Peter Compo: The Emergent Approach to Strategy – Episode 174

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Peter Compo says that “the number one thing missing in most strategic plans is a strategy.”

He’s talking about the tendency of executives and managers to draft plans that present lists of goals and include a bullet point for every possible stakeholder in their purview.

Peter points out that true strategy involves tough trade-offs and lots of collaboration. His pragmatic approach lets strategic objectives emerge organically, includes a variety of stakeholders, and applies adaptive thinking to address tough questions that have no obvious answer.

We talked about:

• the origins of his book, The Emergent Approach to Strategy: Adaptive Design and Execution
• how the “number one thing missing in most strategic plans is a strategy”
• the reasons that real strategy always involves trade-offs and even pain
• how to help teams and people cope with the pain of inevitable loss
• the difference between granularizing the goals you’re hoping to succeed into a list and formulating a true strategy
• how to deal with the bottlenecks that impede your path to achieving a strategic goal
• a fantastic analogy showing how emergent strategy is like solving a jigsaw puzzle that doesn’t have a picture on the box top
• how emergent strategy “has nothing to do with organizational hierarchy” and can come from anywhere in an organization
• how an emergent-strategy practice facilitates stakeholder alignment
• the foundation of his work in complex adaptive systems
• how the concept of adaptation forms the foundation of not only strategy, but also innovation, creativity, and org change
• how creativity and innovation and making change require a different kind of discipline than we normally apply to business processes

Peter’s bio

Peter Compo is a corporate business veteran, scientist, and musician who spent twenty-five years at E. I. DuPont in diverse leadership positions, including director of corporate integrated business planning.

Peter’s broad view of strategy and innovation began developing during his graduate research. In addition to his studies, his musical background led him to recognize common adaptive patterns in science and the arts, the same patterns he then also found in business and technology at DuPont.

He left DuPont to work full time on developing a comprehensive theory of strategy and innovation based on complex adaptive systems and incorporate the theory into practice.

Peter comes from a multi-generational family of musicians in the New York City metropolitan area, where he was born and raised. He currently lives in Arden, Delaware.

Connect with Peter online

• EmergentApproach.com
• LinkedIn

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 174. If you’re aiming to create truly strategic guidance for your business efforts, you’ll have to address some painful trade-offs. In his book, The Emergent Approach to Strategy, Peter Compo shares a pragmatic theory of strategy and sets out the skills you’ll need to formulate a broadly inclusive and genuinely strategic strategy. I think content and UX strategy nerds will really appreciate his design-minded approach and the book’s themes of emergence and adaptation.

Interview transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 174 of The Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I’m really happy today to welcome to the show, Peter Campo. Peter is a 25-year veteran serving in a variety of leadership roles at DuPont, the big chemical, and they do other stuff too, but the big company, the big enterprise, DuPont. More to the point, and the reason I invited him on the show today is he wrote a book called The Emergent Approach to Strategy: Adaptive Design and Execution. So welcome Peter. Tell the folks a little bit more about your book and how your work led you to write it.

Peter:
Thanks. Yeah, good to be here. The book is a two-part book. It’s theory of strategy where I actually derive the function and definition of strategy from a simple but meaningful model of complex adaptive systems with the view that innovation and progress and change are adaptive processes. And that theory goes through a few chapters and then it informs things around the difference between strategy and tactics. It leads to five tests of strategy that are different than traditional tests of strategy, and it leads to a bit of a different view of what execution means.

Peter:
Then the second part of the book is how do we put that into practice, design principles for creating strategy alternatives for creating an overall strategic framework i.e., strategic plan. So it’s a two part book theory and then putting it into practice or how we modify traditional strategy practice using the theory.

Larry:
Right. I love that. I guess the first thing I want to do is just kind of contextualize the conversation around how you think of strategy, how you define it, how you recognize it, how you recognize the absence of it because I know that’s a thing of yours. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Peter:
Yeah, and I think the first thing we should say is, and something that’s not often clarified is what’s the difference between what’s colloquially called a strategic plan, with values and missions and visions and sub goals and strategic priorities and strategic initiatives and metrics and milestones and forecasts and the whole kit and caboodle, which can run to 50, 60 pages of PowerPoint and is generally thought of as a strategic plan. But I call it a strategy framework. What’s the difference between that and a strategy?

