Aperture Strategy: Navigating Radical Uncertainty

Strategy is about change. That cuts both ways; as well as being the primary focus of strategy, change is also its greatest challenge. It’s therefore remarkable how little attention most organisations give to the character of change and its relationship with strategy.

At the turn of the 21st century, we - Jason Poole and Andrew Firth - were mid-level military officers; both of us having already completed a number of operational deployments with the Royal Navy and the British Army respectively. We were to come together in 2003 as the operational planning team for the United Kingdom’s first response military headquarters. It was there that we first became disillusioned with the ‘conventional’ mindset of strategy and planning.

The certainty that conditions would change over time was disregarded; attitudes were deterministic. Abstract strategic objectives were passed down that were little more than direction to deploy military force, and there was no indication of how the military instrument of power was intended to interact with other levers of strategic influence, particularly in the economic and diplomatic domains.

We experienced the way the implementation of our plans changed the landscape in which we engaged, and the way in which that landscape, those systems, tried to change ‘us’ in return. We started to understand inter-connectivity of influence, the necessity to remain open to learning how systems adapted, and what that means for strategic intentions. And we saw how the UK military approach of the time simply wasn’t fit for purpose in taking account of all those issues, despite the veneration of a host of military philosophers from Sun Tzu to Clausewitz.

And so we began to develop an unconventional approach to planning to take account of inter-connectivity, emergence, the certain lack of knowledge and the fallacy of prediction. When we left the military, we developed our approach much further and practised in settings other than military. It worked, and Aperture Strategy was born.

Yet all around us, most organisations still persist with a linear, mechanical, and deterministic approach to planning, failing to understand that the system with which they are engaged is constantly changing, often in ways they never comprehend. This strategic hubris has frustrated us for over twenty years and continues to do so. There is a better way…

The Context: Dangerous Determinism

The 1990s had been a heady time for the friends and allies of the United States, as the international rules-based order looked forward to unparalleled economic growth in the new millennium. The UK – and its military – basked in this sunshine, but the picture should have given no cause for complacency. The Good Friday Agreement set the conditions for the end of civil conflict in Northern Ireland only towards the end of the 1990s, and Europe had seen vicious inter-ethnic fighting in the Former Republic of Yugoslavia after the break-up of the Soviet bloc.

Slightly further afield, civil wars in Chechnya and Georgia stoked by Russian intervention had killed thousands of civilians. In Africa there had been genocide in Rwanda, war in the Congo, and civil conflict in Sierra Leone and Somalia, whilst in Asia there was civil war in Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan as well as increasing militancy and insurgency in Kashmir, Nepal, and Indonesia.

The world was certainly not a peaceful place, but the US and its allies spoke with confidence, indeed with an expectant certainty, about protecting and securing the spread of democracy. Prime Minister Blair spoke of the principles of liberal intervention.

Following the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001 it was said that the world had changed. The reality, however, was that the world had been changing for some time. China joined the World Trade Organisation, Iran appeared to have a liberalising president, North Korean were thawing, Ehud Barak withdrew Israeli troops from Lebanon after 22 years, and Russia was embracing privatisation with a revised version of state capitalism under Boris Yeltsin and his protegee Vladimir Putin. And the globalised economy was driving exponential technological change.

In truth of course, as was noted by Heraclitus, change is the single most enduring characteristic of human development. And yet, the United States and its allies felt strongly that it was in control of world affairs; determined and deterministic such that the world was stabilising – indeed had stabilised – under its benign oversight. The insularity with which ‘Western’ nations regarded the world – or disregarded it – and especially that of the United States, was remarkable, and is, of course, continued to this day.

This was the foundation which underpinned the attacks on the United States in 2001 and subsequent UK military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both were to end in strategic failure. And it was this environment, with its unitary, compartmentalised perspective, that we encountered in 2003.

The Road Less Travelled…

As military planners, the process that we were expected to facilitate had emerged from the Cold War era, collecting on the way many of the principles of New Public Management, with its focus on resources, outputs, and performance measurement. It was itself insular and dismissive of the influence and perspectives of those outside its direct network of control.

“Drucker’s ‘management by objectives’ soon became systematised as a formal goal-setting process – essentially a negotiation about budgets and goals, together with top-down information about overall purpose. This system of management is now fairly universal.” Richard Rumelt

The process was laborious and detailed, dependent upon receipt of very specific ‘strategic’ objectives (which were rarely received). It didn’t go much further beyond evaluating and allocating resources to a pre-determined, fully-formed, course of action. Once the plan was completed, it was expected to unfold in sequence.

Importantly, therefore, there was little or no feedback loop designed into the overall framework to connect strategic objectives and assumptions to tactical level activity. The output of activity was expected to directly – and positively – impact strategic objectives (such as they were). Deterministic approaches struggle to see change unfolding, convincing themselves that the landscape is conforming to the map, when in fact, they’re looking at the wrong map.

One particular vignette has always stood out in our mind from this period. A senior official at the Cabinet Office, speaking at a meeting to review progress in Iraq, stated, “We sort of know what we want to achieve, and there are lots of good people doing good things on the ground, but there’s something missing in the middle.”

Borne out later by the Iraq Enquiry, what passed as strategy lacked coherence, separated both within itself in the relationship between strategy formulation and implementation, and separated from the changed circumstances of realities on the ground. In an environment of increasing complexity, the mechanistic approach failed.

