Leadership

http://lea.sagepub.com Strategic Leadership: An Exchange of Letters

Gillian Stamp, Brian Burridge and Patrick Thomas Leadership 2007; 3; 479 DOI: 10.1177/1742715007082967 The online version of this article can be found at: http://lea.sagepub.com

Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com

Additional services and information for Leadership can be found at: Email Alerts: http://lea.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://lea.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav Citations http://lea.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/3/4/479

Downloaded from http://lea.sagepub.com by Tomislav Bunjevac on May 4, 2009

Leadership

Strategic Leadership: An Exchange of Letters

Gillian Stamp, Brian Burridge and Patrick Thomas

Introduction
The initiative behind these letters arose in a meeting between two of the correspondents Brian and Gillian. For many years they have both been interested in judgement in the decision-making of strategic leaders and thought they might come to understand it more fully through an exchange of letters. The third correspondent, Patrick, also has a long-standing interest in, and has been a practitioner of, judgement in strategic leadership. Keywords decision-making, judgement, phronesis, risk, strategic, sunesis

Gillian Stamp writes:

Dear Brian, I am going to try to keep this initial letter as brief as feasible a good discipline and also more likely that you will have time to read and respond. For a few years now we have shared an interest in developing that blend of intelligence, experience and character that is distilled in the classical Greek word phronesis the practical wisdom people use in particular situations when they do not and cannot know what to do. When analysis is not sufcient, and when there is no technique to rely on, we must draw on our inner resources to make a judgement. These are the situations clouded by ambiguity, uncertainty and irreversibility where as you put it we need to know which rules to break so as to serve the good. In our recent conversation you talked about three elements of phronesis: coming to a view about risk, about people and about timing. I had intended to offer some thoughts about each one in this letter, but found so much to suggest to you about risk that I will send this, and turn to people and timing as soon as possible. Coming to a view about risk as you said, this is a necessary prelude to phronesis. Finely tuned antennae reach out to explore, to see, to look in unexpected places for often tiny signs of nascent events or inuences, in order to discern where risk may lie or where it may emerge.
Copyright 2007 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore) Vol 3(4): 479496 DOI: 10.1177/1742715007082967 http://lea.sagepub.com
Downloaded from http://lea.sagepub.com by Tomislav Bunjevac on May 4, 2009

Leadership

3(4) Leadership Conversation Piece

In a recent article, Ram Charan uses the word acumen to describe this reaching out: The word acumen means keenness and depth of perception, especially in practical matters. . . . Leaders with acumen position their companies advantageously while operating within the same external landscape as their competitors . . . They demonstrate a high caliber of qualitative logic and the ability to frame, assess, discard and adopt many assumptions at once . . . They have the ability to recognize . . . moments of disequilibrium in advance . . . The essence of the skill is to nd patterns from among a wide variety of trends, and to posit the missing ingredients that could catalyze convergence. Many great leaders began to practice this exercise when they were younger, in less complex contexts, and over the years they have developed the requisite skills and judgement.1 This has echoes of your interest in stages of leadership. I am wary of force-tting to Aristotles concepts, but as we think about acumen and coming to a view about risk, it is worth being aware of sunesis perceptiveness, understanding why a situation is as it is, prior to understanding what to do about it (phronesis). The etymology of sunesis is to join or unite, so could one think of joining the dots? Not just the dots that are not yet joined, but those that are not yet even there. As I write this, it occurs that an important element in reaching out to discern risk to seek understanding of why a situation is as it is (sunesis) is that such exploration can feel as if it is actually adding to uncertainty. This is perhaps one of the reasons why many people explore only so far, and do not, or cannot, allow themselves to go beyond a certain point. It is also perhaps one of the ways the leader holds the situation for others and has as you often say to be so careful how they communicate. When a leader and their team do not cast their net sufciently widely, they do not seek to see the connections between actual and potential dots; events and inuences seem to come out of the blue, as a complete surprise. Thinking about phronesis has made me very interested in surprise. I have found it helpful to think about it in terms of the distinction between probability and possibility made by the economist George Shackle. He suggested that using probability to support decision-making in uncertainty can provide only part of the story. This is because probability assumes a list of suggested outcomes that must be nite and known, whereas possibility acknowledges inherent uncertainty. In probability, there cannot be a residual hypothesis i.e. some other answer that would be a surprise. Surprise is a measure of how strongly we doubt the possibility of a happening or the outcome of an act. If a best or worst outcome is perfectly possible, there is zero surprise. If it is impossible, there is maximum surprise. Probability theory is useful because it bounds uncertainty. However, it does not help us to cope with that irreducible uncertainty which is the nature of life. Possibility takes account of those irreducible uncertainties, and allows outcomes imagined for each action to be seen, not as a nite and known list, but as a continuing and essentially unpredictable stream of risk and opportunity. So decision becomes choice or phronesis in the face of uncertainty.

480
Downloaded from http://lea.sagepub.com by Tomislav Bunjevac on May 4, 2009

Leadership

Strategic Leadership Stamp et al.