Peter:
And I argue that in most cases, those 55-page PowerPoint decks with all that stuff are usually missing a strategy, that the number one thing missing in most strategic plans is a strategy. And that a strategy is a statement. It is essentially a rule, a policy, essential rule, essential policy designed to bust what’s in the way of achieving the aspiration, of achieving the organizational goal, whatever it is at that time? And that can be a very big thing, strategy for growing in a new market. It could be for a little thing, how do we reduce inventory if we just want to talk about business? But in a NGO, in a nonprofit, it can be how do we reach more people? It can be how do we do fundraising? And that the strategy is a guiding principle, a guiding rule that helps you get around what’s in the way.

Larry:
And that’s way different from a list of objectives and like you said, missions and visions and metrics and things to achieve. And the irony that most strategic plans don’t have an actual strategy underlying them, that seems cruel as ironies go.

Peter:
It is cruel, but it’s so hard to write a strategy versus create long lists of initiatives because writing long lists of sub-goals and strategic initiatives, it doesn’t require any trade-offs. It doesn’t require any pain. It’s like who can argue? It’s on the list, everything’s there, it’s perfect. But the truth is that real strategy is always associated with a trade-off, with giving something up to get something in return. So for example, you want to grow in a new region. Well, most businesses can’t just finance doing everything or have the people and have the infrastructure and the basic capability to enter a whole new market, for example. Usually that comes with some kind of trade off that we’re going to stop doing something else. We’re going to stop investing perhaps in the markets that got us here in the first place. That is the seed of a true strategy because now you’re giving something up to get something to get something better.

Larry:
As you talk about that, I’m realizing that a huge amount of the concern of content strategists is stakeholder alignment and getting people to agree on stuff. And I can see where it would be a lot easier to get people to agree on a laundry list that doesn’t exclude anything like …

Peter:
That is so right on. We used to say, as long as everybody gets their bullet point, then everybody can go home happy. But what have you done? You’ve destroyed the possibility of really creating something new because all you’re doing is listing what everybody wants. And in the example of giving up old markets and old customers to gain new ones, what about the people that spent their whole career on getting those old ones, who built that business, and now their career depends on it, their pride depends on it? It’s very interesting how a real strategy statement may often sound very unspecial to outsiders who aren’t there in the middle of it because they don’t experience what they’re giving up.

Larry:
And that’s right. And you said, I’ve heard you say that, and you just alluded to this a minute ago, that unless there’s pain, it’s not a strategy. That an effective strategy inevitably comes with some pain and …

Peter:
A trade-off, a pain, something you’re giving up.

Larry:
In terms of getting people to agree because you still need to have that stakeholder, you need to have people on board, whether you’re executing off of a strategy list, strategic plan, or a genuine strategy formula and document, how do you get people on board? How do you negotiate helping people cope with the pain of loss?

Peter:
And this is a really important question and goes to the heart of leadership, and I’m not just talking about the CEO. What about someone in a business in a big corporation that’s got a really fabulous idea and they need to convince people? I mean, there certainly is no recipe for this. There are actually tactics that you can take, show it successfully in a small scope, a new product, pick out a small target to run an experiment. There can be creating pitches that are just compelling, making arguments, personal charisma. I mean, there’s the difference between the strategy of the old line, cook a frog versus shock and awe? Cook a frog, you slowly drip in an organization so as not to invoke the immune response to new ideas versus hit them over the head with it. I mean, these are hard things and there’s no recipe, but just knowing, being able to articulate the strategy is a first step, being able, and especially to articulate what’s in the way of what people are trying to achieve.

Larry:
And that’s really interesting that – one of the things you talk about in your strategy formulation is the notion of bottlenecks and the way you were just talking, I’m picturing obstacles. Are those concepts in the same ballpark?

Peter:
A bottleneck is the term I chose to represent whatever it is that’s the limiting factor in changing a system. So if I could just go back and say, what’s a strategy for and a strategic plan, a total framework? It’s for changing a system from one state to another. It’s to create more capability, it’s to create more assets, it’s to create more reach, whatever it might be, you’re trying to improve something, change it. That’s innovation. Change and innovation are not different. Any improvement that you want to make requires an innovation, requires something new, some new capability. That’s what strategy and a strategic plan are for.

Peter:
So what do you design those around? Well, the typical is to say, well, what’s the aspiration? And we’ll granularize entering a new market into 15 tasks, that’s our strategy. So we’re going to set up a new sales office, we’re going to create products that are right, we’re going to create a marketing plan, we’re going to lower our cost of shipping from our US plants so that it’s easy to do, we’re going to get lawyers involved, we’re going to get HR, and the list goes on to 25. Now we’ve got a plan.

