On Mr. Strategic

I am not sure whether I am seriously violating copyright law with below text, but I fully and totally credit Mr. Strategic himself for what’s to come. My passion is to share wisdom, ideas, energy, creativity, confidence, and passion. I don’t see much harm in doing just that.

Kenichi Ohmae, also known as Mr. Strategic, management guru, author, speaker, and previously partner in McKinsey & Company is a classic, as is his book “The Mind of the Strategist – The Art of Japanese Business”, first published in 1982, right when I was crawling out of puberty.

Beside the habit of rigorous analysis, this is what’s characteristic for the mind of the strategist:

-       A sense of mission

-       A constant drive for achievement

-       With a creative and an intuitive thought process rather than a rational one

-       And an intellectual elasticity or flexibility that enables the strategist to come up with realistic responses to changing situations, not simply to discriminate with great precision among different shades of gray.

In strategic thinking you solve problems by formulating the question in a way that will facilitate the discovery of a solution. In the case of chronic overtime, don’t ask: “What should be done to reduce overtime?”. The answers will likely be to work harder, shorten breaks during and the like.

The intrinsic limitation to this approach is that the question is not framed to point toward a solution – it is directed toward finding remedies to symptoms. Better questions to ask would be:

·         Is this company’s workforce large enough to all the work required?

·         Do the capabilities of the employees match the nature of the work?

Bottom line: you cannot overstate the importance of formulating the question correctly which leads to concrete, practical ideas rather than vague proposals for ‘improvements’ like the ones seen in many suggestion boxes.

Business strategy is about competitive advantage. ‘Strategy’ should be used for actions aimed at directly altering the strength of the enterprise relative to that of its competitors. The principal concern is avoiding doing the same thing, on the same battleground, as the competition.

Identifying the key factors for success: discover what distinguishes winners from losers and why. In some industries production technology is the key factor to success (e.g. soda industry), in others it’s the distribution network (e.g. truck sales), so it differs greatly.

Challenge the business and the strategic thinking by confronting what’s taken for granted in an industry or business by asking the simple question ‘why’. Instead of accepting the first answer you should insist on asking why until you get to the guts of the issue and to possible fundamental bottlenecks.

Strategic tunnel vision. The more severe the pressure on business executives and the more urgently a broader view is needed, the more dangerously their mental vision seems to narrow down. This is especially likely to be true of a businessman who is obsessed with the idea of winning and sees everything in terms of success or failure. Such an executive may be unable to perceive that there is any room for intelligent choice among various courses of action.

What is needed, and what is to be avoided according to the master?

1.    Flexible thinking – Understand the full range of alternatives that lie before you and constantly weigh the costs and benefits of each one. Considering alternatives requires you to pose “What if” questions. If the situation were such-and-such what would be our best course of action?

2.    Perils of perfection – In competing for market share there is no sense in trying to draw up a “perfect” strategy. What is vital is timing. The most brilliant strategy will be useless if it fails to take account of the ever changing market and the ever changing technological possibilities.

3.    Keeping details in perspective – A related vice is timidity. All too many people in responsible management positions seem unable to make well-timed decisions on their own. There may be too much reliance on third party judgments or there may be a lack of information or an incapability to analyze the information correctly. Intellectual timidity is a distrust of all definite answers, a hopeless feeling that problems are too complex and many-sided to yield to clear-cut solutions – a classic incidence of self-fulfilling defeatism. Having once chosen their direction many successful Japanese companies obstinately persisted with execution of their plans regardless of minor shifts in circumstances. Many large, western counterparts insist on getting everything exactly right when it comes to working out the details of a plan.

4.    Focus on key factors – obsessive thoroughness to the point of perfection has its place. In the pursuit of the key factors, the strategic thinker cannot afford to be anything less than a perfectionist.

5.    Challenging the constraints: find out how the managers responsible for a problem area see the problem and what proposals they have in mind for solving it. Usually the response will be something like “There is not much we can do”. Questions to be asked:

a.    Tell me precisely what are the limiting factors that have convinced you that nothing can be done?

b.    What alternatives would be open to you if all these constraints were removed?

If there is no common recognition within an organization of the ideal goal and the obstacles to its attainment, managers’ energies are all aimed in different directions and progress towards remedying the problem is all but impossible.