My sense is that the distinction between probability and possibility could take us beyond the pairs rational/irrational, objective/subjective, cognitive/intuitive, to position phronesis as the quality required where there is irreducible uncertainty and the need to evaluate surprise. So for me there seems to be a sort of sequence (obviously not linear in the way I put it here). The more I think about it, the more that reaching out (Charans acumen, Aristotles sunesis, your antennae or intellectual agility to generate the condence to view strategic issues from unexplored angles and conceptualize the problem) seems to be the rst element of phronesis or the necessary precursor, because phronesis is about what steps to take to do what is wise in the circumstances. Coming to a view about risk follows viewing strategic issues from unexplored angles (your intellectual agility). For me there is: 1. reaching out 2. discerning2 3. bounding uncertainty but not denying its irreducible residue, i.e. coming to a view about risk 4. phronesis (if risk could be contained within probabilities, there would be no need for phronesis). So there are at least two key differences between individuals: a) the spectrum their antennae can cover, and b) their exercise of phronesis. What do you think? There are echoes of the distinction between probability and possibility in the distinction between tame and wicked problems. Tame problems can be solved through analysis and process. Wicked problems, on the other hand, not only have incomplete, contradictory and changing requirements and solutions to them, but are often difcult to recognize as such because of complex interdependencies. You probably know that Keith Grint describes a typology of problems and authority that balances increasing uncertainty about solution, against increasing requirement for collaborative resolution.3 This balance leads to management (where the problem is tame and calculation is appropriate), to leadership (where the problem is wicked and soft power is appropriate), or to command (where the problem is critical and coercion is appropriate). In other words, calculation and management would do probability analyses to bound uncertainty, but it is important not to deny the irreducible uncertainty that remains. That leads to the out of left eld experience where probability has been assumed to cover everything. Wicked problems complex rather than complicated and with a huge degree of uncertainty involved require appreciation of possibility, a surprise index and phronesis. As I read this and reect on our conversation, it seems that phronesis is about irreducible uncertainty, possibility and surprise. Perhaps it is the preoccupation with probability, statistics, modelling and extrapolation that encourages people to cling to probability and thus to the assumption that rational analysis is all that is required. So . . . as you and I think and write about phronesis, we might consider presenting it as beyond probability. What are your thoughts? I end this with an apposite poem by Jo Shapcott about uncertainty:

481
Downloaded from http://lea.sagepub.com by Tomislav Bunjevac on May 4, 2009

Leadership

3(4) Leadership Conversation Piece

Uncertainty is Not A Good Dog4 Uncertainty is not a good dog. She eats bracken and sheep shit, drops her litter in fox holes and rolls in all the variables, wriggling on her back, until she reeks of them, until their scents are her scents. She takes sudden, windy routes through hummocks, cairns and ditches so you cant spot where she is and acknowledge her velocity at the same time. Shes dgety but still careful to snufe through all the mud on the trail. She cant see in the dark but bumps her snout on the overhang lapping the path. Daylights no better: she has to screw her eyes tight against the glare and, panting, just risk it, following her nose across the landscape her tongue brighter than probability, brighter than heather, winberry and scree. Best wishes, Gillian

Brian Burridge writes:

Dear Gillian, For me phronesis is a blend of intelligence and experience with character, which itself encapsulates aspects such as trust, integrity and moral courage. We draw on phronesis when the journey starts as predicted, but gradually, the near horizon, gives way to a different picture: a cliff edge beyond which is the abyss of the unknown. I have long been interested in ways to develop peoples condence in their capacity to make a decision for the good when they do not and cannot know what to do. One of the elements of phronesis as we discussed is coming to a view about risk in that unknown. This means facing ambiguity that is frequently dynamic rather than static that is, the variables are not only in constant motion but they continually change in their order of importance. This degree of ambiguity and chaos means not only that there is a need to stop this ever-varying kaleidoscope to try to identify patterns, but also that common interpretation between individuals is problematic.

482
Downloaded from http://lea.sagepub.com by Tomislav Bunjevac on May 4, 2009

Leadership

Strategic Leadership Stamp et al.

This leads to a signicant difculty in identifying the journey through these patterns and communicating the resultant plan in a way that is digestible to those who cannot conceptualize the problem in the same way. The leader needs to understand what energizes and motivates an entire organization while, at the same time, understanding the uncertainty and fear that decisions might generate in some parts of it. Charans acumen is a good way of describing reaching out into the unknown. It requires intellectual agility to generate the condence to view strategic issues from unexplored angles and conceptualize the problem. It is perhaps more of an art than a science; we need to learn to explore intellectually, to take risks and to use intuition. We must always resist the temptation to align a new picture (set of events) with one that is embedded in our experience. Here lies the danger. Making something t a previous pattern when really it doesnt frequently leads to failure. In military planning, we have what we call Question 4 Have the facts changed?. Increasingly, we use this approach to recalibrate our assumptions i.e. are they still valid? A leader often has the experience of looking down the kaleidoscope and seeking to see patterns that others simply cannot. Sometimes we have to give the kaleidoscope a nudge to shift the pieces so as to develop a slightly new pattern. In strategic leadership, understanding your power to nudge in our ambiguous and chaotic world, and being certain of the results of that nudge, is problematic. Ultimately, the leader must see a journey through the pattern which can be turned into a digestible roadmap for others whose view of the world is less conceptual and less discriminating. Sometimes the kaleidoscope continues to turn of its own volition. What then do we have to do to stop it so as to discern the patterns and pathways? More importantly, by freezing chaotic motion, are we rendering irrelevant the validity of whatever pattern we might see? The world has moved on. Solving yesterdays problems! The inertia of the public sector is a good example. I turn to surprise, probability and possibility. This is the territory where phronesis recognizes that few problems have a straightforward answer dilemmas abound, with black and white solutions giving way to varying shades of grey. In military campaign planning at the strategic level, we complete our analysis with an assessment of the enemys options and select one as his most likely option and one as his most dangerous (for us) pure probability. In spite of that analysis, should he go for his most dangerous option, the surprise and shock is still profound but we will have conducted a risk analysis over what our response should be. In the Iraq war, Saddams strategy was to slow us down on the way to Baghdad, in the expectation that world opinion would mount in his favour and stop the war. The key question was how? We correctly assessed that his most likely option would be to use irregular forces as insurgents, and not adhere to international law in the conduct of that type of warfare. But what we did not know was how much effort he would put into front-loading the southern cities with insurgents. The most dangerous option was his use of chemical and biological weapons. We therefore assessed the risk to our people, and balanced protection (which is cumbersome and renders forces static) versus our ability to move fast and eradicate his ability to deploy such weapons (because he had lost his command and control system and, possibly, the loyalty of his commanders and troops). In spite of all that analysis, had he used WMDs, the surprise/shock would have been profound. So yes, lets take the approach you suggest and use the distinction between

