Creating Agility In The Face Of Strategic Ambiguity
Many years ago, renowned business consultant, Richard Tanner Pascale in his article, “Laws of the Jungle and the New Laws of Business” (Leader to Leader, Spring 2001), wrote that “Two imperatives govern survival in many industries today. The first requires agility in the face of high levels of strategic ambiguity. The second is a shift in culture and capability from slow, deliberate organizations to forms that behave like living organisms, fostering entrepreneurial initiatives, consolidating learning and moving rapidly to exploit winning positions in the marketplace.” While this may have been written 25 years ago, it is still true today. Given current events, our leadership challenge is to translate these two imperatives into concrete and practical applications.
For this, I turn to the work of Richard Pascale, Mark Millemann and Linda Gioja and their book: Surfing The Edge of Chaos: The Laws of Nature and the New Laws of Business (Three Rivers Press, 2000). As they write, “Over many millions of years, nature has devised strategies for coping with prolonged periods of gradual change and occasional cataclysms in which only the most agile survive.” During times of turmoil, they note that “Equilibrium is a precursor to death…. When a living system is in a state of equilibrium, it is less responsive to changes occurring around it. This places it at maximum risk.” The authors then go on to explain the Law of Requisite Variety, which states that the “survival of any organism depends on its capacity to cultivate (not just tolerate) variety in its internal structure…. Failure to do so leads to an inability to cope successfully with variety when it is introduced from outside.”
One example of this from the book is the difference between a fish raised in a bowl and one that has grown up in the sea. The former swims, breeds, and obtains food with minimal effort due to there being no predators. As a result, these fish are very sensitive to the slightest disturbances. The later has worked hard to sustain themselves. They have had to evade many threats, and cope with much variation. Therefore, they are robust when faced with change.
Now, Pascale, Millemann and Goja recognize that the notion of equilibrium as a precursor of death or disaster “must be assessed in the context of scale and time.” As they explain, on the small scale and short time basis, equilibrium is desirable. However, on the large scale, long time basis, equilibrium is hazardous, because the environment is always changing. They explain that prolonged equilibrium dulls an organization “to arouse itself appropriately in the face of danger.” And given what we are experiencing right now, large scale and long time equilibrium can be disastrous and dangerous on many different levels.
The Symmetry Of Shared Consciousness
General Stanley McChrystal with Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell understood this perspective when they wrote the book, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement For A Complex World (Portfolio/Penguin, 2015). General McChrystal is known for his command of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) from 2003 to 2008 during which his organization was credited with the elimination of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). In the book, he wrote that in 2004 AQI “looked on the surface like a traditional insurgency. But under the surface it operated unlike anything we had seen before. In place of a traditional hierarchy, it took the form of a dispersed network that proved devastatingly effective against our objectively more qualified force.” As he explained, “AQI’s unorthodox structure allowed it to thrive in an operating environment that diverged radically from those we had traditionally faced: the twenty-first century is more connected, faster paced, and less predictable than previous eras. Though we encountered this shift on the battlefield, similar changes are affecting almost every sector of society.”
Recognizing this profound change in their operating environment, he explains that in order to win, JSOC had to change. “Surprisingly, that change was less about tactics or new technology than it was about internal architecture and culture of our force - in other words, our approach to management…. Our Task Force’s structure and culture of disciplined, stratified reductionism had its roots deep in military organizational history…. This organizational culture is not unique to the military; since the Industrial Revolution, most industries have subscribed to management doctrines informed by or similar to Frederick Taylor’s ‘Scientific Management,’ a system that is excellent for achieving highly efficient execution of known, repeatable processes at scale…. We were realizing in 2004 that despite the success of this approach throughout the 20th century, it had its limits. Like the Maginot Line, it was insufficient for tackling a new generation of threats. Efficiency is no longer enough.” In short, JSOC came to understand that they were working in a fast-paced world with a higher degree of interdependence, all of which was creating complexity.
Over time, McChrystal and his team learned that “Complexity produces a fundamentally different situation from the complicated challenges of the past; complicated problems required great effort, but ultimately yielded to prediction. Complexity means that, in spite of our increase abilities to track and measure, the world has become, in many ways, vastly less predictable…. This unpredictability is fundamentally incompatible with reductionist managerial models based around planning and prediction. The new environment demands a new approach.”
And for me, here is the essence of what they learned, and is the key message of their book: “At the core of the Task Force’s journey to adaptability lay a yin-and-yang symmetry of shared consciousness, achieved through strict, centralized forums for communication and extreme transparency, and empowered execution, which involved the decentralization of managerial authority. Together, these powered our Task Force; neither would suffice alone.”
Building A Common Identity And A Common Understanding
There is so much to unpack in the previous paragraph. I think the best place to start, when it comes to problem solving within complexity, is to focus on “shared consciousness, achieved through strict, centralized forums for communication.”
First, we must remember this famous quote, often attributed to Albert Einstein: “We cannot solve problems at the same level of thinking that we were at when we created those problems.” This implies that in order to find a solution or a greater understanding or perspective, a new level of “consciousness,” i.e. a new way of thinking, is required which transcends the limitations of the original thinking that caused the problem in the first place.
Once we comprehend this huge insight, the difficulty, when dealing with problem solving within complexity, is that we have a convergence of two different things happening at the same time. First, at this time period, the reason why problem solving needs to take place is not being caused primarily by our actions, but instead by other people’s choices. Thus, we had to respond and solve a problem they created. Second, the consciousness we need to have in order to solve the problem they created, is going to require a shift in our shared consciousness, not just at the individual level of thinking and effort. So, with both of these elements in mind, we, as leaders, are challenged to change our own individual consciousness as much as the group’s shared consciousness. This is a magnitude of personal and organizational change that is vastly more difficult than just attempting to change one person’s mind. Now, we are changing how a group thinks.
Martine Haas and Mark Mortensen in their article called “The Secrets of Great Teamwork” (Harvard Business Review, June 2016) write about the importance of a “shared mindset” as one key element in creating great teamwork. As they explain,“Distance and diversity, as well as digital communication and changing membership, make them [teams] especially prone to the problems of “us versus them” thinking and incomplete information…. The solution to both is developing a shared mindset among team members - something team leaders can do by fostering a common identity and common understanding.” And in one short sentence, they unlock a key part of the solution, namely building a common identity and a common understanding. However, we need to recognize that this does not happen overnight.
To be continued on Wednesday.
© Geery Howe 2026
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