Why Great Strategy Lives In Action, Not PowerPoint | Erik Schön

Strategy doesn’t live in a binder; it lives in motion. We sit down with practitioner-author Erik Schön to reconnect strategy with doing, drawing on Sun Tzu’s correlative pairs, Boyd’s OODA orientation, and Wardley Maps to turn abstract plans into concrete manoeuvres. From the first minutes, we challenge the ritual of annual decks and fixed KPIs, arguing for shorter strategy loops that privilege learning, outcomes, and a clear line of sight to the customer.

Erik unpacks the engine behind durable advantage: the dance of expected and surprise. Customers must get the table stakes they anticipate, but loyalty and growth emerge when you add a well-timed, positive surprise. Think iPhone’s shock, or Ericsson’s practice of shipping at least one “desire to use” feature per release. We translate this into practical moves: mapping capabilities, exposing gaps, and deciding when to build, buy, or outsource. Wardley Maps become the team’s shared terrain, shifting debates from personalities to dependencies and evolution—from novel to commodity.

We also tackle culture and cadence. Quarterly retrospectives and prospectives beat annual ceremonies because they compress feedback, curb KPI tunnel vision, and empower small experiments with fast ROI. Drawing on mission command, we favour firm intent with flexible plans: leaders set outcomes, teams design manoeuvres. Along the way, we explore why some firms stall on “expected, expected, expected,” how to avoid self-induced ambiguity, and what Eastern comfort with change can teach Western efficiency cultures. Real-world examples—from Netflix’s global-local bet to Nvidia’s pivot from gaming to AI—show how capability compounding and orientation shifts tilt markets.

The close is a call to shape the conditions before you need a burning platform. Make the terrain visible, invest time in improvement work, and reward independent thinking within shared intent. If this conversation helps you see strategy as a daily practice—mapping, choosing, experimenting—tap follow, share with a colleague who loves real strategy, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway.

Find Erik's work here:
blog post: https://medium.com/an-idea/the-art-of-strategy-ac4165c0c085 
Book site: https://yokosopress.jimdofree.com/#ArtOfStrategy

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Transcript

Doing Strategy Versus Producing Artifacts

Mike Jones 0:00

Most people don't think of strategy that way.

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Developing a new strategy.

Mike Jones 0:04

Strategic blind spots. When strategy meets reality. Strategy and innovation.

SPEAKER_00 0:08

In the strategy world. Drive their strategic goals.

Mike Jones 0:10

And welcome back to Strategy Meets Reality Podcast. Welcome back to Strategy Meets Reality Podcast. I'm delighted today to be joined by Eric Sean. I've I've been a long fan of your work, especially your medium post, which I'll I'll put up on the um the show notes. Please, before we jump into that, um welcome Eric. If you don't mind giving us a bit of background and a bit of context about yourself or our guests.

SPEAKER_00 0:34

Sure, thanks, Mike. Happy to be here. Always delighted talking about strategy is my favorite topic. So I'm Eric Schroern. I'm a practitioner. So I've been doing strategy since the 90s in in various roles. You know, startups, scale-ups, incumbents, internet startups, incumbents like uh like Ericsson. But I'm also a reflective practitioner because I I wrote a book about it. You know, I've been thinking about it, I've been doing it over the past 20, 25 years, and I got this insight. Well, Sun Tzu, John Boyd, Simon Wardley, they're onto something. They they are speaking the same language, using different words, if you will. So yeah, I wrote this book, started uh as Medium posts, all three. Then one of my colleagues in London said, Well, I can't read medium on the tube, so could you make a could you turn it into a PDF? And then when I turned it into a PDF, I thought, well, I could just turn it into a real book uh that could be printed. Well, that's what I did. It was during the pandemic, so I had you know I saved a couple of hours commuting.

Mike Jones 1:39

That's great, and yeah, I love the way you bring those the works together. And I think we have a similar passion for Boyd and Sun Tzu. Where we slightly deviate is on boardly, not because I don't like his work. I just it's like with anything you don't get, and that's he is he is on my top of my list there in the top three things that um I need to get my head around because I love the way that he visualises things, and I think that's really important. You said something in your introduction that strikes me and I think is lost a lot. You said you're a practitioner and you do strategy, and I think that's that's the thing I've been wrestling with for a long time is that I think since the days of Sun Tzu, we went through the transition phase where strategy became no longer an act of being, act of doing, and it became more of an output. We're just chasing an output. Do you see that as well?

Sun Tzu, Boyd, Wardley And The Book

SPEAKER_00 2:27

Absolutely. It is a process, it's an ongoing thing, it's not an artifact. So you're you're absolutely correct. Doing it continuously or regularly is key. And you know, a lot of big companies they have their five-year plans or five-year strategies and they do it once a year at most. So, yeah, that's that's not really the world we live in because it really starts with with with uh with the environment. And if the environment is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, then you need to adapt. It's it's like water. I love the sun the way Sun Tzu uses water metaphors. I mean, if the world is in constant motion, then you need to be able to adapt and not only adapt, you need to shape. And and water is good at both adapting, you know, following the the hillsides, but also shaping the hillsides. Uh so so I think that's what Sun Tzu and and a lot of people in what's now called China got right. They started from the premise the world is in constant motion. How do we thrive in such an environment?

