The Strategic Plan is Dead. Long Live Strategy
"The approach we developed in working with our clients at Monitor Institute is what we call adaptive strategy. We create a roadmap of the terrain that lies before an organization and develop a set of navigational tools, realizing that there will be many different options for reaching the destination. If necessary, the destination itself may shift based on what we learn along the way.
Creating strategies that are truly adaptive requires that we give up on many long-held assumptions. As the complexity of our physical and social systems make the world more unpredictable, we have to abandon our focus on predictions and shift into rapid prototyping and experimentation so that we learn quickly about what actually works. With data now ubiquitous, we have to give up our claim to expertise in data collection and move into pattern recognition so that we know what data is worth our attention. We also know that simple directives from the top are frequently neither necessary nor helpful. We instead find ways to delegate authority, get information directly from the front lines, and make decisions based on a real-time understanding of what's happening on the ground. Instead of the old approach of 'making a plan and sticking to it,' which led to centralized strategic planning around fixed time horizons, we believe in 'setting a direction and testing to it,' treating the whole organization as a team that is experimenting its way to success.
This approach wouldn't surprise anyone in the world of current military strategy. Recent generations of military thinkers have long since moved beyond the traditional approach, most notably famed fighter pilot John Boyd. He saw strategy as a continuous mental loop that ran from observe to orient to decide and finally to act, returning immediately to further observation. By adopting his mindset (with a particular emphasis on the two O's, given our turbulent context), we can get much better at making strategy a self-correcting series of intentional experiments.
To provide structure to this fluid approach, we focus on answering a series of four interrelated questions about the organization's strategic direction: what vision you want to pursue, how you will make a difference, how you will succeed, and what capabilities it will take to get there.
The skills and mindset for today's strategic planning will come from continuously asking ourselves these questions about our organizations, programs, and initiatives. Once we accept Dwight D. Eisenhower's sage advice that 'Plans are useless, but planning is everything,' we will be ready to adapt to whatever curveballs the twenty-first century sees fit to throw."
(Dana O’Donovan & Noah Rimland Flower, 10 Jan 2013, Stanford Social Innovation Review)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Invention is the result of creative experimentation and synthesis
"Why waste time on expensive experiments when the right answer is obvious? The flaw in this thinking is that creativity is an iterative process in which you synthesize the final result from a variety of sources and thousands of potential solutions. It is not purely a deductive process with a single right answer.
When you fail to experiment broadly, you are building your solution from an anemic set of mental and technical resources. It is the equivalent of trying to design a bridge when the only material you've tested is paper. You can certainly build a bridge, but it will not be nearly as good compared to someone who experimented with a broad range of materials and construction techniques including steel or concrete."
(Daniel Cook, 16 August 2010)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Experimental typography: light refracted through water droplets
Ruslan Khasanov (2012) Lumen type: experimental typography.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Tuning In: A Film About Karlheinz Stockhausen
"Karlheinz Stockhausen (August 22, 1928 - December 5, 2007) was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He is known for his ground-breaking work in electronic music, aleatory (controlled chance) in serial composition, and musical spatialization. ... Similar Artists: Iannis Xenakis, John Cage, Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, Morton Feldman, Olivier Messiaen, Arnold Schönberg"
(last.fm)
Fig.1 Omnibus (1981). "Tuning In: A Film About Karlheinz Stockhausen", television documentary, BBC1 [published on 13 May 2012 by Thiago Carvalho Fernandes, YouTube].
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
UK Imagineering Foundation: stimulating the imagination of young designers
"In 1999 a group of engineers in the Midlands [UK region] who were concerned at the rapidly increasing skills shortage in engineering, developed the concept of Imagineering. 'A new initiative, designed to introduce 8-16 year olds to the fascinating world of engineering and manufacturing through fun, hands-on personal experience, targets the engineers of the future at a young age, develops and holds their interest and hopefully, encourages them to consider engineering as a future career.'"
(Imagineering Foundation, UK)
Fig.1 "One young 'imagineer' constructs a working model that he can then programme using simple control technology at the Imagineering Jaguar Land Rover Education Business Partnership Centre, at Gaydon Warwickshire." [http://www.spaghettigazetti.com/2011/11/imagineering-welcomes-new-queen.html#!/2011/11/imagineering-welcomes-new-queen.html]
2). The Imagineering Timeline
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