Peter:
But what that doesn’t do, when you list everything that you think it takes to succeed, what it doesn’t do is highlight what’s really the hardest thing, what’s really in the way? What if getting brand recognition in a new region would be harder than all those other things? What if it was so difficult or even a challenge, a negative problem that pick country A wants to go into country B, there’s negative things associated with country A in that country B. What if that was the dominant constraint in the system? The system constraint, the bottleneck to progress? Well, when you do the list, it’s 1 of 25 items. And how often does that mean that you never really addressed the hardest thing? And you address it appropriately.

Larry:
You’re reminding me now, you approach this both as a designs practice, and one of the concepts you’ve talked about is the notion of emergence. And it sounds like as you were talking just now, I’m picturing you take that list of 25 aspirations and they’re just kind of all equal, they’re just laying there. And then with a strategy hat on, you go in and go like, “Well, yeah, but none of this other stuff works unless we do something about this crucial thing here.” I guess, how do you design a line of inquiry and a process that helps you cultivate those kinds of insights?

Peter:
Well, I promote very much starting with a simple, what I call a triad, an aspiration bottleneck strategy triad, where you draft your aspiration and nothing is set in stone in the design process. You’re using an agile method where you put everything minimum viable at the beginning and know that you may change everything, including the aspiration, the goal, the vision. Start with that aspiration and then start asking questions. What’s really in the way here? And at the same time, even start to conceive of what kind of strategies might get around that. So if it turns out the bottleneck is brand recognition and negative feelings in the target country about your company or your country or whatever might be associated with you, you immediately start thinking about ways that might bust through that.

Peter:
And then the word emergence comes through here because you can’t just directly solve it. That’s only done in hindsight in textbooks, where they give a story about the company that went into the new region and they did X, Y, Z and had this great success. And they don’t write textbooks about the thousands of who tried it and either failed or had middling success. I think that the concept of emergence here is like building a puzzle, and we talked a little bit about this when we first met. Innovation and change is like solving a puzzle and designing a strategy is like solving a puzzle.

Peter:
Instead of saying, “I know the steps, I can see it, and now I just have to go do it,” it’s struggling through to understand what the bottleneck is, what the solutions are, experimenting, mind games, thinking about it, getting others to weigh in on the possibilities, running experiments. All of these things are solving a puzzle over time. And eventually the picture of the puzzle starts to emerge and you start to believe that you’re starting to see something because real life puzzles, of course, you don’t have a picture on the box top.

Larry:
Yeah, that analogy is the one that got me. Like, yeah, you dump all the pieces on the table, but there’s no box to consult. You have to figure it out.

Peter:
There’s no box. You’ll never have all the pieces. It’s so fun when you hear somebody say, “Well, sometimes you have to make a decision without all the data.” And I want to like, “Well, when the hell does anybody make a decision with all the data?” There is no data of the future. The puzzle includes things about the future that you’ll never know until you learn it, until you experiment, until you get out there and do things. So the puzzle analogy, the concept of emergence is that you have to work at low levels at, there’s a great discipline to it at low levels to slowly start to put the pieces together and think about where does this one go? What did we learn about this? And you’ll never have all the pieces, and you will never even know where the puzzle begins and ends, and some of the pieces won’t even fit right. That’s real life. That’s a better model to me of how to innovate and change than here’s the steps to do it.

Larry:
Yeah. You’re reminding me of a couple of the practices in my bag of tricks. I work in ontology engineering sometimes, and there’s truism in that world that you do both bottom up, look at a whole bunch of data instances and try to figure out what you’ve got, and you look top down with intent, with awareness of the business domain you’re operating in and sort of the business intent that you have around this, and then you kind of meet in the middle. Some of what you’re saying now is a lot of it, that emergence is about the bottom up part of it, but I’m assuming it’s strategy, it’s about the direction of the future of your company or your business unit. Is there sort of a top down, bottom up thing going on there?

Peter:
Well, you really hit it, Larry. This is something I think is very misunderstood about emergence and emergent design and emergent theory about how the world works and how innovation occurs. It’s confused with organizational levels. It’s as if traditional strategy is the CEO telling everybody what to do, and emergent strategy is everybody on the shop floor and on the sales team building the strategy up from the bottom. No, emergent has nothing to do with organizational hierarchy. It has to do with the fact that information can come from anywhere. It’s bottom up, it’s top down, it’s sideways. It’s that the global picture, the macro picture that you eventually get emerges from disciplines at lower levels, at the interactions of all people, of the interactions of people with their technology, with the outside world, with their customers, with their suppliers, with the government, whatever you’re interacting with. This is a terrible misunderstanding about what emergence strategy means. It is not a bubble up from low levels in the hierarchy. The leader of a company has as much part in emergent strategy, as much of a role in designing emergent strategy as anybody else does in the company.