Mike Jones 3:32

Yeah, and I think that's that's that static point, even when you know people are going through these strategy cycles. By the time they've looked at a year, there's so much context missing, and there's so much like people forget what was the the conversation, what what were we thinking about, what was the real challenge at this point? And it needs to be that consistent conversation, the consistent act of observing, you know, looking at the terrain, which I see on if anyone looks at your medium post, you'll they'll see a very clear, really good image that you've created based off of Wardley. And what I really like in there, because you have observation at the the start, and I think that's something that you know what I've seen from organizations not very good at, they want to go straight to solution without understanding the context first. But the next part of that is is the terrain. And I and I don't think people appreciate, I know we're not like you know, military or Sun Tzu where they had a physical terrain that they were looking at the constraints of that, but even businesses, we still have a terrain, it's the external environment. I just don't think we appreciate it that way.

Continuous Strategy In A VUCA World

SPEAKER_00 4:34

Absolutely, and in a military context, you would use maps, right, to orient yourself. And reality always has precedence, but but you need the maps to sort of be able to have a dialogue, to have a conversation. What does the terrain look like? And you can look at it together in your team and then start to to orient yourself and take action or discuss what actions to take and make decisions about different choices of direction and whatnot. And that's the beauty of Simon Wardley's work, and that's how it connects, because he visualizes the business landscape, how businesses evolve, how technology evolves, and then you can start to have those kind of conversations together in your team or prepare on your own to get your thoughts down on paper, because currently there's so much narratives going on, there's so much storytelling, and uh well that's that's rhetorics if you go back to the old Greeks. I mean, you need to have some some thought behind it and and some some analysis and some synthesis behind that, and that's if you have a map, if you're lost in the in the forest, or if you're planning your campaign, you need something similar in business and in tech, and that's that's the beauty of of Simon Wardley and and his his Wardly maps.

Mike Jones 5:49

Yeah. You must model the the external environment some way because otherwise it strategy becomes this abstract thing. And I think for a long time, and that I think that's what deters people away from strategy because they see it as this abstract task, um, and they're like, Oh, I'm more of a doer, I don't but actually it's not, you know, it's it's it is about a way of being sensing orientated, it's a very doing activity, but because we're not using tools like Simon Wardley or trying to visualize the map, it does become abstract. And humans, when we live in the abstract space, we're very good at building our own friction because I just assume that you're talking about something that I recognise but you're not, and it just builds and builds friction, and we don't we don't really get to effectively orientate.

SPEAKER_00 6:32

Absolutely, I fully agree, and that that's I mean, people are different, right? So some people they like the action, the concrete, others they like the abstract, you know, the strategizing, whatever that means. But strategizing, it's both thinking, discussing, and doing. You need to have all these things, otherwise it it just won't work. It's like a system. So so then you need all those capabilities in there. And and you're you're right that the people who like action, but presumably they would like to to take the right action, do the right thing, and this will help them do the right thing, and it'll help them to contribute to to the their whatever team they're in, or whatever organization they're in, if it's if it's a corporate, if it's NGO, or or even your sports team. So it really, really helps.

Mike Jones 7:24

And I love the fact that like me, I found recently, like modern strategy stuff, it's just I I read I buy books, I've got those books, like most of them are part red, because I get through them and I think, well, it's nothing really new. But then I look back, I spend more time looking back at people like Boyd Sunzu and all that and Clautzwitz, and because it's amazes me how we've conceived, we've conceived the idea that we are more volatile, more complex than ever, maybe partly true, but we're somehow different to what it was like. But those figures back then, they were talking about the very skills, the very way of thinking that we needed to deal with this complexity, and we forgot those lessons, and it's almost we're trying to create new ones, but you don't need to.

Maps, Terrain And Shared Orientation

SPEAKER_00 8:06

True, very true. And and I've been thinking about this as well. I've been writing the book and reflecting, because I I read pretty much every translation there is on Sun Tzu, so I don't speak Chinese, but I tried to interpret it and read it with modern glasses to have that perspective. What about using this in a modern context, modern conflict, modern strategy to succeed, to succeed in turbulent times, sustainably succeed in turbulent times? And the insight is that when at the time what is now called China, it wasn't even China, it was the warring states period, was hundreds of years of wars. You know, we think we have we're we're in in turbulent times now, but you know, hundreds of years of wars forming basically a continent, and they had not one pandemic, they had several pandemics, and there was social upheaval, there were revolutions going on for hundreds of years. I mean, if that isn't volatile and certain complex and ambiguous, it's or X. So they were absolutely in flux.

Mike Jones 9:04

Yeah, and and there came the skill. So if you were if you were to advise someone that was fresh to um Sun Tzu, either yeah, I know the the classic is um the art of war. Is there anywhere else also um w what what's some of the key principles that you think really stand out for Sun Tzu?