483
Downloaded from http://lea.sagepub.com by Tomislav Bunjevac on May 4, 2009

Leadership

3(4) Leadership Conversation Piece

probability and possibility to go beyond the rational/irrational, objective/subjective, cognitive/intuitive pairs, to position phronesis as the quality required where there is irreducible uncertainty and the need to evaluate surprise. Regards, Brian

Gillian Stamp writes:

Dear Brian, In this letter I try both to respond to yours and to cover the second and third elements of phronesis: coming to a view about people, and coming to a view about timing. There are many resonances with George Shackle in your letter. Like you, he used the experience of a kaleidoscope and introduced the notion of kaleidic situations. As he put it: The facts at best are like a few pieces of coloured stone or glass intended for a mosaic, and the task . . . is to design the mosaic as a whole from the suggestions offered by these few disconnected fragments. A slight accidental rearrangement of the scattered fragments can reveal new possibles, congurations can call for new tesserae of hitherto unthought-of kinds and colours to ll out what is to hand, and can produce novelty in a moment of inspiration.5 If we add to his description contemporary kaleidoscopes with viscous uid, we have an even more powerful image of changing connectivities. Shackle is also clear about phronesis (although he does not use the term). He argues that in a world where everything is predetermined, decision-making would be an illusion; in a world of certainty where it would be possible to have perfect foresight, decision-making would be empty; and in a world that is completely chaotic and without any discernible order, it would have no power at all. Your point about the risk of freezing chaotic motion brings me to the second element of phronesis coming to a view about people. For me, people can only tolerate not freezing if they are in ow. Someone who is overwhelmed by chaotic motion tends to freeze everything to make the anxiety bearable. By contrast, someone who is underwhelmed can be tempted to add to the chaos to make the situation more interesting. We thrive when the challenges of the world in which we work, learn and live draw fully on the perspective we bring so we can make sense of what is going on. We ourish when the challenges are just right for our curiosity, complex enough for the connections we want to make, the potentials we want to imagine. People all over the world describe the feeling as being in ow energized, condent, competent, going with the grain, exhilarated as they cope successfully with new challenges, as things just seem to happen right of their own accord. When we are in ow our intuition is just there for us, and if there are choices to make, we make them almost without being aware. But if the challenges are insufcient for the perspective we bring, we feel frustrated, switched off, and eventually anxious, hesitant and low on condence. We lose touch with our intuition, and if there are choices to be made, they seem obvious and

484
Downloaded from http://lea.sagepub.com by Tomislav Bunjevac on May 4, 2009

Leadership

Strategic Leadership Stamp et al.

self-evident. They require no judgement, no phronesis and are tedious, demoralizing, no fun. If the challenges are overwhelming, at rst we feel perplexed and have to coax our intuition. If overwhelm increases, worry takes over. We lose our feel for signicant differences and so are forced to gamble rather than make coherent choices. We long for the comfort of our intuition, and yet we fear it. People seek ow for its own sake, because it is a reward in itself, giving energy and condence. Flow is not a luxury but a staple of life; its function seems to be to induce us to grow, in that as our perspective grows, we seek ow as often as possible and will achieve it only by facing growing challenges. It often feels as if our growing perspective has a life of its own as it seeks wider horizons. There is a link between being in ow and the risk you point to of seeking to align a new set of events with one that is familiar in your experience. Our predisposition towards pattern-recognition is both a strength and a vulnerability. The strength is in our experiential intelligence that storehouse of experience that can be used to resolve tame, well-structured problems. When in ow, we can see the limits of our experiential intelligence, and judge when to go beyond it into the wicked areas. When overwhelmed, we are inclined to cling to experiential intelligence and widen its assumed remit into areas it cannot cover. When underwhelmed, we may ignore our experience because we are so hungry for something new. So an over-simple summary could be that phronesis about people is appreciating whether they are in ow, or over- or underwhelmed by the complexities they face. So now to your third element of phronesis coming to a view about timing. As you indicate, this links with your phrase the power to nudge. Being certain of the results of that nudge is problematic. Somewhere in here we have a theme of kaleidic, phronesis, nudging, nuancing . . . For some years I have been interested in felt leadership how people feel when they are well led. One of the aspects is peoples trust in the timeliness and wisdom of the leaders decisions. One of the CEOs with whom I work, Patrick Thomas, puts it like this: Even though I might not like the consequences, I feel that Fred makes decisions in a timely way. He is not afraid to face the music (negative perceived outcome) or he got the timing just right (positive perceived outcome). Leaders with good timing are often described as lucky. Investors who make decisions at exactly the right moment are more often than not described as lucky . . . good leaders seem to create luck. Opportune implies that something else happened to cause a decision to be made, while the feeling I think that is felt is that despite nothing signicant triggering a decision, it is well timed! I believe another aspect of timeliness is that it can only be observed after the event, and often a signicant time after the event. A track record of timeliness is required before a leader is felt to have the attribute. So timely (timeliness) is maybe the most accurate word seizing the moment. Are being judicious or just being lucky alternative approaches? I read somewhere that Napoleon asked two questions about a potential ofcer: Does he have hope? and Does he have luck? How would you feel about including Patrick in our thinking?

