Goals and objectives

Uh-oh! Something else is on my mind.

This time it's objectives or goals, interesting study on innovation and strategy, and a statement made by Stewart Brand that I just can't shake. Luckily for me, this new thought is thematically connected with all the other thoughts through the notions of complexity. Let me take you through what's on my mind. First, however, a place of honour for a statement that I read nearly a decade ago (maybe more) in an interview that Fortune did with Stewart Brand. (For those of you unfamiliar with Stewart, go here, here, and here.)

Nature does not evolve toward goals but around constraints.

To say that this quotation had a significant effect on my worldview and thinking about business and strategy would be like saying puberty has a significant effect on how boys see girls. It's glibness makes it powerful, and I'd like to recommend more strategists and CEOs take it to heart. But that probably wouldn't work because the statement seems to deny the value of goal-setting and reaching for objectives: an act that would be simply wrong in many business circumstances, such as daily operations and sales. That is, in what might typically be referred to as "business-as-usual" circumstances. Tactics are goal-oriented by definition.

Where it's absolutely not wrong is in big picture strategic planning, innovation, and in product/market development -- any place where there is a high level of uncertainty. On that note, I saw in an issue of The Economist that according to research conducted by Donald Lehman, of Columbia, and Jacob Goldenberg and David Mazursky, of Hebrew University of Jerusalem: the most successful "idea factor" (i.e., generation of ideas) is, "'taking advantage of random events,' which generated 13 times more successes than failures." (The full article is here.) So, my understanding of this is that opportunism is a more effective means of generating successful innovation than any of:

"need spotting" -- looking for an answer to a known problem,

"solution spotting" -- finding new uses for existing technologies/capabilities,

"mental inventions" -- ideas dreamed up in the head apart from reality,

"market research" -- asking the market for it's desires, and

"trend following" -- going with the flow.

Granted the research was on the success and failure of product innovation. Still, the analyses and conclusions, such as there are, may be well applied to strategic planning for an organization or an individual initiative. It suggests that corporate vision and strategic planning ought to be more hospitable to the serendipitous discovery of opportunity whether in market shifts or unanticipated consequences. (Think of the success of 3M's "Post-It" products.) Serendipity is harder to predict and re-coursing to follow such unplanned opportunities would demand a degree of intestinal fortitude that is lacking in most organizations.

Still, it's hard to dispute the real-world proof. For every organization driven toward a tangible, singular goal within a strictly defined vision, there is an offsetting story of unanticipated success. Many businesses did not end up as their business plan proposed. They evolved to accommodate circumstance and serendipity; they took advantage of opportunity despite it being "off strategy" and (horrors!) outside "the core." They changed gears when it seemed right, sometimes in an apparent natural evolution. Magna Industries, for example, was not started by Frank Stronach as an OEM supplier of auto parts to the automotive industry. Nor was EDS created to be what it has become. Sometimes in apparent confusion or in a way that disrupts the historic path. Nokia is the exemplar of unusual and successful corporate evolution. In the fast-moving, highly-uncertain Internet space, are countless examples. For every Amazon or eBay (there again -- Pez trading to this??) there is an offsetting going concern that the original investors would never recognize. Read the Tucows history, for example.

"Opportunism" is what we're describing, and it has a bad rap because it's painted up with unseemly shadings of fraud and hucksterism and, at the very least, dilettantism. That perception hinders the notion at the strategic level, and it need not be so. In fact, on a longer time horizon, I would suggest that evolution is largely about opportunism. Except that it's an opportunism directed at survival -- substantially without pre-conceived notions of what should be. Understanding something of the ideas coming out of the science of complexity, and its sister -- emergence -- would serve business people well. . . .

We break this post and return to regularly scheduled programming. What began as a warning that I would be producing a (hopefully) thoughtful piece worth reading has turned into an early version of that paper -- absent the thoughtful part. So, check back for the essay. It will be a little more researched and less ad hoc in development of the argument.

Posted by Grayson at November 6, 2003 08:03 AM