SPEAKER_00 9:27

No, there the couple of things in in Sun Tzu. He talks about these I call them correlative pairs. There's loads of translations of it, but it's really the yin and yang. I mean, everyone heard about yin and yang, but it's very superficial. But uh, if you go back to the Chinese language, it's pictures, right? It's pictograms, and yin and yang, that's like the sunny side of the mountain and the shady side of the mountain. So it means that you know, throughout the day, you know, the mountain will be shady and it will be sunny. There are things that move, there are things that change. So it's yin and yang sounds very abstract, very fluffy. But if you look at the sign, and people who read Japanese and Chinese, they will see this. It's the sunny side of the mountain, it's a shady sign. So they get that image by reading it. So where am I going with all this? Well, there's a number of those correlative pairs in Sun Tzu, and that's like his or whatever, if it was one person or whoever collectively wrote the book. I mean, it's their way of making sense of the context and the patterns of this volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. So they have these pairs that they try to map the context and the current situation into. So should we attack or should we defend? And the one of the key correlative pairs is expected and surprise. So, what is expected and what is a surprise? And Boyd rifts on this a lot as well, and as do Saleman Wardley. In the military, of course, you you want to trick your opponent and you want to have this strategic ambiguity so they don't know what to expect. You want to get into their observe, orient, decide, act loop. So and that you can do with shaping and deception and whatnot. But the essence is that this cycle of expected and surprise, that's a key strategic quality principle. But it's part of this this toolbox with correlative pairs, and expected and surprised. Take a modern example. My favorite one is is probably Apple. You know, the launch of the iPhone. I I watched the the Rim BlackBerry movie the the other night. I can thoroughly recommend it. It's a fantastic movie, and they they are so successful with with uh the keyboard and everything, and then they're in shock when Steve Jobs is on stage. You know, text, iPod, web, text, iPod web. That's expected, right? You you want to have that, but then it's in the one device, and it's totally surprising. And the the user interface is awesome, it's you have desire to use. So that's like a great illustration of the combination. You have the expected, and then you give this knockout punch the surprise, it's in one device. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, that's a concrete example of applying that that principle today.

Expected And Surprise As A System

Mike Jones 12:09

Yeah, and it I think that you see it enough, really. Um and I watched that Blackberry uh and it's a Blackberry film on Netflix. If you if you haven't watched it, I I would recommend people watch it. It's a really good example about how someone becomes quite disconnected with the external environment. And even thinking about in John Boyd terms, their their orientation is locked in um it it's not keeping up with reality. And so they deny all information, they were denying that, oh yeah, we don't need that, we're we're still good, everyone still wants what we've got, and unfortunately that led to their demise. You this whole I do surprise, we used to do it in the military, and it was all about yes, there's stuff that they knew that we would do standard, but then we'd always find um two key things security and surprise. We always make sure we had security, and we always make sure we had surprise, and because if you can surprise someone, then they're they're trying to reorientate really quickly. And if you if you get them in that space where they're they're in complete shock and awe and they are trying to make sense um of what you're doing, that puts them sort of on the back foot, and that's what you want.

SPEAKER_00 13:17

You want to seize that initiative. Exactly. And and to translate that into business, because there you have customers, right? And you don't want to negatively surprise them, you want to positively surprise them, you want to say, oh, this is awesome. So they're they they have a desire to to use what what you just positively surprised them with. So that's essential. But then, of course, you have competition and the your competitors, you want to give them a surprise or two that what happened there? I'm uh I'm I'm totally lost. Where did that come from? That works with your competitors in business as well. And one thing we did in Ericsson, I don't think it's a secret anymore, but it's it's on on a far less grand scale than Apple. But you know, we had releases twice a year, telecom software for for mobile networks, and we always wanted to have at least one thing, or maybe only one thing, that was this positively surprising that well, our customers, the operators would say, Wow, we really need to have that. And it would also leave our competitors in shock because ideally they couldn't do it in a year or two. So we always aimed to have one of those sort of awesome desire to use kind of features in our releases twice a year. So, so uh, and of course we had a lot of other features as well, but those were the expected ones. You know, you need to have the table stakes as well. But then at least for at most one such compelling need-to-have kind of feature.

Mike Jones 14:37

And I have this discussion with clients when we do strategy with them, and they'll say there are some stuff that you want to externalize and you want to say, but there are stuff that we we don't want to say, and actually it's okay. But I think for a long time we're used to this artifact of strategy where we we put up our purpose and vision and all this lot. Um actually there's there's some stuff we want to deceive people for for reasons for security, so that we can shock them, and if we can shock them, it gives us that advantage, and we we should always be you know sensing, reorientating, adapting to the environment to our advantage, whatever the advantage means in in that context. But it I don't know, I I look back sometimes and I think how have we lost these skills? I know I'm not saying we have all have, you know, there are people plenty of people out there that have them, but we generally in the sort of uh MBA exec world, I I just don't really think these sort of ideas exist.

SPEAKER_00 15:33

Yeah, I mean conflict, competition, these things are tricky, right? It's not like you take a simple formula and just follow the simple rules and and fill in the blanks of a form. It's not that simple. You need to think, you need to observe, you need to discuss, you need to visualize. It it takes a lot of time and effort. And most people, even you know, managers, executives, they haven't really done it, they haven't really practiced, they haven't trained for it, and of course they're a bit lost when they're when they're told to, oh, could you could you come up with a strategy? Of course, we're humans, so we want to use as little as little energy as possible and get quick to target. Uh, and that's that's um it's it's not good. It will it won't give you a good strategy. But the the the the thing is, and coming back to Boyd, as long as you're slightly less bad than your competitors, it's okay. So that's why a lot of the sloppy strategy work still works, because your competitors are even worse.