485
Downloaded from http://lea.sagepub.com by Tomislav Bunjevac on May 4, 2009

Leadership

3(4) Leadership Conversation Piece

So again, oversimple, but perhaps phronesis about timing is understanding the difference between chronological clock time and what the Greeks called kairos the time of opportunity and the art of nudging the one into the other? With best wishes, Gillian

Brian Burridge writes:

Dear Gillian, Are we perhaps suggesting that some leaders will have an intellectual limit in their mental energy and determination to go around the buoy yet again to check the t of the facts to the assumptions? Some of the recent spectacular failures of companies show clear evidence that the boards failure was not simply arrogance (although there has frequently been plenty of that) but also a sense of intellectual fatigue. There is certainly the distinction between individuals that you mention: the spectrum their antennae can cover, and they way they exercise phronesis. The spectrum issue is now pretty clear, in that some people will not be able to read the texture, recognize that they have made intuitive assumptions, and thus understand when the picture has changed. But they will nevertheless have a mental picture of varying levels of accuracy. So the application of practical wisdom to a partially inaccurate picture may or may not lead to disaster. But the lack of any application of practical wisdom certainly would. So it comes back to an instinctive condence to do what you know is right. But what does right mean? Appropriate, just, or even goodness and where does the quality of judgement actually come from? Tough questions. I am not strong on Aristotle but I do know that modernists consider associative reasoning to be a more accurate interpretation of the human approach than the strict Aristotelian analysis. I will look deeper. That said, sunesis works because the need to interpret texture (as varying shades of grey in both time and space) is at the heart of the ambiguity with which strategic leaders are required to grapple. Where the texture is very indistinct, it becomes necessary to extrapolate between the dots. The way we dene these dead spaces is nothing more than by making intuitive assumptions. However, we are now in a situation where we make hundreds of such assumptions subliminally, in the sense that the boundary between ground truth and assumptions becomes blurred. If spectrum is a discriminator in the identication of the qualities of a strategic leader, then what does that mean for leadership development? How innate are these skills? Does it go back to generating the condence in an individual to employ his/her intuition? I frequently say to people, I want you to back your own judgement; you will nd that daunting at rst [and rightly so, otherwise I have appointed the wrong person who is arrogant enough to assume that they know all the answers]. But take condence from the fact that, if I did not think that your judgement was up to it, then I wouldnt have appointed you. The words are ne but we have to provide tangible evidence to an individual along the way that they are up to it. Maybe we actually do this either through highlighting the results they achieve or by deploying development strategies which, in terms of

486
Downloaded from http://lea.sagepub.com by Tomislav Bunjevac on May 4, 2009

Leadership

Strategic Leadership Stamp et al.

their content, may be of limited direct relevance, but the fact that they have been undertaken acts as a crutch. Summed up by: I have a Harvard MBA, therefore I must be good at strategy! Your comments about perspective and ow are useful, but they beg the question that when we are in ow (as a leader), are we intuitively applying phronesis in our daily activity without perhaps realizing it? There could be some worthwhile analysis of the components of being in ow. I am now seeing some common threads here kaleidoscope texture dead spaces assumptions probability possibility. The use of phronesis is denitely beyond probability. Subconsciously, we move step by step through various elements of uncertainty, and, equally subconsciously, we apply practical wisdom to chart the way ahead. If we could assess outcomes according to probability, we could almost certainly subject them to visual realization. Where we are with phronesis is about the deep ambiguity of uncertainty (in the mathematical sense, or even chaos theory) where there is no chance of making things appear tangible through visualization. Rather, we have to conceptualize outcomes to understand what we are seeing. The old mathematicians faced something similar, which made them resort to abstract numbers to solve difcult concepts (such as the square root of minus one). I agree that it would be very useful to include Patrick Thomas. Later, as this hypothesis develops, we should perhaps enlarge the circle. Good leaders are undoubtedly good storytellers. As an aside, this links to the maxim, leadership is theatre. Now, theatre implies a script, rehearsal, even a costume: conceptually this all amounts to time. Time to think, time to plan the message, and the discipline to apply that time in that way. Limitations on perspective may stem from this. Regards, Brian

Gillian Stamp writes:

Dear Brian, You suggested that it would be worthwhile to analyse the components of ow. You will recall that we are in ow when our capabilities match the challenges of our work. The concept of ow emerged from the work of Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi,6 who was one of the rst people to be interested in what has now become known as positive psychology what makes people well and happy, rather than what produces pathology. Elliott Jaques came up with a similar notion in his concept of work felt to be fair because the challenge of the work matched the persons capacity to handle it. The poet Keats could have been describing ow when he wrote about negative capability being in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact or reason. Flow is a rediscovery of what Aristotle called eudaimonia (ourishing), what Hildegard of Bingen in the 11th century called viriditas (greenness), and what Marion Milner in the 20th called an intuitive sense of how one should live. It is a

