of the rope’ we decided to think in terms proposed by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. For those of you who haven’t read it, Kuhn observed that “a scientific community cannot practice its trade without some set of received beliefs.” Further he suggested that these beliefs form the foundation of an “educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice”.

Normal Science, according to Kuhn, “is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like” and scientists take great pains to defend that assumption.

In contrast to ‘normal science’, Kuhn defined a ‘scientific revolution’ as “a non-cumulative developmental episode in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one”. He suggested that a scientific revolution that results in paradigm change is analogous to a political revolution that results in an entirely new form of government.

The group agreed that those individuals who have a proven capability to anticipate and accurately describe advancing ‘paradigm shifts’ were the ones we were looking for.

One thing we easily agreed on is that it takes years of thinking and re-thinking about the world from a global perspective to develop an even passably useful strategic vision. There are thinkers who focus on this level and, over many years, develop a sure grasp of the likely direction and intentionality of global systems. Most of them dedicate their lives to the process and the good ones operate without an ideological agenda. The group agreed that such animals are rare and could name only about a dozen that might qualify.

Another quick agreement was on the danger of too loosely defining a paradigm shift. Those of us who had read Kuhn’s striking introduction to the second edition of his book remember well his regret over the misuse of the term paradigm. It got so, at least according to some pundits, that there were several paradigm shifts every day. As a friend of mine was fond of observing, “A paradigm here and a paradigm there and you are still a couple of nickels short of half a dollar! Paradigms should be made of sterner stuff.” So we decided to be purist about it and adopt Kuhn’s proffered narrow definition – “When paradigms change, the world itself changes with them”.

Clearly the group was now focusing on a specific kind of planning – one that attempted to look ‘over the horizon’ and ‘beyond the logical implications of currently known trends’. We realized that our focus had become similar to that of the senior management teams of trans-global companies and national governments. The planning we were now talking about strove to anticipate, mitigate the disruptive effects of and, if possible, take advantage of the displacements caused by highly disruptive paradigm shifts.

With the definition of ‘visionary’ fairly well roughed out, the group shifted focus to the knot at the other end of the rope. The second world view – ‘view from 6,000 feet’- was seen as being far more ideologically proscribed and certainly based on the concepts of normal science. These were managers of practitioners of a very wide range of ‘normal sciences’. If the ‘visionary’ was the architect then the ‘theater commander’ was the construction project supervisor. Their troops are people who are trained in specific disciplines – following established procedures and applying, within strict limits, what Thomas Kuhn referred to as ‘normal science’.

To be clear, the group decided to focus a bit back from the very end of the rope – the platoon-level foot troops that make up the front-lines of any implementation effort. The theater commanders were interesting to us because they managed a widely divergent set of resources and skill-sets that had to be closely coordinated. These individuals ran large and complex operations mostly on a virtual basis.

Much like the ‘visionaries’, the group agreed that these theater commanders took a very long time to mature. Although they may have begun their careers in a single discipline, their contribution to the process was the identification, evaluation, deployment and management of a wide range of resources in order to implement a complex plan targeted towards achieving extraordinary results. It takes years of experience to develop these capabilities.

One thing the group found very interesting about theater commanders is that they seemed to be the first major node along the rope whose focus is predominately virtual. By that we meant that they assemble teams of experts across a very side range of disciplines – most of which focus in well defined bodies of ‘received knowledge’ – but their own expertise is in the management of these diverse disciplines.

A group member suggested that the theater commanders were very much like very accomplished translators – a kind of uber-translator. They represented the first ‘focus node’ – meaning that they transmitted the orders, requirements, schedules, etc. down the line – translating them into ‘local speak’ in the process. They also communicated results, failures, anomalies, unexpected challenges, etc. back up the line and into ‘strategic-speak’ in the process.

Oil and Water

Once we had agreed on the distal nodes of the planning process, the group turned to considering how well these distinct world views collaborate. It quickly became apparent that the distance between the two was creating some fairly aberrant behaviors in an attempt to bridge the gap.