I like to conclude with Thomas Alva Edison’s recipe for inventive genius: 1% of inspiration and 99% of perspiration. Sensitivity, will, and receptiveness are necessary ingredients for creativity.

Leadership abilities - the other six

The following abilities of a leader are not the usual ones like ‘excelling in communication’, ‘seeing the big picture’, ‘putting vision and values into practice’, or ‘demonstrating astuteness and competence’. These are certainly important abilities, and there are many extensive lists to which I do not wish to add yet another one. I merely wish to highlight a certain category of abilities that is too often underrepresented. I’d like to focus your attention to the following six abilities which I believe to be self-explanatory, needing no further elaboration.  You can use them to reflect upon your own abilities and choices, to evaluate your leadership and its outcomes, and to pinpoint areas for improvement for yourself and for other leaders.

§  The ability to admit misjudgments, mistakes, and wrongdoing.

§  The ability to forgive others’ misjudgments, mistakes, and failure.

§  The ability to see and help others prosper and grow - possibly outgrowing you.

§  The ability to put ‘me’ after ‘we’ and ‘it’.

§  The ability to be constructively critical, downward, upward and towards peers.

§  The ability to sincerely give credit and let others shine.

Good luck!

Are your thoughts in line with reality?

You suffer most whenever you believe a thought that contradicts with ‘what really is’. As Byron Katie states in her book “Loving What Is” (2002), “If you want reality to be different than ‘what is’, you might as well try to have a cat bark”. To want reality to be different than it is, is beyond useless and hopeless. But this doesn’t seem to keep us from doing this many times a day. How often do you have thoughts like “My boss shouldn’t act like that, it’s ridiculous!”, and “I should have done this, that, and the other”, or this one: “My son should show me more respect”, or “My spouse should know what I need by now”. This ‘shouldisme’ is keeping you from dealing with the world as it is with all its different perspectives and realities and with all its imperfections. It hampers your creativity in finding ways to deal with whatever you are presented with, including disappointments caused by self and others. It imprisons you in a private world of so-called logic and truth that is not universal and it keeps you from seeing your own role in what is going on within and around you.

After my first education in the Rational Effectiveness Training for Trainers and Coaches (stemming directly from the Rational Emotive Therapy by Albert Ellis), I put up a sign at home with the message: “I will not ‘should’ on myself today”. I still remind myself regularly, that imposing ‘shoulds’ on myself, and imposing my demands, my rules, and my ‘shoulds’ on others is not a guarantee for making myself or people around me believe, think, and act differently.  It’s more a guarantee for personal and interpersonal tensions to mount. In the best case scenario, it is a guarantee for short term compliance rather than for long term and authentic changes in perspectives, thinking, and acting.

You may ask yourself: What creates more energy, strength, and ideas? “I wish I hadn’t lost that project” or  “I lost that project, now what can I do?” Accepting what happened doesn’t mean you have to feel happy about it or approve of it. It merely means you can see things as they are, feel the loss, anger, or disappointment without resistance, and see things as they are without the confusion of an inner struggle but with the determination to move on. “This should not have happened, this is unfair, I shouldn’t have had to experience this” can sure feel good at times, but it is victim behaviour that allows you to wallow in self-pity and, more importantly, that keeps you from turning your attention and energy to your strengths, opportunities, and possibilities. Is your cat barking yet?

Thought leaders in management and leadership

Out of the many in the field I have chosen five thought leaders and some of their beliefs that provide me with food for thought and with inspiration. I hope they have a similar effect on you.

Peter Drucker

-          Listen first, speak last.

-          To ask “What can I contribute” is to look for the unused potential.

-          Inspiring and successful leaders are curious folks and lifelong learners. They pay attention to people and focus on opportunities, possibilities, and strengths.

Peter Senge

-          Reality is made up of circles, but we see straight lines.

-          In the new view of leadership and in a learning organization leaders are designers, stewards, and teachers as opposed to the traditional view of leaders as special people who set the direction, make the key decisions, and energize the troops, based on the assumption of the powerlessness of people, their lack of personal vision, and their inability to master the forces of change.

-          The essence of mastering systems thinking as a management discipline lies in seeing patterns where others only see events and forces to react to.

Kenichi Ohmae

-          Successful businesses strategies result not from rigorous analysis but from a particular state of mind, with a sense of mission and a constant drive for achievement with a creative and an intuitive thought process rather than a rational one.