Larry:
Interesting. Now you’re making me think of something we talked about as we were preparing for this in a slightly different light because I was talking about how most of my folks are … I have maybe one executive, two or three executives among my readership. Most people are maybe a lot of director and senior level, a couple of SVPs and a lot of team leader kind of folks. And what you’re just saying is one, that good leaders, it sounds like are probably listening to these folks and the discoveries that they’re making as part of their emergent strategy. But also it seems like that puts a little bit of an onus or responsibility on people at any level to be thoughtful about this and be aware of how they fit in as pieces in this emerging strategy. Does that make sense?

Peter:
Well, I think what you’re connecting to is that if you do emergent thinking, you automatically say, anybody can have a voice in this. And in fact, take advantage of the fact that everybody can have a voice in it. Some people call this open strategy. I say make it the people’s design by enabling them to be part of it. I think that’s a huge part of what we’re talking about and emergence is helping people be part of the design process, be part of the thinking process, and it pays so many dividends. Not only do you get their input that only they can give because they’re out on the front lines, they’re at the factory, they’re at the customer, they’re working with the government, with regulatory, they’re with suppliers, the people that are interfacing with the rest of the world.

Peter:
But you also get them to feel emotionally connected to it. You get them to feel like they own it, like they’re part of it, that they were part of the design. It’s their design, it’s their strategy as much as the leader’s strategy. But this is not trivial to do because time constraints and everybody dropping everything and having a strategy discussion. It’s not trivial to do. And in fact, it takes a really successful organization in a fairly stable spot to be able to engage people like this in a disciplined way. But absolutely, this is, I think, a huge benefit of thinking about emergence as a concept and how ideas can come from anywhere and should come from anywhere.

Larry:
Yeah. I don’t know that we talked about this before we went on the air, but my whole intent with this podcast is to democratize content strategy, and strategy is an important part of that. So that everything you just said, 1,000% aligns with my intent here. But hey, I want to go back, one thing back at the very start, I’m kind of circling back to something I wanted to ask about earlier. The foundation of your work in complex adaptive systems, is that something you can talk about quickly or is that that a whole PhD course to understand?

Peter:
Well, I think it can be talked about in a few different ways. I believe the central point of what complex adaptive systems says is that you cannot manipulate outcomes directly. You can’t get the global, the macroscopic, the big picture. You cannot directly influence that in a way you want. You can corrupt it, but to change the way you want, I want to grow my business, I want to go to a new place, I want to create a whole new product line that does wonderful things for people. You can’t do that directly, that the outcomes of those higher level objectives only come from many, many interactions at what we call low or local levels. People working together, people working with technology, people working with AI. These are low-level interactions that have to be done in a disciplined way such that they all are working towards the higher-level outcome. And that sounds easy, but that’s almost like the whole problem why strategy is so hard?

Peter:
How do you take all of these many myriad interactions, thoughts, different people, different technologies, different realities, constraints such that they all coherently bubble up towards a future that you want or that you think you want? This is what strategy is supposed to do, but if strategy is based on a view that you can just see the future and then granularize it into a million plans and choices and just go do it, you’ll miss that. You’ll miss the whole point of emergence. Emergence is just another word for how things emerge at high levels from low-level activity.

Larry:
Yeah, it’s like that forest and the trees thing that you have to be an ecosystems thinker. And that’s something that’s interesting because that’s a practice that a lot of content strategists do is like content ecosystem mapping and domain mapping and stakeholder mapping.

Peter:
Absolutely.

Larry:
And I think that’s going to be a familiar thing to folks. And then just kind of taking that same idea and applying it to developing a strategy, which we’re often doing. So that’s interesting to hear that. But also as you were talking about that, it made me think it’s so biological, the way that adaptation underlies modern biology, everything about it, it sounds like adaptation can be the foundational concept in strategy as well.

