By Janus Boye
“Forget the crystal ball and start navigating”
Management researcher Iben Stjerne with business agility expert Morten Elvang
This was the catchy subtitle of a recent interactive session in our Copenhagen digital leadership peer group, where we were joined by management researcher Iben Stjerne and business agility expert Morten Elvang
They introduced us to the emerging concept of open strategy, which led to an interesting conversation on power dynamics, experimentation and essentially how strategy is changing.
A few days later, we did a similar session with our London group, where Morten joined us remotely. Again, stories of how strategies are failing, how strategy processes are often a very big waste of time and how generally strategies are not communicated well filled the room.
A version of this slide was used in our recent peer group meeting: As is widely accepted in both work and more private matters - it starts with acceptance as the important first step in getting past uncomfortable thoughts, feelings, and situations in life
At each session we had an hour for our usual mixture of slides, conversation and reflection. At the end of the London session, one of our members asked: How do I explain this to my senior management in just a few minutes?
This blog post is an attempt to do just that. It’s intended as brief management-friendly introduction to the topic based on a 4-minute video we recorded. Towards the end, you can find the brief video.
As per tradition in our sessions, we started with ‘why’.
Why open strategy?
According to Iben, the problem with strategy as we know it, is that it ends up as documents on the shelves that nobody reads. It’s different with open strategy.
To quote:
“You involve more people in the process and make both the process and decisions more transparent. This will increase the impact of your strategy, create more alignment, and provide you with more creative input. Open strategy also leads to increased commitment and legitimacy for the strategy.”
Slide from our Copenhagen session on open strategy: Open strategy is all about transparency, inclusion and adaptability
How will it impact me?
Morten answered this one and opened by addressing the frustration that’s felt by many employees due to the lack of openness and transparency. He’s known for coining the term ‘black market for common sense’, which is what happens inside many organisations, where the system doesn’t make sense.
The bigger picture, and perhaps more important, as Morten said, is that as things are going faster in society, complexity is going up and industries keep being impacted by disruption. This drives the need for a different approach.
To quote Morten:
“If you are not open, you’ll miss key information and make bad decisions. As stakeholders, whether on the board or in the senior management team, that’s simply unacceptable. You need to actively seek the relevant information to inform your strategy”
What’s new when it comes to open strategy?
Building on the input from Morten, Iben said that the radically changing markets, the continued pressure for efficiency and demands for increased customer satisfaction, all calls for much more adaptable strategies.
To achieve this, you need to involve more people than in the past. Also decision processes needs to be radically faster.
Compared to the few existing books on the topic (see mention below), Iben and Morten views formulation and execution as one entangled dance – one is hard to separate from the other. Specifically, they have extended ‘classic’ Open Strategy with an upfront cleansing process to unmess and added adaptability as an explicit attribute. '
To quote Morten:
“Unneccesary tight-lippedness is a threat to your survival”
In other words: Where most literature on open strategy so far advocates limited openness during the strategy formulation, that’s not the recommended approach by Iben and Morten.
Iben Stjerne and Morten Elvang visited our Copenhagen digital strategy group in earlier this month for a joint talk on ‘open strategy’
Learn more about open strategy
You can also continue your learning journey by visiting the Open Strategy - Works! site that Iben and Morten are maintaining. If you go on the site, you’ll find this impactful opening quote
“The ultimate job of open strategy is to AVOID doing the WRONG THINGS when you could have known better”
Open strategy is currently achieving quite some attention. In April MIT Press published Open Strategy - Mastering Disruption from Outside the C-Suite by Christian Stadler, Julia Hautz, Kurt Matzler and Stephan Friedrich von den Eichen. The book cites an impressive track record for the emerging open strategy practice:
“A survey of 200 business leaders shows that although open-strategy techniques were deployed for only 30 percent of their initiatives, those same initiatives generated 50 percent of their revenues and profits”
Back in 2019 Cambridge University Press released the Cambridge Handbook of Open Strategy. The first of its kind, this Handbook mobilises research on the emerging phenomenon.
We’ll naturally continue the conversation at our upcoming peer groups and also at the Boye Aarhus 23 conference in November, where you can meet both Iben and Morten in person.
Finally, you can also lean back and enjoy the brief video below