Understanding context makes board decisions better, says Dr Gary Saliba GAICD, a director of management consultancy Strategic Journeys, whose strategic planning advice is based on the pioneering “anthro-complexity” approach of Dave Snowden, founder and chief scientific officer of Cynefin Co.
1. Manage from the present
Directors need to develop and cultivate a culture that supports management to manage from the present. They need to identify what factors and dynamics are shaping the system, and develop catalysts and interventions that create a disturbance in the system. In the public sector, these actions need to be enough to direct new behaviours more aligned with the policy direction and less in directions that are undesired.
Directors need to be prepared that not all opportunities (experiments) will take them closer to their desired direction. It is critical to frame this approach as “learning” and to recognise “safe failure” as an accepted and honoured part of the process.
2. Search out multiple perspectives
Dave Snowden has highlighted the concept of “entrained” patterns — once our brains learn something, it is difficult to unlearn. Directors should reflect on the extent to which their board is locked into these entrained patterns of sense-making and decision-making. Explore the composition of the board. Does it have members that act as catalysts to interrupt entrained patterns of sense-making? By developing board processes that challenge entrained perspectives and ways of thinking, directors can enable the emergence of new ways of thinking and working.
3. Understand the business environment context
Context provides meaning and the ability to make sense of the situation. There are three key contextual frames — ordered, unordered and chaotic. Knowing in which frame to interpret the business environment is critical to support effective decision-making. When challenges in the private sector are perceived from an inappropriate contextual frame, decisions will most likely lead to undesired and ineffective results, especially related to business capability, product and service development, financial results, employment and industry development.
The implications for directors of public sector boards have national impacts if policy and strategy development and implementation are not perceived from the appropriate context. Directors of public sector boards need to find ways to respond to political expediency, biased perspectives and refusal to consider alternate contexts to present a more appropriate approach.
4. Develop new ways of working
Directors need to be systems thinkers — to view issues as comprising a range of factors highly interconnected through non-linear relationships and feedback mechanisms. They cannot predict the impact of decisions, policies and strategies. Instead, directors should re-perceive a business operating environment shaped by various elements that make it easier or harder to influence behaviours.
They need to think in terms of the business environment having a disposition and propensity to move in certain directions — raising the importance of observing for “patterns of behaviour”. We can no longer think in terms of linear cause and effect.
Public sector directors will need to explore developing processes to enhance their capability to identify what is supporting or impeding progress — and find ways to support directors and executives to work with the political system to enable the public sector to better serve its needs.
5. Look for patterns
To respond to the challenges of business and society, directors need to look for emerging patterns and understand to what extent these patterns of behaviour align with the organisation’s direction.
Experiments can help better understand systems and direct how to proceed. Such an approach can potentially be easier for directors in the private sector. While directors are still accountable for results, there is sometimes freedom to take a more flexible approach and use the learning to inform decision-making.
The performance of public sector directors is under additional political scrutiny. This can raise the false belief that mistakes cannot be made, forces directors to become more risk averse and so limits the desire and opportunity to design and implement experiments. Maintaining current linear cause-effect thinking to policy development issues in an “unordered domain” (where there is no immediate cause-and-effect relationship) is nonsensical and irresponsible.
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