“In fact, the key, if implicit, assumption underlying strategic planning is that analysis will produce synthesis. that decomposition of the process of strategy - making it into a series of articulated steps, each to be carried out in a specified sequence - will produce integrated strategies.” Henry Mintzberg

We were not the only ones to identify serious shortcomings with, or at least have misgivings about, the UK military’s process for strategic and operational planning. There was significant experimentation with alternative approaches such as Effects Based Operations, Network Centric Warfare, Systemic Operational Design, and the Comprehensive Approach. None of these gained any traction, however, largely because they imposed a complex process in response to a complex challenge.

And so we took the road less travelled and lobbied hard for changes to the existing planning methodology. This included developing the definitions of existing elements of the process to encourage more creativity, identifying the need for achieving enduring effect rather than finite objectives, integrating all departments around a single concept of operations, and supporting initiative at the level of delivery. Some of this work was subsequently incorporated into UK military planning doctrine.

Later in our careers both of us held senior strategy and policy roles in the both the Cabinet Office and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

We were continually disappointed that over the years, there was little real change in the way in which departments of state approached strategy formulation and delivery. As the OECD said in 2017, in a statement that was prophetic about the way in which governments approached the COVID pandemic:

“Complexity is a core feature of most policy issues today; their components are interrelated in multiple, hard to define ways. Yet governments are ill-equipped to deal with complex problems.”

Strategy and Change

We began by asserting that strategy is about change. Unfortunately, there has been little change to what we describe as the prevailing, ‘conventional’ approach to strategy. Despite the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, the global economic crisis, BREXIT, and the pandemic, strategy processes remain focused on imposing control over a closed environment that will conform to behavioural expectations. The problem is it isn’t ever closed, and it won’t necessarily conform.

To be agile and resilient in an uncertain and ambiguous environment, strategic frameworks must allow for the fact that competitors will respond to interventions; and perhaps they will do so with unseen or at least unforeseen effects. No-one can expect to control an environment fully.

To change the way we design strategy, we must also accept that outcomes – the aggregate result of the output from a range of actors – arise through complex interaction that is impossible to predict. We can only observe and adjust accordingly. Further, it is not the actors themselves that are most important, it is the relationships between them.

When embarking on the military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the UK government showed little regard for the consequences or the context of its intentions. Events do not just happen, they unfold. Strategy that accommodates the reality of change provides the context within which decisions are made.

Aperture Strategy’s “Four Frames’ Approach

And so, on leaving the military, we established Aperture Strategy, offering a unique approach to strategy design and implementation in order to counter the failures of planning we had experienced in both the public and private sectors.

Our approach is heavily influenced by the thoughts of leading strategists, including Henry Mintzberg, Peter Senge, and Richard Rumelt. The concepts of emergent strategy and the learning organisation are at the heart of what became Aperture’s ‘Four Frames’ approach. Together they bring the necessary agility and resilience to strategy design.

It wasn’t until reading Dr Mike Jackson’s epic work, ‘Critical Systems Thinking’ (2019), however, that we realised how much our methodology parallels many of the core elements of Systems Thinking. There are echoes of Russ Ackoff’s idealised design, W Ross Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety, Donella Meadows’ points of leverage, and Stafford Beer’s Viable Systems Model. The synthesis of these ideas was not deliberate, at least to begin with…

We’re indebted to Mike for welcoming us into the systems thinking community and for his interest in our work. The collaboration that we have begun with Mike’s Centre for Systems Studies is invaluable to our further development. His conviction that, “Systems Thinking is the only appropriate response to complexity” is, for us, inarguable and indeed self-evident.

In exploring the theories of strategy and Systems Thinking, however, we’ve always borne in mind that a framework approach to planning has to be practical. As practitioners, we have been keen to ensure that our approach is not complicated for the user, and moves from exploring the problem set through to producing a meaningful and manageable framework for implementation. It’s an end-to-end process.

Aperture’s ‘Four Frames’ approach blends strategy design with Systems Thinking. We’re committed to offering a different way of thinking to provide a clear direction of travel whilst navigating uncertainty. Our methodology:

• Translates strategic objectives into meaningful activity through creating a unifying concept of engagement, recognising that the behaviour of ‘the system’ cannot ever be completely understood or predicted and that it will change over time in unforeseen ways.

• Engages with the widest possible range of perspectives about the problem statement and the purpose of the strategy.

• Spends the majority of time available in making sense of the current situation and developing a concept of engagement – the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ – not immediately constructing a list of actions.

• Seamlessly connects the formal planning phase to implementation, providing a means by which to adjust activity in the light of changes in the environment, whilst retaining a focus on the concept of engagement.

• Focuses senior leadership on the effect that is being created in the environment, with those closer to the point of delivery being focused on – and responsible for – the activities that contribute to it.

• Facilitates creativity and innovation, coherence, alignment, validation, and focus.

For the fifty years or so of our combined learning and experience in the field of strategy design and implementation, we have railed against ‘conventional’ approaches. We agree wholeheartedly with Mike Jackson:

“[Decision-makers] are usually brought up on classical management theory that emphasises the need to forecast, plan, organise, lead, and control. This approach relies on there being a predictable future environment in which it is possible to set goals that remain relevant into the foreseeable future; on enough stability to ensure that tasks arranged in a fixed hierarchy continue to deliver efficiency and effectiveness; on a passive and unified workforce; and on a capacity to take controlled action on the basis of clear measures of success. These assumptions do not hold in the modern world, and classical management theory provides the wrong prescriptions.”

We’ve therefore designed the ‘Four Frames’ approach to offer an alternative prescription. The future is always uncharted territory, complex and uncertain. Not only do we not know how it will evolve, but neither do we know what rules and influences will guide its evolution. Aperture’s ‘Four Frames’ approach works with that reality.