487
Downloaded from http://lea.sagepub.com by Tomislav Bunjevac on May 4, 2009

Leadership

3(4) Leadership Conversation Piece

state of being that has been recognized for thousands of years and in different cultures. There are many studies that demonstrate the physical and psychological benets of ow, and the deleterious effects of over and underwhelm the latter being particularly damaging to the immune system. Being in or out of ow depends on whether or not the challenge of the world draws on the perspective we bring to it. This echoes Charans acumen (the keenness and depth of our perception, especially in practical matters). And practical matters immediately recalls sunesis (reaching out to see a situation for what it is), and phronesis (deciding what to do about it). When we are in ow we thrive, we are self-contained and minimally selfconscious. We are not conscious of phronesis yet our judgements are robust. Our timing is right and we are condent to rely on that imsy support structure of intuition that cannot be cramped into words. We concentrate easily and can maintain a relaxed watchfulness for subtle changes in a situation, its context, the people involved and the saliencies of each. One of the effects of being in ow is that other people can trust our judgement, and so a virtuous spiral of mutual trust and respect builds. When we are overwhelmed by complexity, at rst we are perplexed. We lose our lack of self-consciousness, and start to become aware of the task and of what we are trying to do. Our intuition needs coaxing. If the sense of overwhelm increases, we start to worry, to lose our sense of timing, and to rush or delay decisions. We cannot nd the familiar that would reassure, and long for the comfort of our intuition. We become preoccupied with our performance, interrupting our work to ask ourselves and others how we are doing. And as the overwhelm grows, we become anxious, make inappropriate or no decisions, and become self-clumsy, feeling we have lost our touch. We are afraid of our intuition and lonely without it. In other words, we feel the limitations of our ability to read a situation, our antennae, and we lose touch with our capacity for phronesis. So if a leader allows someone to become overwhelmed by the challenges, he or she is depriving them of that condence in their intuition that you value so highly and want to nd ways to build. When we are underwhelmed and feel that our capacity is not being used to the full, at rst we become frustrated and self-aware, asking ourselves why we are doing so poorly at something that is so easy. Our judgements seem less reliable, though they still succeed often enough to reassure. We try to reach for our intuition but our trust begins to waver. If the underwhelm deepens, we cannot nd the unfamiliar that would challenge. We become self-conscious, preoccupied with the gulf between our self and our tasks, constantly interrupting to think or say, Theres no point, no challenge, its not getting me anywhere. Our judgements, our exercise of phronesis, become unpredictable beyond the limits of tolerance. Our timing is off, our sense of priorities goes up the creek, we lose touch with our intuition and feel it is not worth trying to re-establish contact or even being open to it. We see tasks as chores, know they could be done with ease but feel out of touch with them and know they are not being done well. Utterly underwhelmed, we feel deprived of the challenge of work, become self-

488
Downloaded from http://lea.sagepub.com by Tomislav Bunjevac on May 4, 2009

Leadership

Strategic Leadership Stamp et al.

clumsy and lose all belief in our capabilities. As I mentioned above, it is this state of being underwhelmed that is the worst for psychological and physical health. As you pointed out, one of the responsibilities of a leader is to communicate plans in a way that is digestible to those who bring a different perspective to a situation. So many people assume that the language or imagery that makes sense in terms of their perspective is the only language available. This may be one of the reasons why there is so much writing about storytelling in leadership. Your phrase less conceptual and less discriminating is for me a way of describing people with a narrower perspective. Patrick places great value on translating providing meaning in language and imagery that makes sense to all perspectives. One of the CEOs with whom I work describes these differences in terms of the kinds of conversation he can have with different people: some hear him clearly and engage with him, some extend his point, some help him to reframe the issue, some put it in a completely different context, some seem to hear what he says but become irritable when asked to engage further, and some do not hear what he is saying. In an earlier letter I said that ow is not a luxury but a staple of life. As our perspective grows, we seek the intrinsic reward of ow by searching for new challenges. We do our best to go with the grain of that growth, to nd challenges that stretch but do not over- or underwhelm us, that are just right for us at each stage of our growth, keeping us on a path of ow. This sense of continuity has been described as a career anchor the pattern of talents, motives and values that guide, constrain and integrate our working lives. If we move into a setting where we feel out of ow, we are pulled back into something more congruent with that pattern. People often feel as if their growing perspective on the world calls them towards wider horizons, and this may mean signicant change in moving to different places to live and work. We come into our own at different stages of our life: some earlier on in enjoyment and competence in hands-on, operational work; some later in pleasure and competence in abstract ideas and strategic direction; some later still in interest and competence in global issues. With best wishes, Gillian

Patrick Thomas writes:

Dear Brian and Gillian, I really appreciate the kaleidoscope analogy. For me the essence of the analogy is that the pattern is not static. I never look for the freeze-frame but rather the patterns created by the pieces in motion (as this is not totally random or chaotic). The essence of nudging then is to gain some understanding of what is, and will continue to be, a dynamic environment by causing something dynamic to happen. Another way of thinking about this is that the information content of a static image (view) is orders of magnitude less than a dynamic one so if you have to make a judgement, then you must create some information on which to base your mental model. As we are talking here about making judgements in the real (dynamic) environment, nudging has an important role to play in drawing dynamic information from the world that would not be available if you retained the static (snapshot) view. From