Business Translation: Positive Surprise

Mike Jones 16:35

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I think I think people underestimate this idea of structural coupling or shaping, is I wrote about um that the fact it is the buoyancy of the market that is dragging them through, not necessarily their conscious effort to position himself in that in that way. Because you even look at um we were talking about surprise. You look at Apple now. Apple, as we said earlier, with the you know, Steve Jobs, he he had that. He he had that ability to shock and awe and surprise. And now it's almost like we wait for the new iPhone and it's like, oh wow, it's a different colour, nice one. There's they they've lost the ability to do that, and I think that's why they're now so tightly bound in the herd. I don't think they know how to get themselves out and distinguish themselves differently.

SPEAKER_00 17:20

Exactly. So so instead of having this cycle of expected surprise, expected surprise, they're like expected, expected, expected, that was expected. There's no positive surprise. No. That's a bit of a problem.

Mike Jones 17:34

I often laugh when when I look back on Sun Tzu's work and I said, Imagine, imagine if it was like now in Sun Tzu's time, where like they're they're looking and they then come up with ideas, but they spend most of their time on slates drawing graphs about the expected benefits of their strategy and all this stuff, sat on a hillside doing that and presenting that to a board of people to get approval. Whilst all that's happening, the enemy is shifting around. Well, technically that did happen in Napoleon's time.

SPEAKER_00 18:02

No, but what they did, um, and this is in in the book and and in my interpretation, what they did was they did some kind of simulations. So they were doing, let's call it war war gaming as preparations. So they were talking about you know sticks and and calculations in the temple, but that means they had they had a mission room where they simulated and they looked at their capabilities, they looked at their strengths and weaknesses and prepared how are we going to shape based on the environment? And they were trying to set up conditions in those preparation sessions so that they would be certain to win. I mean, create the conditions so that the consequence would be sustainable success. So they were doing a lot of planning and preparations and checking their capabilities, and to avoid a conflict, that was the best, because then you didn't sacrifice a lot of people and a lot of land and a lot of valuables and money and and whatnot. So if you could win without even having a conflict, that was the best. And alliances were super important. So there's a hierarchy of things, a priority list of things to do, and at the bottom was was going all in conflict and and uh yeah.

Capabilities, Line Of Sight To Customer

Mike Jones 19:14

Yeah, you still see that exist today in form. I don't think people look at it the same way, but the idea of shaping or being shaped, how do you consciously shape the conditions to your advantage? And that's looking at what your what constraints are in play, what couplings you have, so alliances, suppliers, you know, if you can you can shape yourself in that way, then you you don't have to go into conflict. You you will win, you sustain that advantage. But that simulation is is overrated, underrated, sorry, not overrated, underrated. I'm used to it in the military, we we do it all the time. And you only have to look at the success of um, you don't have to agree with what they were doing, but that operation in Venezuela with the Delta Force, you know, prior to that, they would have done loads and loads of simulation war gaming through that to try and to shape the conditions best for them to to make sure that their success was had a higher percentage than it would be if they just boldly went, Oh, let's just go in and let's just let's see what happens. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 20:15

And in those simulations, I mean in China at the time they didn't even have maps. Maps were invented later, right? Yeah. So and that's why using a worldly map to sort of simulate or look at various potential happenings and how how can we shape, where do we put in in the conditions here, what capabilities do we have, what capabilities do we outsource, or what can we buy, uh, what can we build ourselves, those kind of things. So you can map this shifting landscapes. It's it's basically just a graph of capabilities and how they depend upon each other, and then you look at the evolution from something completely new, a novelty, to a complete commodity, you know, like electricity or or tap water, and all things in life and the world evolves through those those uh phases. So that will help you tremendously to prepare, and then of course, everything about agility, flexibility, that's all good. Yeah, but you need to know where you're heading and and try to shift the odds a bit in your favor, and that you do through a little bit of preparation and looking at your capabilities, looking at at your your customers, starting from the customer and customer needs, both the expressed ones and the the sort of not yet expressed ones. So and then you work your way all the way down to whatever you need, what capabilities, I mean, including electricity, because you need to run your data center somehow.

Mike Jones 21:40

You you you mentioned a a key word um quite a few times now is capability. It it's the matching of the external environment. Where do we need to position ourselves best to have that advantage? But then also that that's that connection. I think that connection between the internal and external um gets missed sometimes. You go, well. If we are to do that, we need these capabilities and these resources to enable us to do that. Now, is that achievable though?