Peter:
Well, to me, it’s not only the foundational concept of strategy, it’s the foundational concept of innovation, creativity, and change. The whole idea of eureka and we just go do it, and it happens, it’s not borne out. It’s not borne out in the data, you can cherry-pick an occasional example where people essentially lucked in, but I don’t believe reality, and I think more and more people are seeing this. But then the question becomes, what’s the discipline? It’s not just a free-for-all. Everybody does what they want in emergence. What’s the discipline? What’s the discipline if it’s not just go make that happen, just go get that goal? If it’s not that, what is it? And you could say that’s almost the summary of what my book is. If it’s not “just go do it,” well then what is it? What’s the discipline?

Larry:
Yeah, I get it. And it kind of goes back to what you said a minute ago about what was it? That you can only identify success in hindsight. That you can’t just set out … It’s cultivating this mindset that you’re talking about that enables you to look back and go like, oh, to describe the success. But you could never just reverse that and say …

Peter:
Well, that’s absolutely right, because you can’t reverse it because you’d have to take all the other organizations and cases and people that did something similar but didn’t get the same result. It’s cherry-picking. It’s not easy to write books about average companies with average people doing average things yet that’s what we all are. I mean, most of us are just … There’s only so many Teslas. There’s only so many Steve Jobs, and we talk about them, and we can learn from them for sure. And Elon Musk has a strategy where he focuses on engineering. He says, “I’m not going to spend my time up in the corporate office. I want to be on the shop floor, and I’m going to spend most of my time there.” Kind of hearkening back to Henry Ford, 120 years later. So it’s heavy. It’s a heavy thing to try to change an organization, and it’s a heavy thing to try to create. And the few stories of great successes are not always the best model because it makes it sound like statistically it’s true, and they’re not statistically true.

Larry:
Yeah, no, and as you’re reminding me this new mindset, it’s like you have to be something more analogous to a gardener and an experimenter and a tinkerer with a real inquisitive mind and a curiosity about how to put it together rather than some wizard making plans off in the corner or something.

Peter:
Well, you’re hitting adaptations square in the eye there. What was the terrible, terrible problem for most people by what Darwin said is like, how can you say it didn’t take a designer? How can you say that this nature and all of these organisms so incredibly adapted to their surroundings didn’t require a designer who saw it ahead of time and who said, go do this or I’m going to do this, I’m going to put these things together? And I’m not just talking about people who felt it was against scripture. Scientific people, how can it be that it grew without a designer? And it’s a very, very tough thing for people to accept. And in business, we want to point to the cases where it looked like there was a designer who saw it all and just said, “Boom, look, three years later, we’re rich.” I don’t think it’s a good teaching model about how it really happens.

Larry:
I’m going to re-look at every piece of business journalism with a way more critical eye now. So thanks for that. But hey, Peter, we’re coming up already on time, but before we wrap up, I just want to make sure, is there anything last, anything that you want to revisit from the conversation or just make sure we talk about before we close?

Peter:
I think I would say maybe we haven’t hit this head on, but as a good close, creativity and innovation and making any change requires discipline, a great discipline, but it’s a different discipline that we’re used to. It’s not the discipline of I see it and now just everybody go do your part and go do it. It requires a different level of discipline that we don’t have an easy language for, that we don’t yet have common models and views of that and what I’ve tried to do in this book and my continuing work is to show that creativity can come … There are disciplines and there are techniques and things that can be very creative without that designer, without that omnipotent designer that can just say, “Go do it. Here it is.” That we can find these disciplines and that it’s not just free thinking and whatever you want goes. That’s what I think I offer, and I hope people would give that a look and see what’s behind that in my work.

Larry:
Yeah, I think that’s a really refreshing point of view. I can think of, it runs so counter to so much of the conventional wisdom in the business and design worlds that I run in, that I think I just love the idea of introducing your ideas to folks, so thanks. Hey, one very last thing, Peter. What’s the best way for folks to connect if they want to follow you online or stay in touch?

Peter:
Sure. I guess three things. Of course, The Emergent Approach to Strategy. The book is available on all the online outlets, of course, amazon.com. I post quite a bit in LinkedIn, LinkedIn profile, Peter Compo. And then my website, emergentapproach.com, has quite a bit of information, and also I haven’t mentioned it, a set of what I call five task sets where a bit of a guidebook to implementing the practice of the emergent approach. So I encourage people to take a look at emergentapproach.com, and there’s quite a bit of resource there for you. All I ask for as a little sign-in.

Larry:
Excellent. Well, thanks so much, Peter. I’ll put a lot of stuff in the show notes as well. Thanks for the great conversation. This was really fun.

Peter:
Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it.