From Strategic Planning to Live Strategy
Traditionally, strategy was conceived as a rational plan, designed at the top of the organization and communicated downward. Today, however, complexity and extreme environments make plan-driven strategies unworkable. They become Dead Strategies—documents that end up stored away, disconnected from reality.
For turbulent environments like these, we need a strategy that remains relevant: a Live Strategy, one that functions like a living organism, which we define as:
“A dynamic set of bets to achieve the Vision with the desired Positioning.”
To develop this type of strategy, organizations must cultivate the right mental models, work with self-managed groups, and sustain almost continuous Strategic Conversations. Strategy is shaped through conversation.
Conversation as an Opening to Complexity
Edgar Morin (1990) proposes that complex thinking requires integrating diversity, accepting uncertainty, and connecting different forms of knowledge. Strategic conversation responds directly to this principle by creating a space where multiple perspectives can coexist and be articulated.
In this way, conversation becomes an instrument of systemic thinking, where each interaction expands the collective cognitive map and strengthens the organization’s ability to read its environment.
Dialogue as a Source of Innovation
David Bohm (1996) argued that authentic dialogue allows individuals to suspend assumptions and listen without imposing their views. In the realm of strategy, this practice enables new levels of understanding and collective creativity to emerge.
Genuine conversations—not formal meetings—are the ground where ideas turn into strategic hypotheses and where the organization becomes a learning system capable of reinventing itself.
Transformation of Mental Models
Peter Senge (1990) showed that invisible mental models condition organizational action. Strategic conversation, by making these models explicit and subject to collective reflection, enables the development of deeper strategic awareness.
This process turns conversation into a space for double-loop learning (Chris Argyris and Donald Schön), where not only actions are corrected, but also the assumptions that gave rise to them.
Strategic Conversation Enables Transdisciplinarity
Strategic conversation facilitates the emergence of a shared language—one that is unique to the organization and to its Live Strategy. Within this collective dialogical space, diverse perspectives, bodies of knowledge, and disciplines can be integrated.
Through strategic conversation, organizations harness the benefits of transdisciplinarity as a core component of Live Strategy, enabling dynamic decision-making. In a business ecosystem, this conversation must also involve all key players, since integrating their diverse perspectives is an essential requirement for a Live Strategy.
Dynamic Coherence and Distributed Leadership
In contexts of constant change, strategic conversation acts as a mechanism of dynamic coherence: it keeps the connection between vision and action alive, continuously adjusting strategy without losing purpose.
At the same time, it decentralizes leadership, fostering a distributed and collaborative model in which collective intelligence replaces hierarchical direction as the engine of strategic action.
Conclusion
Strategic conversation is the heart of live strategic thinking. It is not a communication tool, but a process of co-creation of meaning, learning, and adaptation. Through it, organizations become systems that dialogue with their environment, with their members, and with themselves.
“Strategy is not imposed; it is conversed—because only through dialogue does a shared vision emerge that gives coherence to collective action.”
Bibliographic references
• Bohm, D. (1996). On Dialogue. London: Routledge.
• Morin, E. (1990). Introducción al pensamiento complejo. Barcelona: Gedisa.
• Senge, P. (1990). The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. New York: Doubleday.
• Argyris, C. & Schön, D. (1978). Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
• Serra, R. Le Fosse G. Iriarte J.(2000). El Nuevo Juego de los Negocios. Buenos Aires: Norma.