SPEAKER_00 22:08

Sure. I'm getting excited here because in Ericsson, we I mean that's a telecom company, mobile uh networks with with radios and stuff. So we always talked about uh line of sight to customer. Line of sight is good if because if you have line of sight, that means you have good radio conditions and you don't have any interference and stuff. So that metaphor was extremely valuable when talking to engineers and managers and and whoever in the company, because everyone got the metaphor. We want to have clear line of sight to customer. And if you don't have that, if you have the sort of a foggy view or no view at all, then you run the risk of going totally wrong. So, how do we get clear line of sight to customer? That could help us with all the tricky trade-offs, coming back to the Sun Tzu correlative pairs. Should we be on this end of the spectrum or that end of the spectrum? And of course, that shifts, it's a timely balance. So the balance is different in different contexts and different situations. But if you can have taken the customer perspective to it, that will help you to reduce all these, you know, tens of trade-offs or hundreds of trade-offs to the few key ones that you really need to grapple with and and and resolve to the best of your abilities. But then to have this map of capabilities with a clear line of sight to the customer and and his or her needs, then you can identify gaps. We don't have this capability. Okay, how do we get that? Do we build it ourselves? Do we buy it or do we outsource it? So it can help you with those kinds of decisions. Because you have this map that you draw together in your team, and then you can start challenging what's on the map rather than challenge each other, which typically happens in a corporate environment. It turns into a rhetorics game, you know, me versus you. And instead, how do we improve this map or our stand understanding of or our orientation of the environment, the current environment, together? That's the beauty of it.

Quarterly Strategy Loops Over KPIs

Mike Jones 24:00

And that takes, I don't know, there's loads of leadership literature that talks about this, about self-awareness, but there's that self-awareness of the organization that I think it's overlooked in that a real deep understanding of your identity as an organization. What actual capabilities do you have is really important. And I think this gets clouded by aspiration in a sense of I'm not talking about no ambition, but I'm talking about um, you know, it's it's great to have ambition, but we need to start with reality first. Who are we? What capabilities do we currently have? Because then when we're mapping it, like you said, it's easier for us to understand where our gaps are, other than when they live in this fanciful world and they go, Oh, yeah, but we're really good at that, or we're gonna be this. And I have to often sometimes go, don't talk about what you want. Let's talk about what you are first, the current state first.

SPEAKER_00 24:53

Yeah, and and that's that's the beauty of Boyd's orientation, and that you can do on an individual level, you can do it on a team level, you can do it on an organizational level or even on a society level. So it's it's fractal, right? So the key thing is you do it. I mean, as a human being, you do this observation orientation, it's almost like simultaneously, it just goes on and on, and sometimes you apply more energy and sometimes you're more on an autopilot. But but having this regularly done in in your team or in your organization, and then it's different timescales. And if you've done it once a year for strategy, then maybe you should do it quarterly. That's that's what we tried in Ericsson. We we moved it from from annual cycles to quarterly cycles, and then we called it strategy retrospectives and prospectives because it was like take a day, the whole leadership team, really think together and visualize where are we, what have we done, what have we learned, and then look towards the next quarter. And it was really not about you know KPIs and and targets, it was it was what have we learned and what capabilities are working for us and which ones are not working for us. So, like compressing the cycle a bit to learn faster. That was that was the aim in that specific context.

Mike Jones 26:08

Yeah, I think it comes it grounds you more into context, uh having that space to observe, orientate. And again, it's not it's not a balanced score card, it's not a KPI, because I think that blinds people into trying fixing a measure rather than broaden out to go, what what what's happening? You know, how is the external environment shifting? Is it to our advantage or not? What's shaping us? How can we and I think this is a more broader question that then makes sense when we then go more granular into okay, so what capabilities do we need? What where do we need to probe to see if we do where where's the simultaneous experiments that we need to run? It becomes a lot clearer. But I think if we create this what I call self-induced ambiguity, strategic ambiguity is really good and we can get onto that, but when we get that self-induced ambiguity, where we create so much fog that no one can really see what we're going through, it it just creates confusion and people will then become so internal in their functions that they just fracture. Absolutely.

Small Experiments And ROI In Weeks

SPEAKER_00 27:08

And this thing about ambiguity and fog. I mean, we'd like to have clarity. The clarity, as you rightly point out in one of your latest blog posts, is not about details. Yeah, yeah. It's it's it's it's rather the opposite. You need to get clarity on the direction first, and if you lock down too much on specific KPIs and you lock them for 12 months, you will miss out on opportunities that come up if you're not open. And that's why why this conditions consequences approach that like Sun Tzu and Lao Tzu, they're not locking into a specific target, they are they're looking at the direction and then they are flexible as you go because you know the map maybe maybe it was wrong. And you find things out, and then you need to be flexible, but yeah, you you avoid getting because some people are so focused, results focused, and they're so action-oriented, so then they will get into this tunnel vision and miss out on what's going on in in reality outside their little tunnel, and that's not good in a competitive environment.

Mike Jones 28:16

No, yeah, in any environment, you you see in our um NHS and um stuff like that here, our public services, they're not in a competitive environment, but what they do is they just get so focused on targets, and I know it's the pressure from the government of set these targets, but it really narrows their focus, and then they try to um seek stability and predictability by saying if we do this, we will get this, and that's what they aim for when they miss all the changes rather than going, Well, what is the what's the intent? What's the direction you know, how do we hold the intent firmly, but no the the the the direction or the plans loosely it gives us that flex to to adapt.

