Dakota tribal wisdom says that the best strategy is to dismount when you’re on a dead horse. Of course, there are other strategies. You can change riders. You can get a committee to study the dead horse. You can benchmark how other companies ride dead horses. You can declare that it’s cheaper to feed a dead horse. You can harness several dead horses together. But after you’ve tried all these things, you’ll still have to dismount.
Gary Hamel
Strategy formation can be either deliberate or emergent.
The best decision for you is considered the most rational one. Note that the rational choice depends on your desired outcome to survive as a business. Logic has nothing to do with your desire. It is neither logical nor illogical to want to survive. However, if you’re going to survive and know something about business, it might be considered unreasonable to be logical since it will likely not get you your desired outcome. Logic has more to do with organizing and coordinating your decisions and making the results of your reasoning process consistent with your desires and information.
However, you will have to be rational to reach your desired outcome. It may turn out that logical measures disprove the sustainability of an existing model (including a new one), but they are unlikely to show what model should replace it. This is a job for Level 3 Frameworks, Rational Frameworks.
Suppose all models are wrong, and knowledge is a status (not a material) and only exists through practical relevance to a context. Is the framework to date only a logical framework? If so, how do we get it to become knowledge?
Moreover, how do we ensure that it is considered to be helpful?
- Logical models are simply concepts within an established framework that attempt to validate and confirm our ideas against the established framework.
- Rational Frameworks have a completely different function. Relative to logical, the purpose of a Rational Framework is to determine if there is a model that makes sense of the prevailing or desired conditions.
Rational models discover what matters regardless of presuppositions instead of dealing with only what counts within a presupposition.
Rational measures can find a pattern in the available information, and the design may be refined into a model. The refinement may well conflict with or even obsolete some prior model that has usually been associated with the circumstances in which information was gathered.
For the framework we have produced to become more functional, it must become a framework from which a business solution can be derived and managed.
Strategy – a method or plan chosen to bring about a desired future, such as achieving a goal or solution to a problem.
Strategy and innovation must look beyond what is internally logical and desirable within a model, which will include considering much of what logic tries to ignore or discard. Rational measures are the ones that focus on the kind of change that makes or breaks the relevancy of models, as opposed to on variances that prove or disprove incidental compliance. Both strategy and innovation are inherently rational, not logical.
The first step towards redefining a business is switching to a strategic focus, which aims to beat the competition to achieve differentiation. This switch will enable the company to see where it can be different instead of focusing on improving by questioning industry assumptions and fundamental beliefs.
Frameworks help strategic thinking to help analyze and conceive important ideas, decisions, strategies, and plans. Whereas logic can be shown to be cold and calculated, rational thought, while often somewhat logical, includes factors such as emotion, imagination, culture, language, and social conventions. Humans aren’t logic processing machines, and human judgments differ from logic such that illogical thought is the basis for social success, artistic achievement, and other foundations that have immense value.
For strategic thinking, we need:
- Broad view with the ability to zoom in
- Abstract with the engagement of the imagination
- Abstraction illustrated with concrete examples
- Important non-intuitive framework breaking ideas
- Alternatives and uncertainties
- Aim to reach an overarching goal
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