One of the great challenges for organizations in the current economy is making strategy under the uncertainties posed by turbulent environments, intensified competition, emerging technologies, shifting customer tastes and regulatory change. Executives often know they must break with the status quo, but there are few signposts indicating the best way forward. Executives have long been exhorted to conduct analyses of internal and external environments and construct scenarios of the future. However, seeing strategy in this way has some serious weaknesses. It assumes that accuracy can be achieved through rigorous analysis and conscientious efforts to overcome individual biases in perception. It also assumes that the process will be relatively frictionless and primarily analytical. But research has found that most forecasting efforts fail to attain the desired precision. To study how managers make strategy in conditions of considerable uncertainty, the authors took an in-depth look at five technology strategy projects inside the Advanced Technology Strategy Group at a communications technology company that was experiencing a period of high industry turbulence. The authors observed managers'struggles to forecast the future and discovered that managers could not imagine new futures for the company without rethinking the past and reconsidering present concerns. A new future could not shape strategic choices unless it was connected in a narrative that showed how it relates to the past and the present. When managers settled on a particular narrative, they could make choices. Strategy making amid volatility thus involves constructing and reconstructing strategic narratives that reimagine the past and present in ways that allow the organization to explore multiple possible futures. In comparing strategy projects, the authors found that the more work managers do to create novel strategic narratives, the more likely they are to explore alternatives that break with the status quo.
Today's top executives are expected to do everything right, from coming up with solutions to unfathomably complex problems to having the charisma and prescience to rally stakeholders around a perfect vision of the future. But no one leader can be all things to all people. It's time to end the myth of the complete leader, say the authors. Those at the top must come to understand their weaknesses as well as their strengths. Only by embracing the ways in which they are incomplete can leaders fill in the gaps in their knowledge with others' skills. The incomplete leader has the confidence and humility to recognize unique talents and perspectives throughout the organization--and to let those qualities shine. The authors' study of leadership over the past six years has led them to develop a framework of distributed leadership that consists of four capabilities: sensemaking, relating, "visioning," and inventing. Sensemaking involves understanding and mapping the context in which a company and its people operate. A leader skilled in this area can quickly identify the complexities of a given situation and explain them to others. The second capability, relating, means being able to build trusting relationships with others through inquiring, advocating, and connecting. Visioning, the third capability, means coming up with a compelling image of the future. It is a collaborative process that articulates what the members of an organization want to create. Finally, inventing involves developing new ways to bring that vision to life. Rarely will a single person be skilled in all four areas. That's why it's critical that leaders find others who can offset their limitations and complement their strengths. Those who don't will not only bear the burden of leadership alone but will find themselves at the helm of an unbalanced ship.