489
Downloaded from http://lea.sagepub.com by Tomislav Bunjevac on May 4, 2009

Leadership

3(4) Leadership Conversation Piece

the nudge, some understanding about the relative dynamics of the elements in the eld of view (of the kaleidoscope) may be gleaned. For the kaleidoscope this would be the relative behaviour of the different-shaped pieces making up the pattern. A preconception may suggest a possible expected behaviour, but unless a nudge is initiated, this preconception cannot be tested! Making decisions successfully requires information about the relative speeds of response of the elements (known or unknown, suspected or unimagined) that will impact on the outcome of the decision. Nudging may well reveal, to the careful observer, some information about the dynamics of the system being observed, or indeed that a piece in the kaleidoscope has become stuck, wedged against another piece, or indeed has only just came into view. A nudge could be seen as slightly incremental, and in a sense it is a short term experiment, even though it may be designed to test the appropriateness of judgements made within an environment with much longer time horizons. Numerous analogies in the world of systems dynamics and control systems engineering come to mind, including examples of how to judge the necessary length or duration of a nudge before a correct inference may be made (another reason why Malcolm Gladwells Blinking sometimes goes wrong). One example would be that of driving a car in reverse. When you turn the wheel to the right initially the front of the car will rst move to the left before the whole car moves to the right this is known to control engineers as a non-minimum phase response, and occurs often in peoples interactions with nature. In other words, the short-term nudge/experiment could be too short to identify the long-term action, and may discourage more adventurous behaviour. A key attribute then is to be able to judge for how long the nudge needs to be sustained. (Another case of the leaders role in holding the faith.) This is why some people are so bad at reversing their car, or at steering ships for that matter. Or maybe why some are nervous, or do not trust their judgement because they have not yet waited long enough to see the desired outcome, and may be confronted with a short-term result they do not like. Another function of nudging is to identify which inputs impact on which outputs, and in what magnitude. This is a type of innite dimension sensitivity analysis, where the sparse areas (little or no connection between input and output) are identied. This is not so much extrapolating between dots as choosing which dots are important to start with. In most natural systems, the matrix of interactions between innite numbers of variables is extremely sparse, and in mathematical terms it may be ordered so that it is diagonal. In other words, if you can mentally juggle the variables into the right order, then a logical sequence of interrelationships of cause-and-effect comes into view. The sparseness may of course contain relationships that will be revealed as surprises later. This ordering and identication of sparseness is something that I sense is important as we try to make sense out of the unknown, and more particularly the dynamic unknown. We may never nd all the variables and steps between cause and effect, but we are able to judge which interactions are highly leveraged and which are unimportant. I feel that often it is the sparseness that gives rise to a discernible pattern image or shape. It is the shape of the sparseness that becomes joined together, and not the dots. As always, there is much more sparseness or improbability available to us to make a picture and judgement than there is concrete probability and certainty.

490
Downloaded from http://lea.sagepub.com by Tomislav Bunjevac on May 4, 2009

Leadership

Strategic Leadership Stamp et al.

So maybe nudging is important as it can provoke some of the shadows of surprises to reveal themselves. To the well-developed judgement engine, that shadow of the surprise is all that is needed. The connecting together of uncertainty, improbability and un-connectiveness or as I call it, the sparseness may create the mask, shadow or template for the nature of the beast that we are trying to see. Once seen, communicating the nature of the beast and matching the level of the communication to the work level of the audience is vital if action is to be stimulated. Translating this leaders perception of the dynamic into a series of freeze-frame, concrete images, or, dare I say, bullet points, is essential if action or change in an organization is to work. It may well require good theatre, script, costume and expression as well as condent creative lying Ive already seen this happen in industry X, or This happened to person Y when she tried this. Apologies for this not owing particularly well and jumping around I was never destined to write a book! If only I could capture it in a picture or diagram. I will get there in the end. Regards, Patrick

Brian Burridge writes:

Dear Patrick and Gillian, It is time to look at this notion of the power to nudge. The mention of Napoleon gives me a lead. Napoleons view about his ofcers in terms of, Does he have hope? and Does he have luck? is very relevant. The matter of hope runs along two dimensions. The rst is that, unless a commander believes in the probability of victory, he cannot motivate his troops to give their all. Secondly, if the commander does not have hope, he is in some way undermining his faith in his own judgement. In such circumstances, decision-making becomes random, failure more likely and the leaders self-condence evaporates. A downward spiral! But of more interest to us is luck. To Napoleon, to be lucky in battle was an irrelevant concept. Rather, he sought commanders who could identify and take advantage of a eeting opportunity. Such events might fall into two categories. The rst might be those opportunities that are obvious to all, where the only discriminators are the readiness, speed and courageousness of the commander and his troops. The second relates to the ambiguity that we have been discussing throughout this correspondence. Not every commander in the Napoleonic era would have had the perception to recognize a eeting opportunity. Napoleon himself reected on this: If I always appear prepared, it is because, before entering on an undertaking, I have meditated for long and have foreseen what may occur. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly and secretly what I should do in circumstances unexpected by others; it is thought and meditation. Here Napoleon relies on phronesis in the sense that you raised in your piece about timing. He understood the ticking clock of the battleeld in the sense of fatigue on his troops, the strain on logistics and the stress on commanders. But he also recognised kairos in terms of the eeting opportunity, and was adept at merging one with

