It’s always nice to be invited to do something of real meaning so when Dave asked me to step in as guest blogger for seven days it was an obvious affirmative on my part. Moreover, the timescale seemed perfect; seven days corresponds so well with the seven key disciplines in my new book, ‘The Strategic Mind, The Journey to Leadership through Strategic Leadership’ published by Management Books 2000 this month. Surely, nothing could be more prefect than that? Except that that is exactly the kind of linear thinking I am hoping the book will help to dispel. Far better for me to distill some of the central arguments of the book and let this forum be the interactive exchange of ideas that it is designed to be. Luckily, I have no doubt that I am in exactly the right place for that to happen.

The key to strategic thinking is to be able to see a bigger picture, to distinguish the wood from the trees. I like to define it as the intuitive ability to see the whole. I have spent much of the last 20 years working in an educational and commercial capacity helping people to learn to think more strategically. At first, it was wrapped up in my work as a ‘strategic consultant’ (I really dislike that term as I think it’s an oxymoron) but over the years it has become a passion in its own right; probably due to the fact that many of my clients assiduously avoided the difficult ‘where are we now’ question and rushed as quickly as possible to the ‘where do we want to be’ and ‘how do we get there’ questions.

The foundations for strategic leadership are based on two key elements, the capability to think outside the box and to envisage a different way of doing things and the practical capacity to do something about it. Strategic thinking needs to be both conceptual and practical because without both these aspects even the very best ideas, dreams and visions will not be translated into significant changes in the real world. Let’s look quickly at an everyday example, the issue of recycling.

At the core of my book, ‘The Strategic Mind, The Journey to Leadership through Strategic Thinking’ lie seven key disciplines that form the basis for developing our ability to think at a deeper and more profound level. At first sight some may appear counter intuitive (‘act slowly’), while others will be more familiar (‘dream’). Over the next four days I will very briefly consider the disciplines (in pairs) with some comments on integrating the disciplines and the way forward in my final blog on Saturday. Naturally, in practice, the seven disciplines overlap and form an integrated whole.

Today I am taking a brief look at the third and fourth disciplines in my book, ‘act slowly’ and ‘serve others’. I have to smile at what I have written because it seems for the last three weeks I have been rushing around like a lunatic trying to make things happen quickly. The result has been a crushing sense of being burdened by life and of having no personal space. Luckily heavy snow today has interrupted my pattern and I was able to take a long walk in the woods with my family (including our young puppy), capture some fantastic snowy photographs of the fabulous Wiltshire countryside and generally recalibrate. That has allowed me to cancel several long and tiresome meetings which I should not be attending in the first place. Thank goodness for wisdom brought about by external circumstances!

Today we take a look at the fifth and sixth disciplines in my book, ‘reflect’ and ‘be simple’. Last year during one of my presentations on the key disciplines of strategic thinking one of the audience members asked me to prioritise the disciplines. As they are all part of a holistic approach I patiently explained that none is more important than the others but the lady was not satisfied. ‘I don’t know how you expect us to use these principles if you, yourself, are unable to prioritise them’ she said with an air of finality. I didn’t resolve the issue on the day but it did set me to thinking. For me the core, and most difficult, is reflection, which underpins many of the other disciplines. However, if I was forced to pick only one to live by it would be simplicity.

When I wrote ‘The Strategic Mind’ I was determined that it would be a practical book. As a result I based it around stories; lots of them. Some are longer case studies but many are simply brief illustrations, mostly from my own personal experience. In short, I have written about everything from Apple to the ‘Leafy Bean’, a small café in Shanklin in the Isle of Wight. This week, I have tended to concentrate more on the conceptual side of strategic thinking so now I would like to rebalance. Having a good theoretical framework for making a difference is quite different from actually doing something! We can certainly improve our skills in strategic thinking by using the seven key disciplines explored in the book. To become a leader, however, we need to integrate this framework into our actions and there is much to be done. First, however, a brief comment on the seventh discipline of strategic thinking; ‘dream’

I somehow find myself as the guest blogger for a couple of weeks. My format introduction is:

Steve Freeman is a pioneer of the Agile Software movement in the UK, where he helps companies to deliver software. He is a presenter and organizer at international industry conferences, and was Chair of the first London XpDay (now in it's 10th year). In 2006 he won the Agile Alliance's Gordon Pask award. Previously, Steve worked in research labs, software houses, earned a PhD, and wrote shrink-wrap software for IBM. He has also taught at University College London. Steve was an attendee at the 2005 Certification at Greenwich University. Steve is fellow addict of Wagner's Ring Cycle.

but this is a little dull.

The relevant background is that those of us involved in the Agile Software community have been bumping into the furniture for some time as we stumble around, trying to help the people involved understand that developing software on any scale is fraught with uncertainty, hubris, and chance. Our discovery of social complexity has given us a framework to understand, and even explain, some of the practices we've adopted. Now we just have to make it work.

I'm also using this as a chance to experiment with a faster style of blogging, since I mostly try to write "well-crafted" posts. We'll see if I manage carelessly to offend anyone.

The (London) Times had a front page recently on the juggernaut that is the NHS IT project. First there was a letter making the lunatic proposal that we commission our university computer departments to write the code ¹. There's a nice response from Alan Pollard (British Computer Society) that makes the position clearer

Few IT projects fail because of technology. IT falls victim to overexpectation, unco-ordinated decision making, lack of clear objectives and relentless cost paring without a corresponding and realistic reduction in the desired outcome. All these are driven by those setting out the needs for planning, managing and approving the project. Today’s IT professional has to be far more than just a computer scientist. He or she has to be skilled in psychology, business matters, diplomacy, project management and politics.

