The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results

toward making them flexible is to create an operating rhythm with quarterly reviews of progress, in which adjustment is expected and the budget is a treated as a rolling forecast.

The concept of friction is entirely consistent with systems thinking and chaos theory, but it is more useful to managers because it describes how working in a complex adaptive system is experienced. Its elements can be seen and felt, so we can more easily work out how to deal with them.

management

Generating activity is not a problem; in fact it is easy. The fact that it is easy makes the real problem harder to solve. The problem is getting the right things done – the things that matter, the things that will have an impact, the things a company is trying to achieve to ensure success. A high volume of activity often disguises a lack of effect

Strategic thinking can therefore be laid out as a staircase: a logical sequence of steps which lead to an end-state, which is either the destination or a position which opens up future options. The steps of the staircase define the organization’s “main effort” at a strategic level. The main effort is that single thing which will either in itself ha

The intelligence of an organization is never equal to the sum of the intelligence of the people within it

Thinking strategically involves “going round the loop” to establish coherence between aims, opportunities, and capabilities.

Such a model will only work if people are competent and share basic values.

A strategy is fundamentally an intent: a decision to achieve something now in order to realize an outcome; that is, a “what” and a “why.” Even if our destination is unclear, we need some sense of the end-state to be achieved which gives our current actions a purpose.