SPEAKER_00 28:55

Yeah, that's that's a very interesting observation because if you go back to 2500 years ago, it was about going going to the Gamba, being in the environment and seeing with your own eyes, not staring through KPIs, because then you try try to abstract away reality. Yeah. You try to abstract away the context. You try, but you may go horribly wrong because you're not there in reality. And again, coming back to these Chinese characters, the character for Gemba, I think I looked it up sometime. It's it's like the original meaning was something like the the emperor looking out at the rice fields and people are starving. I mean, that that's a pretty interesting graphical representation of why it's important with the Gemba and and be there and see what's going on and not sit in in your castle or palace and and steer through through KPIs.

Mike Jones 29:49

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you're blind, a lot of them are um are purely, I wouldn't call it retrospective, I was just it would be called it's just purely looking backwards um for these these KPIs, trying to justify the score rather than really going, well, what what's capability are we missing? What's changed now that's making it difficult for us to to achieve this? And it's it's more having a better conversation about the internal and the external.

Change As Default: East And West

SPEAKER_00 30:16

Exactly. And we were coming from from a situation where we used the balanced core guard for quite a long time in Ericsson and a lot of engineers there. So we got into all these complex calculations and formulas in Excel. So we lost I mean, the we didn't see the forest for the trees. We we got bogged down in all those details. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. We're gonna try something radically different here. And and um that's what we did. Going from those Excel sheets to retrospectives and prospectives on what is really important right now, and try to define one, what's the most important thing for us, what's the biggest problem, what's the biggest challenge for us as an organization right now? And let's focus on that for the coming quarter and ask the whole organization to think how can we contribute, how can we what can I do in my part of the organization? What can we do in our team? So it's it's a subtle shift because traditionally you have your overall objective and you break it down and you break it down and you break it down and you lose the the line of sight. But here it was like okay, this is the overall challenge for our organization for the coming quarter. How can I and we contribute? And then you started to get a lot of actions, a lot of very sensible actions because people knew what was most important, and everyone was thinking, what can we do? That was that was pretty amazing, actually.

Mike Jones 31:36

And it's good because it's it's the principles of mission command, isn't it? From excellent, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. This is the intent, this is what I want to achieve, and this is what we sort of deem success will look like, i.e., the outcome that we should visibly see. And then is a case of right, what what you know, R and D function, what does that mean to you? Um and they'll simulate that and go, well, what's the context? You know, what what they're actually asking me to do, and they'll they'll come up with ideas and they'll run those ideas. Um, but that's where really got to be key around when we look at strategy and we look at manoeuvres and we say, right, like we're gonna do these manoeuvres, um, which should hopefully um change the trajectory um to our advantage. But each maneuver is is activity, is capability, it's it's something happening in the organization, isn't just an abstract thought that we're not doing anything. Uh and I would say that there's an outcome and output measure. So output is something physically that we're going to do, and then outcome is that you know the culmination of those. We should see, and I use see purposefully because in the external environment we look out, we should see this change in the dynamics. We should see, I don't know, uh a competitor retreating on these areas. We see stronger relationships in this alliance we've created. We see that the customers are reacting in this way, but that's the bit that really makes sense to what we're doing. If we're not seeing that emerge, then something else has happened, and we can look and go, well, what has emerged or what hasn't emerged, and how do we then adapt from the stance?

SPEAKER_00 33:07

Absolutely. And and to me, what you're saying means that everyone needs to think for him or herself. They need to think a bit and reflect. Okay, it's not just mindless execution of someone else's orders, if you will. Every team, every individual needs to think and act based on the context and the why. So so and that's pretty powerful powerful. And that also then then you need to look at the results to have this feedback and learning loop as well, as you as you rightly point out, with the with the output and the outcome. And then you need to think about okay, how do we measure this? And it's not someone else putting a measure on you, it's you who who you you do an experiment and you need to think about how how you measure the the outcomes or the outputs from it. And no one else but you can do that, or your team, yeah, or your part of the organization.

Identity, Adaptation And Examples

Mike Jones 33:53

Exactly. And what we're explaining there takes a great bit of agility because I'll see people listen to this and they'll probably go, well, it's pretty tough because we're solid out just delivering. And it's because they don't have that that requisite agility in there, that bit of flex that can deal with this um today and tomorrow tension that's going on, this change versus status quo. And that's where it goes down because I think we've been locked into efficiency. And if you look back on Sun Tzu and all those back in battle, you imagine if they were going, Well, actually, why have we got three people here where we could probably have you know one person doing this and that'll save us some money?

SPEAKER_00 34:32

Yeah, and and I think what what we did successfully in the Ericsson was we had the the the business person, the head of the product management, and the RD person, head of the the product development unit, they shook hands on stage, say, hey, we're gonna work together, which is which was not always the case, you know, a little bit of uh politics going on in large organizations, you know, me versus you or R D versus business, IT versus the business. But they were on stage saying hey, we're gonna do this together. And they did a few things that were really important. That was one, very symbolic, but also very concrete. They also said that we would like you to invest not one percent, not five percent, but they I think they said ten percent of your time on improvement work. They I uh if they would have said five percent or one percent, it would have been zero. But I think I have to check if they said ten percent or twenty percent. They may even have said twenty percent just to make I mean the the surprise. I mean eight percent, wow, because they knew that it would be pressure on delivering, right? So they said that, and both of them said that they had just been shaking hands on stage, and then people started to to do this ex improvement experiments, and they said that okay, you're gonna put so and so much one one day per week. Or we I think we had um what did we call it? What did we call it an innovation day or improvements day? We had it once per sprint, or sprints were were they two weeks or three weeks, or one day per sprint uh allocated for for this. Then you could not only think but also do whatever software coding or or scripts and stuff. And they also pushed us to and said that well, you should get the return on the on investment, not in two years, not in one year, but let's try to do it in a quarter. Oh wow, and that was driving small experiments. Because if you do a small thing, then you will you will get the return of investment quickly because you just invested a little. So it doesn't take so much. So it was a a number of of brilliant steps there that that we did. And and I'm not saying this is easy, this was a journey. I mean, we started around 2008, more than five years, less than ten years. It's it's it takes time and effort.