-          Analyses done for the sake of vindicating one’s own preconceived notions do not lead to creative solutions.

-          Sensitivity, will, and receptiveness are necessary ingredients for creativity.

Tom Peters

-          Excellence is the result of many small tasks, all of which can be practiced and mastered.

-          The key to leadership is the effective communication of a story. Looking for things that went right, and building on them, as opposed to looking for things that went wrong and trying to fix them.

Stephen Covey

-          Start with researching you own character, your beliefs and thoughts, and your motives rather than focusing on the ‘problems’ as they present themselves, or seem to present themselves.

-          Seek to understand first, then to be understood.

A Gestalt Approach to Organizational Consulting and Personal Development

If you have heard of the Gestalt Approach or Gestalt Psychology at all, it might be because of the expression “The whole is more than the sum of its parts”. The Gestalt Approach is indeed a holistic and system approach. Originally a psychological school and therapy, gestalt thinking is increasingly finding its way into the corporate world through consulting, training, and coaching from a gestalt perspective.  

During my training as a psychologist I first encountered the gestalt principles and approach, but my interest and use of this approach were reignited five years ago during a one year course in Coaching of Organizational Change through a Gestalt Approach at a renowned Gestalt Institute in Belgium.

Whether you visit this blog out of interest in change, in leadership, in personal development or all of the above, gestalt thinking and acting can bring you great benefits. I will start out providing you with twelve principles of the gestalt approach continued with practical applications and advantages while concluding with some questions for you to contemplate.

Twelve Principles of the Gestalt Approach

1.       The gestalt approach is a holistic and system approach. Everything and everyone is considered in its context and through its relationships. The consultant or coach looks at the total situation (person, family, work, personal life) rather than to compartmentalize and to analyze everything in an orderly manner and step by step.

2.       Any individual, group, or organization is doing the best possible at any given moment. We all have the potential to do more, do better, or to be creative if we decrease the obstacles or blocks inside us or in the external environment. The means by which to accomplish this is awareness.

3.       Awareness is central to the Gestalt Approach and can be described as a ‘knowing and being’ in the ‘here-and-now’, as being aware (referring to sensations and feelings through the senses) of what is going on in and around you – an intuitive knowing and being as opposed to thinking and theorizing about it.

4.       Three forms of awareness are to be considered: awareness of yourself, awareness of others, and awareness of what’s going on between you and the other/ the context.

5.       Many personal and organizational problems are linked to our tendency to fill the present with limited and distorted beliefs about our past and our future and to our belief that our ‘fantasies’ are realities.

6.       According to gestalt thinking, the main force driving a person and influencing his or her behavior is self-realization as opposed to, for example, Freud’s instinct.

7.       A client never speaks about his or her work environment or manager as that work environment or boss actually ‘is’, but rather how this environment or boss appear to the client: perception and interpretation are subjective.

8.       The Gestalt Approach does not aim to explain or analyze, but to describe and to let things speak for themselves in a non-judgmental manner. Behavior often doesn’t have to be explained but understood. In most cases, multiple explanations can be found for each problematic situation. A mere intellectual knowing of the ‘why’ of the situation usually does not contribute enough to a change in behavior or dynamics.

9.       In addition to awareness there is a second key factor to the Gestalt Approach: responsibility.  Responsibility is the free will and the existential choice that lets you choose at any time who you are and how you think, feel, choose, and act. You are responsible for everything in your life, which diverts from determinism which ignores free will. Responsibility is not some kind of duty, something that is imposed from outside by an authority. Responsibility is the ability to respond, the ability to recognize and be responsible and accountable for your own thoughts, feelings, needs, attitudes, actions, and norms in a given situation and for their consequences or results, also when your responses seemed spontaneous, unconscious, unintentional and resulted in undesired consequences.

10.   The gestalt coach and consultant uses his own person and being rather than techniques to help increase awareness and growth. When people and organizations are ‘stuck’ they generally see only one perspective. It is the consultant’s task to assist in exploring other perspectives. All awareness arises from comparison with opposites. Everything that exists or shows itself is the result of two forces that present themselves through their differences.

11.   In the Gestalt Approach conflicts, tensions, and resistance are appreciated as vitalizing forces and as energy that can be used once felt, known, and, where necessary, redirected. This more often than not implies first emphasizing differences rather than shoving them under the carpet.

