In much organisational work, strategy is treated as if it comes first and execution follows. Once the strategy has been made, the task is to close the gap between intention and performance. 

But who makes the strategy, and what are the logics informing that strategy-making? 

In the context of polycrisis, we need more than ever the strategy-making capacities related to the post-conventional stages. We also increasingly work with leaders making the transition from the Performing to the Internalising stage, and hence from conventional to post-conventional logics. 

This is not a claim that later-stage leaders are better people, or that conventional-stage leaders cannot make strategy. Different logics make different aspects of reality available to us. The question is whether the capacities from which we are making strategy are sufficient for the world in which that strategy must live. 

Performing: making the system visible 

In this model, the Performing stage is the first stage at which we can really speak of a capacity for strategy-making. It is the first stage at which the organisational system becomes visible within its context, and it is also here that sustained relational attention to the motivations and inner worlds of collectives becomes possible. 

Enormously successful “linear” organisations – organisations that can develop and exploit reasonably predictable markets – are often led from the logics of this stage. The perspective is long enough to build and to pay attention to sustainability; pragmatism underlies the capacity to achieve outcomes that seem constrained by knowledge systems; and collectives can be moved to perform together through positive politics. 

The shadow of this stage is its emphasis on performance for the sake of performance, and its key constraint is the invisibility of “the game” itself. We become highly effective at winning the game of achievement without the capacity to see the game as a game within a specific historical and social unfolding. 

This may help to explain why many currently successful organisations operate as though the terms of the game will persist, even while they prepare for AI adoption, climate disruption, and war. The moves change, but the game itself is not questioned. This can lead to serious and cynical zero-sum strategic bets – I am thinking of parts of the fossil-fuel industry and some developments in AI, not least war technology and the rapacious exploitation of cultural commons. 

Internalising: questioning the game 

It is at the Internalising stage that we can begin to question the game we are playing: whether we are trapped in exploitative and extractive processes rather than regenerative ones; how human beings are socially and economically situated in these processes; and what it means to be human and to participate in human organising when inequality, poverty, oppression, war, and climate destruction are conditions of the game. 

The Internalising stage may be a difficult time for individual leaders, as they step away from the comfortable and unquestioning inclusion and status of the conventional world in which they achieved success in the first place. A significant task for those of us concerned with the future of the organisation is to secure the place of Internalising leaders as voices of greater inclusion, vision, and responsibility, even when their questions unsettle the pace, certainty, and conventional effectiveness of Performing logic. 

Strategising: finding the points of transformation 

Out of the integration of the Internalising-stage logics, the much-expanded strategic capacity of the Strategising stage emerges. Leaders with a centre of gravity at this stage bring the capacity to balance multiple timeframes and multiple systems. They are able to identify the “acupuncture points” – C. Otto Scharmer’s term – at which focused intervention can effect radical transformation. 

It is perhaps only at this stage that we can begin to appreciate Bruno Latour’s insistence that the ecological mutation must reorganise the political landscape, and to ask how economic, social, and political influence might be exercised within the limits of the terrestrial world. 

Transforming: questioning the terms of the endeavour 

What about the Transforming stage? These are possibly the logics required to examine the very terms of our endeavours, and to keep asking questions about human purpose beyond what is already captured in the language games we cannot help playing. 

None of this means that organisations should wait for a rare post-conventional leader to tell them what to do. In stable and reasonably predictable conditions, Performing logic offers an extraordinary capacity to build, align, and deliver. The challenge in polycrisis is not to discard this capacity but to include and transcend it: to retain the ability to perform while also questioning what performance is for, whose interests it serves, and what worlds it helps to create. 

Strategic capacity is therefore not only a matter of what leaders know. It is a matter of what they are able to see, what they can bear to question, and the place within themselves and their systems from which they act. 

References 

Latour, B. (2018). Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity. 

Scharmer, C. O. (2009). Seven Acupuncture Points for Shifting Capitalism to Create a Regenerative Ecosystem Economy.