Mike Jones 36:45

Yeah. You you essentially bring in a paradigm shift of how you know we've been ingrained to sort of think from the sort of you know, failureism of efficiency all the way through. And um I really like the idea of the small experiments because I I see it in large organizations, especially in our public services, where if they've got an idea or change, it's a transformation. It's like the everyone's doing it all at once, and you're thinking, Well, that's just you you're you're overwhelming and destabilizing your whole organization. Well, actually, you can because everything's fractal and you've got teams, actually, you can isolate that and go, well, let's let's run the experiment just in these two teams in these two different areas and see what happens. We can learn from that, and then that means we can move forward. I think there's an urge to it's almost like a false sense of speed, thinking that we just do it all at once, it would just done quicker, and they wonder why all the I won't say they fail, but it's very suboptimal results.

Mission Command And Outcomes

SPEAKER_00 37:44

Yeah, it it it's so interesting because our whole paradigm in the northwestern world since the Greeks has been like change is hard, change is you know, we don't want that, we want stability. Whereas the Eastern world, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, they start from the opposite. Change is natural, change is easy, just do it. How hard can it be? I mean, that's the nature, and you do small things, small improvements, small trials, and and they even have symbols for for change. I mean, the the dragon, that's the shape, the ultimate shape shifter. That's the hero in in Eastern mythology. And you have things like even today, you have the one of the the baseball teams in Japan, they're called the Hiroshima carps. Why do they pick a carp? Well, because the carp is like the symbolic animal that fights up through the rivers up to the very top, and when it has fought uh its way through that it becomes the dragon. Wow. So uh yeah, it's interesting in how our societies over centuries can can see change in totally different ways.

Mike Jones 38:50

Yeah. Change is natural because we are, like I said earlier, we're structurally coupled to the extended environments, the changes in that change us. You know, we only look back on us as a society in the last sort of hundred years, the amount of changes we've come through, not all by we haven't opted and gone, you know, I'm gonna do this. It's by the nature of things changing in the environment that has changed us, and we do it and we adapt. That's the whole nature of our evolutionary species. But it seems to come to organizations and they fight this idea, they they want this this stability, this efficiency, this perceived predictability, where actually if they just embrace it and they realise that adaption is is crucial. The viability principle we go, we live by in sort of systems world is that you must adapt as quick as or quicker in your external environment or your competitors, otherwise you'll cease to exist. But it's how do we constantly adapt without losing our identity? And I think that what happens is that organizations don't do that, so they they wait and they wait and they wait until they have to transform, and I think that's where they they create such instability, and sometimes people don't make it the other way, and their identity completely collapses.

SPEAKER_00 40:03

It's a paradox because as individuals we're extremely adaptable. Think what what people have have have been going through throughout history on an individual level or on a family level. I mean, it's amazing. But as you say, when it comes to the the organizational level, it's almost like a bit of the opposite, except for some organizations that have that capability sort of built in because they've been around for hundreds of years. That's in their DNA that, well, we're good at changing and adapting, and we've been around since the whatever 1300s or 1400s. So then they have that their identity.

Moltke And Independent Thinking

Mike Jones 40:40

Yeah. You see some great examples of companies that do it recently. Like you think of things like Netflix. You know, they went from Love DVD and they've adapted now to they're not even a content provider anymore, they're a content creator and thinking they've they've done those adaptions over time. They didn't go, we're gonna be this, and it was a linear path. They they chose opportunities and there's opportunities or forances, and those provided opportunities, they took those, and over time their identity they adapted. Same with um Navida, they started off as you know, cards for games, graphics cards for games. Now they are the backbone of AI, and they've gone from a 30 billion valuation to 4 trillion. So, you know, adaption does bring reward.

SPEAKER_00 41:24

Absolutely. Uh those are great examples. And and they have built capabilities along the way. And they have been shaped and shaped their environment to make it more probable for them to succeed. So they've been both adaptable, they've been flexible, and they've been thinking about very deeply about who they want to be and where they want to go, and what what the environment, I mean, looking at their strengths, looking at their weaknesses, looking where the environment is going. With Netflix, I like this idea of looking at the local content creation. That's their surprise, I think. That you can have a murder mysteries in Sweden or in and that could be that's not only for Sweden and for the Nordics, it's for a global market. And they made it work. So that's like wow, no one thought of that before. But they consciously built that capability and made it happen.