491
Downloaded from http://lea.sagepub.com by Tomislav Bunjevac on May 4, 2009

Leadership

3(4) Leadership Conversation Piece

the other. This is what he needed from his commanders. He needed them to nudge the things that they could nudge both tangibles like logistics and the intangibles like ghting spirit but he knew that these could never be an end in themselves in battle. The skill that he was after in his commanders was an ability to recognize the eeting opportunity and assess the chance of success intuitively. In other words, they needed to understand the risk contained within the ambiguous patterns of the battleeld as it unfolded. They dealt in risk on the basis that it is possible to recover if it all goes against you. Beyond that, you enter the realms of gambling where there is no chance of recovery if the odds dont run your way. Intuition is a combination of intellect and experience. War-hardened generals had both; new subalterns did not. But they gained their experience vicariously at the knee of their generals or in the way that Nelson treated his Band of Brothers. In essence, what Napoleon was looking for was creativity, in terms of not merely accepting the situation at face value. He needed commanders to ask themselves, I recognise an opportunity that has a 75 per cent chance of success. What can I do to make it 80 per cent or 85 per cent? The difference was often merely a nudge, and success in battle gave commanders the condence, and hence the power, to nudge. Regards Brian During the next couple of months, Brian spoke about phronesis and risk to audiences in both the private and the public sector. Gillian wrote briey to him asking if he had any further thoughts.

Brian Burridge writes:

Dear Gillian and Patrick, It is some time since last we corresponded on the issue of phronesis. Since then, a number of interventions with strategic leaders from a variety of multi-national sectors have again focussed my attention on the power to nudge. Many readily identify with the metaphor of a kaleidoscope, but have signicant difculty in determining pathways through ambiguity and chaos in the real world. I believe that there are two reasons for this. The rst is that they fail to recognize the key importance of strategy to the sense of navigation that a strategic leader needs to possess. Secondly, in seeking to nd pathways through ambiguity, they are frequently able to see fragments of a route, but feel unable to join them together in a complete journey. Or they see a relatively well-dened pathway, but its start is beyond their reach. Yet again, we come back to Aristotle. He would have recognized this as the ability to read the situation in terms of joining together fragments. To him, it was sunesis but we now tend to talk about someone having good intuition or, as a metaphor, as having political antennae. I wonder whether you have a view on how readily an individual is able to apply this skill? it seems to align with your views on ow. In a sense, there is a need to jump a huge ravine or penetrate the thickest of jungle representing enormous

492
Downloaded from http://lea.sagepub.com by Tomislav Bunjevac on May 4, 2009

Leadership

Strategic Leadership Stamp et al.

uncertainty before they pick up an uncharted but visible route. Here is where they need to deploy the power to nudge. The degree of condence required is probably governed by the appetite to accept potentially yet more uncertainty. But getting the level of nudge just right deserves consideration. Starting with the matter of strategy, the recent interest in strategic leadership has tended to obscure the roots of both. The term strategy itself is now used without precision, but it is the essential tool of a strategic leader whose responsibility is to lead the whole organization to a destination some time in the future. He or she must drive, not cruise. They must lead towards the vision, not simply monitor process. So without strategy, there is simply nothing with which to lead. As you know, the term strategy has its roots in ancient Greek as stratos, meaning army, and argos, meaning lead. Thus, strategy is inexorably bound to what a leader at the top of an organization actually does. But applying that strategy and making the necessary adjustments in the light of the actual context where the existing rules and experience do not apply calls for phronesis. Like you, I admire the denition of phronesis that goes along the lines of knowing what to do and how to do it, at the right time and with the right people, with the right mix of persuasion and challenge, and the right sense of what to leave unsaid and undone. So the application of sunesis is required to read the context, and the application of phronesis is about then knowing what to do. I reproduce here a diagram from some earlier work of mine:
THE CONFIDENCE OF A STRATEGIC LEADER STRATEGIC JUDGEMENT T E C H N I C A L C O M P E T E N C E E M O T I O N A L I N T E L L E C T U A L

M A T U R I T Y

A G I L I T Y

EXPERIENCE

My position has always been that the left-brain activity of gaining technical competence (Aristotles techne), and the right-brain activity of using intellectual power or agility to conceptualize a problem (Aristotles episteme), were the equivalent of the base metals of the ancient alchemists. Phronesis is the equivalent of the philosophers stone in that it takes these two constituents and blends them with a much more magical ingredient which includes aspects such as intuition and wisdom. Provided that our leaders are not simply overwhelmed by what they are facing, the result is the alchemists gold of the condence of a strategic leader. The whole process is built on the bedrock of experience, from which ows