1) The depth of misunderstanding the letter shows is breathtaking, do you really want your health to depend on something a student wrote for their coursework? At least medical students spend a few years training before being allowed out on their own. The attitude to the status of my profession reminds me of a story I heard from a trombone player I met who'd played in a legendary Goodal Ring Cycle. Crawling out of the theatre, exhausted after hours of playing leitmotif's, he was cornered by someone from the audience. "That was fantastic! A wonderful performance! I was transported! etc, etc." (pause) "By the way, what do you do for a living?"

Some time ago we announced a narratives project around the practice and community of Agile Software development. It got stuck for a while but, with now that Cognitive Edge has finished the new version of its fragment gathering system, we should be able to make some progress.

This reminded me once again of how, in opposition to the way most of us are trained, concrete examples are so effective when we're trying to communicate; start from some examples and work out what they mean to us. In my world, I've seen how describing requirements in terms of examples (implemented as automated tests) has radically improved the quality of the systems I've worked on. Keith Braithwaite has a nice discussion of why examples seem to work linked from here.

Of course, the idea has been around for ever—that's what Use Cases were supposed to be, and the Usability people have been working with "Personas" for decades—but things went astray when we started using metaphors about building construction.

What's new is that we found an approach to doing this that works in practice, and that doesn't involve endless discussions of turgid documents. What's even better is that it seems to be a way for software people, who do abstraction for a living (or at least the good ones do), to communicate with everyone else, who have no idea what the geeks are talking about.

It's important that we get this project moving again, because the Agile Software community should be hearing about the Cynefin approach. Cognitive Edge have speculated about using narrative fragments to drive system requirements, and we have the organisational tools to turn that into working systems.

I have a few posts in mind which will attempt to use what we know of the human body as an analogy to help us make sense of the social body we call the organisation.

Analogies, like metaphors, example stories and even taxonomies, can be useful sensemaking devices insofar as they reflect broadly similar situations and sets of relationships, and help us transition back and forth between the known and the unknown. They help to the extent that they provide ready-made patterns or frameworks or mental models that can help us visualize or understand or extrapolate things about a novel situation that may not be immediately obvious to us.

The approach has some risks, because we are often more familiar with the simulacrum or model we are using for the analogy and less familiar with the target context we are trying to make sense of, and small interpretive successes can tempt us to take our analogies further than they are warranted. We don’t always know the target well enough to test the validity of the conclusions we draw.

This is especially true of what I’m interested in: parallels between the science of the body which is relatively well-developed, and the science of the organisation which is medieval at best. Scientific insight may look like a much better substitute for the credulous hypotheses about organisational life that we fumble around with, but only if the parallel works – so one of the questions I want to ask over the next few posts is: does a parallel with the human body give us potentially useful lines of enquiry for understanding organisations better?

However there are good precedents for at least making an attempt on this analogy and some guiding markers about where the analogy breaks down, quite apart from opening up the analogy to critical scrutiny.

• Political theorists have long used the analogy of the human body for the body politic
• Evolutionary biology tells us even the human body is comprised of coalitions of self-interested “germs” that in a distant past “decided” they were better off as specialised cells cooperating with clusters of other specialised cells
• Psychologists have discovered that even our consciousness is not as cohesive or as singular as we like to think

We know there are limits to this analogy, though I’d like to press those perceived limits a bit and test them. For example, birth and death are generally far less dramatic for organisations than for human bodies. Or are they? A singular, free will can direct a human body in unpredictable ways that are not generally reflected in organisational life – or are they? An organisation is a much looser coalition of dispersable and interchangeable free agents compared to a body where the coalition is tightly geared and directed – or is it?

The questions I have in mind to explore over the next couple of weeks are:
• To what extent can our skin teach us about memory and destiny in organisations?
• Is there such a thing as mental health or sanity in organisations?
• Does the idea of metabolism help us understand organisational life and especially change readiness?
• Is the idea of the power of mind over body stronger in organisations than in individuals?
• Do organisations have irreversible biographies the way that human bodies do, or are they genuinely capable of rebirth?

Today is the 75th birthday of Liberty, what used to be the National Council for Civil Liberties in the UK. It's good to remind ourselves why they were founded (in 1934) since we now live an society where the authorities have unprecedented powers of and infrastructure for surveillance. It looks like we gave too much away in response to the terrorism crisis, at least according to the professionals like the International Commission of Jurists and a previous head of MI5.

We should remember how quickly a major recession triggered the collapse of the democracies and how much it cost to recover, since it's also the centenary of the pre-Fascist Futurist Manifesto.

For all the obvious failings of liberal democracy, I do like that books no longer have to be licensed by the Crown or the Church, and (however weakly implemented) the notion of due process of law, and limits on executive power, and so on. Perhaps I'm just too bourgeois.

Skin carries – and reveals – the memory of the body’s interaction with the world, whether it is as an interface with the environment (the effects of being out in all kinds of weather, excessive suntanning, scars from injuries and burns) or as a manifestation of what the body has consumed over time (drug and alcohol abuse, diet, poisoning). We can look into a person’s face, and read aspects of their history, and this becomes easier and easier as they move into middle and advanced age.