Mike Jones 42:15

Some of the biggest successes have been not to the traditional English or American thing, it's been from local, from Japan, from the Nordics, from Germany. And yeah, they they've provided that. And that I think that just that ability to cast a net, that's that surprise that and a capability that other traditional traitors are thinking because they're so locked into just America's, just England.

SPEAKER_00 42:39

Yeah. Yeah, and and of course uh Japan and Sweden and the rest of the world has learned from from England and from the from the US. I mean, we were looking up to the way you made movies and TV series, but then something uniquely local was added to make it like surprising. It's like, wow, that's different in a good way. It's not just strange. So I I think it's it's it's absolutely brilliant.

Mike Jones 43:02

And and and I think that's a classic example of uh boys' orientation. Actually, they they changed the orientation, they they destroyed the the normal orientation that if you wanted great movies, great production, it had to be Hollywood's or maybe England, um, and actually destroyed that thing. Actually, no, you can do it, you could do it anywhere. We've got the technology now.

SPEAKER_00 43:23

And I think that's the essence of agility, being able to get out of your tracks before you you you go bankrupt, right? I mean, isn't it? We need to change before you have to create a burning platform. I think that's how do you create that capability in an organization? That's the multi billion dollar question.

Mike Jones 43:44

Yeah. It's always that challenge between status quo and change, and that's always going to be a very, very difficult tension for organizations to to grapple with, especially if they're serving low tolerance for low risk. Tolerance for low risk? Yeah, tolerance for risk, sorry. The uh Uh stakeholders and boards that like safety. And I think that's if you think about it now, reflection, I think that's unfortunately where Apple are at the moment, for my estimations, that you know they're making a vast amount of money, and there's some stakeholders there that don't want that to be disrupted, but then that's a cost of of of change, and that's why there's no surprise now, it's just the same, the same, the same as we mentioned earlier.

SPEAKER_00 44:24

Yeah, yeah. Uh Apple is interesting in many ways. They have so many brilliant people and they have such a proud history, and they have their identity. Um who knows? Maybe they have something.

Mike Jones 44:36

Maybe it'll surprise surprise us. I'm an I'm a big Apple fan. Everything I've got is Apple, so I'm waiting for a good surprise.

SPEAKER_00 44:43

Same here. Same here, same here. But we had some negative surprises recently with some.

Shaping Conditions As A Habit

Mike Jones 44:48

Yeah, I know, yeah. So hopefully they need they need to reincarnate um Steve Jobs to get him out of the situation or find and unlock that. Um there will be someone there. It's probably a bit like uh um Clautzwitz, uh not Klautzwitz, uh von Molkter, when he was general of the Prussian army, the Prussian army were fighting against his ideas to create this adaptable well uh uh mission command. I won't say the German words, I'm gonna embarrass myself. But that and they fought against it and eventually they they accepted it and it brought so much value.

SPEAKER_00 45:24

Yeah, someone he sorry for getting excited, but he created a system, right? He created the whole training and education, and and they had their their simulations or their war games, and and they had this uh I forgot the German word, and I'm not gonna embarrass myself either, even though I speak a little bit of German and I studied in Hamburg, but that was a long time ago. But they had this independent thinking obedience. I love the term, I mean that's a long German word, independent thinking obedience. So and that meant that in those simulations you had to disobey orders to succeed in some cases. So Moltke Moltke he put that into the to the war gaming exercises because he wanted people to think for themselves in the context, not just mindlessly following orders. And the people he took into his general staff were the ones who had actually shown that they could disobey an order in one of those exercises. And I think that's that's pretty brilliant. And that shows shows how strongly he believed in the system that he trusted people. If you have the context and you train together, um and then you will think alike, so you can trust each other even more. But it's not like you think the same. That's not what he wanted. He wanted the independent thinking obedience, which is like almost like a like a contradiction in terms. You can imagine those stuffy Prussians, right? But they were not, they were totally flexible and they had an idea of how to do things, and they wanted independent contextual thinking and actions for what the context required.

Mike Jones 46:56

And it it's such a great story to think about definitely organizational leaders to think are they are they hindering this new this new capability by their own perceived beliefs and we challenged. But I've I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. And for the listeners there, I'll put uh Eric's book and medium post in the show notes so you can really really get to the root of your thinking, how you synthesized Sun Tzu, Boyd, and Wardley together. I think it's fantastic. Um and I think it'd be really enlightening for for listeners. So thank you so much for for joining us today, Eric. Um, before you go though, what would you like to leave listeners to think about from this episode?

Closing Thoughts And Listener Ask

SPEAKER_00 47:37

I think that it's one of the things that's easy to forget because we're so flexible and adaptable and agile, right? I mean, it's not only about being flexible, adaptable, and agile. You can think about how you shape the conditions, how you can create conditions, how you can design things in a way that betters your odds to succeed. I think that's an important takeaway for me from this conversation. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you very much for for inviting me.

Mike Jones 48:04

No, no, it's a pleasure. Yeah. And look at the I urge people look at this idea of shaping, it is really important. Um so I think we we often just um we just go with the flow. And sometimes that can be an advantage, sometimes not. But if you really enjoyed this episode as much as I have, um please like and share to your network so that um other listeners can can enjoy this too. But Eric, thank you so much for coming along and I look forward to sharing some great ideas again with you soon. Thank you, Mark. Pleasure.