493
Downloaded from http://lea.sagepub.com by Tomislav Bunjevac on May 4, 2009

Leadership

3(4) Leadership Conversation Piece

blueprints for past solutions that have worked or failed, plus the wisdom to know how, when and if to apply them. Again, Aristotle recognised the relationship between wisdom and experience when he described in Nicomachean Ethics the role of experience: Whereas young people become accomplished in geometry and mathematics, and wise within these limits, prudent young people do not seem to be found. The reason is that prudence is concerned with particulars as well as universals, and particulars become known from experience, but a young person lacks experience, since some length of time is needed to produce it.7 Phronesis was translated as prudentia in Latin, and hence prudence in English. Prudence conjures images of risk, and there is a risk here that experience can be a constraint (your metaphor of fatal baggage), but the application of phronesis is the skill that allows us to really test the relevance of experience and, if necessary, to discard it. Turning once again to the power to nudge, there is a clear requirement to possess the condence of a strategic leader. In other words, this condence allows us to accept loose recognition of the route through an ambiguous problem, rather than seeking to identify a precisely-recognized pattern. This comes from experience of successfully solving other problems that may not be considerably different in nature, by applying this rather loose approach. The key similarity is always that the problem is beset by ambiguity and complexity. As I postulate above, phronesis is a key element in generating this condence. What a leader actually does in these circumstances might be dened in one of two approaches, or a combination of both. First, there is the acceptance that he or she has the ability to change (nudge) a few of the variables over which there is a modicum of control. As a result, a new, and perhaps more digestible, pattern will emerge. The actual power (be it legal, ethical or positional) is simply not able to be deployed at anything other than the strategic level. The second approach is the willingness to take a leap into the unknown to jump the ravine or to hack away at the jungle foliage on the grounds that any plan is better than no plan. Given their experience and their innate deployment of phronesis, strategic leaders have a much smaller menu of the unknown than do those at lower levels: the world to the former is either more interpretable or, intuitively, in less need of interpretation. Thus the risks in the leap into the unknown can be quite tightly dened and there is always an escape route. Such action is vastly better than the alternative. As Shakespeare allows Henry IV to nd, a strategy of I would twere bedtime, Hal, and all well, is simply no strategy at all! Regards, Brian

494
Downloaded from http://lea.sagepub.com by Tomislav Bunjevac on May 4, 2009

Leadership

Strategic Leadership Stamp et al.

Gillian Stamp writes:

Dear Brian and Patrick, I have greatly enjoyed our correspondence as it has deepened and widened our shared interest in developing peoples condence in their capacity to read situations (their sunesis) and to make a decision for the good when they do not, and cannot, know what to do (their phronesis). To summarize our thinking about phronesis and risk took us beyond probability to possibility and surprise. Thinking about phronesis and timing led us to luck as being adept at merging the chronos of the ticking clock with the kairos of opportunity. Thinking about phronesis and people led us to the importance of being aware of whether or not they are in ow. In your last letter, Brian, you made the point that we tend to talk these days not of sunesis but of someone having good intuition or, as a metaphor, as having political antennae and that this could be linked with being in ow. Much of my work over many years has been about understanding differences in what constitutes ow for individuals at various stages of their lives. I have come to realize that we each reach out or extend our curiosity in different ways. Some of us are most at ease with the familiar, some want to nd out more about a particular area, some widen their searches like ripples on a pond, some reach into unexpected, apparently irrelevant contexts to seek for what might be there now or for what might emerge. Having reached out, we see different connections, variables, possibilities as the raw material for making sense of the world. As you put it, Brian, seeking to see patterns others cannot see. Some of us seek every possible angle on a situation we are interested in, or a problem we are trying to resolve, so that we can decide what knowledge, which techniques will suit it best. Others look for the connections, the principles that link a number of situations or events together in a sequence. Others revel in seeking patterns where none are obvious, and working out the rules that govern them. And some of us deliberately seek out uncertainty. It is a key part of a leaders role to be alert to the different ways and the different pace at which peoples perspectives unfold, and to match responsibilities accordingly. With best wishes and many thanks for this interesting correspondence. Gillian

Notes
1. Ram Charan, Sharpening Your Business Acumen, Strategy and Business, 30 March 2006. 2. discernment described by an investment banker as the quality of being able to grasp and comprehend what is obscure . . . to see what might not be there . . . Discernment can be compared to a . . . scout who moves softly through the forest tracking that beautiful beast reality, and discovers signs of its passage, the metaphorical broken twigs and bent owers. 3. Grint, K. (2005) The Social Construction of Leadership, Human Relations 58(11). 4. Commissioned by Pallabs in January 2006.

495
Downloaded from http://lea.sagepub.com by Tomislav Bunjevac on May 4, 2009

Leadership

3(4) Leadership Conversation Piece 5. Shackle, G. L. S. (1969) Decision, Order and Time in Human Affairs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 6. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990) Flow. New York: Harper and Row. 7. The word prudence was used by Thomas Aquinas when he translated Aristotles works as they re-entered the West, having been cared for by Islamic scholars for centuries. Aquinas was obliged to use a word that would t with Christian theology, hence the more limited word prudence.

References
Gittings, R. (1997) Letters of John Keats. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jacques, G. (1976) A General Theory of Bureaucracy. London: Heinemann.

Gillian Stamp is a Director of Bioss a research consultancy institute that builds capacity in individuals and organizations in the private and public sectors in many different parts of the world. Her main work is to be a sounding board for leaders. She has worked with Brian and Patrick for a number of years. She is on the Board of The National School of Government and is a member of The Sunningdale Institute. [email: gillian@biossthefoundation.com] Brian Burridge developed a particular interest in leadership during his 39 years as an RAF ofcer. In occupying progressively more senior positions, he recognized that a signicant void existed in the UK on the signicance of strategic leadership and the necessary development path for the strategic leaders of tomorrow. Now a senior executive in the aerospace industry, he speaks extensively on strategic leadership in both the UK and in Continental Europe. Patrick Thomas has, for the last 10 years, been working at CEO level in a number of global private and public chemical companies. Most recently, he has joined Bayer as Chairman and CEO of Bayer Material Science. He is the Chairman of the Oxford University Business Economics Program and a Member of the Advisory Board for the European Institute for Industrial Leadership.

496
Downloaded from http://lea.sagepub.com by Tomislav Bunjevac on May 4, 2009