12.   A gestalt consultant encourages a different use of language, supporting awareness and responsibility by changing ‘it’ to ‘I’ and ‘we’ to ‘I’, by turning ‘have to’ into ‘choose to’, by changing ‘knowing’ to ‘assuming’, by replacing ‘but’ by ‘and’ and by asking ‘what for and how’ rather than ‘what and when’.  

Practical Applications for Intervention and Change

Intervention means to enter into an ongoing system for the purpose of helping it in some way. To consult or to intervene places the consultant in the position of being a disturber of boundaries and of set ways, even if these set ways are not working out well. The Gestalt Orientation is a process oriented consultation, with the consultant focusing on client energy, on its functioning, and on the way the system approaches its problems. The consultant helps to unblock the system and mobilize its energy to define and solve its own problems rather than making detailed analytical investigations, diagnosing the problem and recommending and implementing preferred solutions. With this the Gestalt approach diverts from the deterministic medical model with an emphasis on what happened in the past and on cause-and-effect relationships and striving for intellectual understanding. The focus is on what is happening in the here-and-now and the focus is on the health rather than the illness or weaknesses of the system, thereby aligning the Gestalt Approach with Seligman’s Positive Psychology.

You might wonder what to make of all this and how to put these principles into practice. The most important goal of consultancy is, again, teaching the client system how to enhance the awareness of its own functioning and how to mobilize energy: becoming aware and turning this awareness into useful action. In order to accomplish increased awareness, useful action, and thereby growth and change, you can ask yourself, or if you’re a consultant you ask your client five questions:

1.       What am I doing right now, in the here-and-now? Am I putting demands on the table, am I fantasizing, am I telling a story, am I complaining, am I dealing with issues constructively etc.

2.       What do I experience and feel right now? This question refers to specific physical experiencing, like the mounting tensions in your shoulders, your shaky voice, or overactive sweat glands. This question also includes inquiry into your emotions: fearful, joyous, curious, hurt, bored etc.

3. What do I want right now, not to be confused with the “I want it now” attitude of 2 year-olds, teenagers, and too many other human beings. This question makes you consider your upcoming needs. What do you need in this situation right now? Are you looking for attention, approval, engagement, solitude, support, respect etc.? You are asked to choose your position, to identify with your needs and to show the courage to face the reality that you might aspire something that does not fit your environment, or the reality that others might disapprove of you or your needs.
4. What do I expect? What ideas do I hold about the near future? What do I anticipate? Expectation management would be a good phrase to represent this question. It also inquires into the ‘catastrophe’ that you might fear. This way you ‘map’ what is still uncertain. If you know what you expect you can verify your views and ideas and ask yourself whether your views and expectations are realistic. Think of the saying: “People suffer most from the suffering they fear”.
5. What am I avoiding? In every situation there is always a ‘background’ that receives little attention. This could imply you’re avoiding something that others should not discover. Or it could be that something should be avoided because you fear you won’t be able to handle it. You might avoid providing your opinion out of fear of being ridiculed or dominated. It is often true that by merely facing your fear you decrease your fear rather than feeling overwhelmed by it.

These five questions contribute to increasing your awareness about yourself, about others, and about what takes place between you and your environment including your responses to other people and your understanding of their possible motives and of your own needs. This in turn results in:

è More energy and creativity.

è Less fear and distorted beliefs and thoughts.

è Stronger focus on competencies and success.

è Optimal use of differences, tensions, and resistance.

è Increased individual autonomy and competency.

è More effective personal and interpersonal behavior patterns.

è Stronger personal and team responsibility and accountability.

Some Questions to Contemplate

There is so much more to say about the Gestalt Approach and its benefits for personal development and for organizational consulting and change management. I will leave it at this, however, and conclude with some questions for you to contemplate in your role as a consultant or as a person looking for perspectives on growth and change:

-          Do I actively seek opposing perspectives from my own, especially in times of urgency or tensions?

-          Am I aware of the differences between perception, interpretation, judgment, appearance?

-          Do I prefer analysis of the past and of cause-effect patterns or do I prefer awareness in the ‘now’?

-          Am I aware of my often limited and distorted beliefs, thoughts, and conclusions?

-          Do I know how to confront my realistic or not so realistic expectations and fears?

-          Am I aware of what I tend to avoid and of which needs I am serving with this avoidance?

I salute you and your journey towards awareness, health, and growth!