All around us, everday, there is evidence of how our world is changing. Our new age of mass communications is changing society. It is even changing warfare. Today, on the train, I noticed this story in a friend's copy of The Guardian. It tells of the Israelis attempting to disintermediate the media in the conflict with the Palestinians. I make no comment on the article, the conflict, or any other of the tragic episodes of war that currently afflict the globe. But it restored to my mind Arquilla and Ronfeldt's book 'In Athena's Camp'. The Israeli initiative is by no means the first military cause that seeks to exploit the immediacy and ubiquity of the internet as a communications device. It just adds to the weight of evidence gathered since Arquilla and Ronfeldt published their book in 1997. I am sure you can think of other examples.
Now, a few days after lecturing on skunk works, I am beginning to wonder if we are all writing a whole theory of asymmetry wherein a faster-paced, networked society loads the dice in favour of the alternative, fleet-footed initiative, rather than the command and control of the incumbent.
Is this the age of asymmetric strategy?
3 comments:
Is this the age of asymmetric strategy?
Good insights Peter.
I reckon the "framework" we have been discussing is just such a thing. Indeed it is deliberately so, just that it has been/is currently focused on innovation mainly in technology.
The scenarios that revealed Moore, Metcalfe and Coase also postulated that virtual communities on the web would become powerful in a self organising way. This scenario included an inability of the state (or other source of power) to regulate or disrupt such communities without severely and visibly limiting the openness and freedom of the web. So far, from what I can see, such communities have tended to focus around shared interests such as hobbies, news, information or trade. Their use as major political reform bodies has not really surfaced, yet. Whether they will or not remains to be seen. During the summer school scenarios this year, a key question that emerged was around "how will technology affect democracy?" and vice versa.
Stuff like DIGG points a way forward here. It shows the evolution of a self organising system via the interactions between the nodes(news pundits) in the system and their opinions, this time one that is focused on sharing news about what is happening "out there"
If you allow these 3 principles (Moore, Metcalfe and Coase) as a backdrop, and overlay the principles of disruption described by Christensen then another of your points rings true. He talks of the need to understand how to leverage asymmetric relationships between the disruptor and the disruptee, as it were. Meanwhile Chasm is a model of how different constituencies relate to change. The innovators thrive on it, the visionaries leverage it for their advantage and the pragmatists do it when they have to. Christensen's approach is focused on the early part of the Chasm when a small player can disrupt a market and take it away from a larger incumbent.
And then there is Beer's work. based on the way in which nature engenders change in the environment and the organisation, to enable viability. All of his work is founded on W Ross Ashby's law of requisite variety "Only variety can absorb variety". There is much to get to grips with in these 5 words. It is a touchstone for almost all other thinking in my view. Certainly Chasm is a way for an organisation to manage its variety in accordance with Ashby's law, especially when the organisation is small and growing in a large environment.
The Mosaic change approach allows follows Ashby's law and is based closely on the way nature uses structural coupling as a way of maintaining the relationship between an entity and its stakeholders/environment.
As a framework for a disruptor to enable major change in an environment by understanding how to maximise the potential of the "inferior" position in an asymmetric relationship it all seems valid to me.
Not sure what that means or what might be missing. It begs the question about could the framework leap from technology focused markets to wider political arenas? Where might the differences be that would make the framework inappropriate in the latter scenario?
Cybernetics is all about taking a model that works in one context and applying it to another, so maybe.
Thanks for the provocation, food for thought......
ian
I have been thinking about this, and here's a scratch formula for asymmetric strategy.
Goal asymmetry i.e. competitors have different objectives. e.g. in a classic incumbent / interloper situation the incumbent is tied to one set of objectives, whilst the interloper seeks only to steal a niche, or only to disrupt the goals of the incumbent.
Temporal asymmetry e.g. incumbent is pressured for short-term results, the interloper can play for a longer trajectory.
Structural asymmetry e.g. incumbent is organised hierarchically, incumbent organises in cells.
With just these three dimensions, I can begin to describe Ryan Air versus the rest, or open source versus Microsoft, or the situation in Iraq!
I am also thinking about two further dimensions. One is Growth Asymmetry ... what makes an interloper into a movement? The other would be a Presence or Cognitive asymmetry ... I am not sure of this but something to capture how media presence amplifies one competitor as against another.
Its all about variety in the end.
Great points, Ian. I need to look in the literature and see what is out there, but this might be a good start to our book!
The whole discontinuous/radical/disruptive innovation (and Blue Ocean) stuff is based on being different to the incumbent in a way that the incumbent either can't or won't emulate. And taking advantage of that. The Innovator's Dilemma points out the problem, The Innovator's Solution shows how the small challenger can lever the dilemma by focusing on asymmetry in their strategy vis a vis the incumbent.
What does not come out of the luminaries in these areas is the meta model of variety management (requisite variety generation)that all of their methods try to produce.
Your lecture last week on Method as Fetish triggered some thinking.... If we use the four steps of competence model....
1 Unconscious incompetence
2 Conscious incompetence
3 Conscious competence
4 Unconscious competence
.... methods are produced by an adept at something who codifies their competence so that someone who recognises their own unconscious incompetence can, by following the bouncing ball of a method, become consciously competent. Your point that what is needed is proper thinking about the subject at hand rather than the meticulous following of a method is spot on. But then we are not taught how to think properly really. What is needed is a set of thinking tools above methodology that allows us to evaluate the situation and the method that we should apply to it. Tools and ideas like structural coupling, requisite variety, VSM all sit in this space in my view. If I have these tools then I can look at almost any situation, get a handle/diagnosis on it pretty quickly and establish whether any approach will deliver me what I need. Patrick's view of the Iraq war is spot on. Vietnam was the same. They always try to either ignore or break the law of requisite variety and as always it seems to be immutable.
As Ashby said "Man adapts by conquering the reducible; the irreducible is impregnable." Things like the law of requisite variety are irreducible and are therefore impregnable. Most methods are not.
cheers
ian
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