Purveyors of each world view regularly attempt to adopt the perspective and behavior of the other. Architects occasionally pick up a hammer and theater commanders attempt to think like generals – usually with disappointing results in both cases.

There was a sense that, among theater commanders, the strategic vision had to be an integral part of the planning process – but an inadequate structure and resourcing to make it so. Many of these ‘reinvention-out-of-necessity’ attempts were clearly visible in mid-size and larger consulting firms. Consultants had established advisory boards of ‘visionaries’ to try to bring the ‘truly visionary’ into their practice. Others had simply adopted this or that world-view and become ‘forceful advocates’ for it. In most cases the results were simply a consulting firm with a gimmick.

Some members of the group were also familiar with ‘visionaries’ who had started a consulting firm to help translate their visions into practicable knowledge. Several came to mind almost immediately. The one which we focused the most attention on was Kissinger Associates, the New York City-based international consulting firm founded by Henry Kissinger. Here was a ‘visionary’ who had founded a company to advise clients on strategic issues and help them plan for advancing paradigm shifts.

The discussion focused on the personal history of Dr. Kissinger – in an effort to establish why he was able to accomplish what many others found so difficult. Something important came out of that part of the discussion.

The group agreed that there is no linear progression from one world view to the other. In other words, a very experienced theater commander does not very often evolve into a strategic visionary and a visionary does not very often become an effective theater commander.

The training is different – the accumulated experience is different as well – and the required knowledge and patterns of thought are radically different. “It would be like arguing that if you increased your proficiency in English enough you would suddenly start speaking French”, one member observed. And, though the nit-pickers among us would have liked to pull apart the metaphor, we agreed that the preserved truth was more important than the ego exercises on offer. The lesson in all of this was quite clear:

A marlin cannot fly and an eagle cannot live under water. That does not make the marlin less because it is not an eagle or the eagle greater because it is not a marlin. Both are necessary to the process – both are important to the extent that they are potent as who they are.

Inherent Schizophrenia

Roses are red, violets are blue
I’m schizophrenic and so am I…

By the time the session began to wind down, it was apparent that we were focused on a highly complex and subtle process that, in order to be reliably effective, had to find some way of integrating two radically divergent world perspectives. If a planning process which focused ‘over the horizon’ was to function holistically, there needed to be a bridge across the chasm – a unifying mechanism.

I recalled part of an interview that I had seen with John Forbes Nash Jr., the math prodigy who was able to solve problems that had baffled the greatest minds. He overcame years of suffering through schizophrenia and eventually won the Nobel Prize. When asked how he overcame his schizophrenia, his response was “I became disillusioned with my delusions”.

Bridging the Disconnect

By the end of the session the group was focused on the question “how do you design, resource and manage a consulting firm that is able to holistically translate the visionaries insights into actionable advice for a client?”

The coffee was gone, schedules had been mangled and people were tired. But they were also game to continue in a follow-on session to deal with that question.

© Dr. Earl R. Smith II

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Related Articles:

• Moving the Ball
• Sea Change Brings Change
• Attitudes, Agendas, Interventions and Compromises
• Change – Two of Many Perspectives
• Planning and Implementation
• The Importance of Structure in Organizational Change

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Dr. Smith is Managing Partner of The Federal Circle. The Federal Circle partners with teams and existing companies. We help them up their game and win big in the Federal space. We also arrange funding for acquisitions and expansion by acquisition. Our model is based on the belief that, if you select the very best and work with them in a highly professional and focused manner, the results will be truly amazing. He is the author of Amazing Pace: Turbo-charged Business Development – a book that shows how Advisory Boards can dramatically increase revenue. Dr. Smith is also the author of Dream Walk: Parables for the Living – a book of Raven Tales and exploration.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 7:08 PM and is filed under Advisory, Life Coaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.