Why Prof. Roger Martin Is Right (Brained) About Accusing Most CEOs of Being Bad at Strategy

Great points in HBR post by Professor Roger Martin Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in Canada and the author of The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage.

I recently read his book and was inspired by it. He makes a few comments that are really close to my heart.  He is taking CEO's, strategy consultants and corporate strategists to task for their 'one dimensional' thinking on strategy. And I couldn't agree more base on my own experience. I was a corporate strategist myself for many years and currently do strategy consulting. And it alway bugs me that when talking strategy, many a CEO seems to have come to expect (no doubt trained by using big 4 consultants for too long and/or having done a traditional MBA) there is only one right way to do it: the analytical way, rational, very much left brain driven, very methodical, deductive and compartmentalized. This is Roger's scathing critique:

"However, there as yet is no analytical tool for combining a given where-to-play choice with a congenial how-to-win choice or vice versa. That takes creative insight. But the majority of people who seek to become corporate strategists or strategy consultants do so because they are much more comfortable with analysis than what they perceive as guesswork. So they tend to become expert at strategic analyses, not strategy. That, I submit, is why CEOs and "strategists" so seldom produce good strategies. Strategy is a creative act and the way to produce good strategy is go beyond basic analysis to creatively integrate your choices concerning where you play and how you propose to win" via blogs.hbr.org

Yes! How right he is. And I mean litterary: he in essence propagetes using the Right Brain in a strategy process, the one that drives creativity, pattern recognition, story telling, empathy and synthesis. Synthesis between "how to win" and "where to plan". There aren't many strategist that do this well, but there is one firm in particular that I have worked with closely on a number of occasions who excel at this: Strategos - the firm founded by Gary Hamel. Big shout-out to my friends over there! The tragedy of a creatively crafted strategy though is that the more left-brained CEO's that Prof. Martin is accusing are on a different wave-lenght and never firmly embrace it....

So here is the question: how should we develop our leaders, our CEO's (other than sending them to Prof. Martin's Rotman) to start using their Right Brain more and rely less on Left Brain skills when thinking about strategy. What should be changed in the curriculum of traditional MBA's? How should Leadership Development Programmes be used to make up for this unbalance? Your thoughts are much appreciated.

Comments

[Tim Gielens]

Hello

We should consider recent research in the field of neuroscience indicating that the left-right distinction between brain functionalities/modalitities doesn't necessarily correspond with the reality. The structure and equipment of the brains of left handed people shows vast differences, as opposed to right- handed people: motoric action, perception, language, face recognition....all of those domains are located in one spot in the right- handed group and distributed over both hemispheres in the left-handed group. While I was studying Neuropsychology they could never give me sound evidence of the popular left-rigth distinction beween the so called emotional and analytical functions of the brain.

Isn't it odd we try to explain the brain functionalities in a linear way, thereby bypassing the Cynefin framework for complex problems and complicated relationships?

So I propose we should be carefull on this...

Regards,
Tim Gielens

[Willemijn Kemp]

Hey,
According to your question what should be changed within a MBA, the thing I'd like to add is that in the Netherlands only 2 % of the students start their own compagny after university. Bening an entrepeneur asks creativity as well. What research is done on right brain development, creativity and entrepeneural/managing skills? These outcomes can be incorporated in an MBA, maybe even with brainstorm/out of the box training or something like this to challenge the students themselves as well to use their creativity.

kind regards, Willemijn Kemp

[Pierre Loewe]

I fully agree that most companies, consultants and writers have overemphasized the left brain, hypothesis-driven, analytics-is-the-end-all-be-all approach to strategy. In the process, they have seemingly forgotten that creativity and open-ended discovery are indispensable if you don't want your strategy to be a mere duplicate of that of a competitor using the same fact base, conducting identical analyses and therefore coming to the same conclusions (and therefore adopting the same strategy).

That said, Roger Martin is hardly the first person to argue for a more creative approach to strategy development, although he does it well and persuasively. Henry Mintzberg, among others, has long argued for an emergent approach to strategy. In my view, there is a proper role for discovery and a proper role for analytics in strategy development. At the risk of oversimplifying, discovery is most important in the early stages (to generate a rich menu of unconventional strategic options) and analytics in the later stages (to decide which of the options to choose). But I agree that for many reasons -- too long to elaborate on here -- the pendulum has swung much too far to the analytical side and that we need to bring creativity and discovery back into the strategy process.

[Sam Mazze]

Yes, yes, yes. I've worked directly for quite a few CEO's and, by and large, none understood the value of including creative thinking in their strategic mix. It drove me crazy because their analytic blinders kept them from achieving key goals, which they then dumbed down. I will give some thought to your question and write later. I have definite thoughts about "die Uhrsprung" of the problem but I have to hone the premise as well as suggested prescriptions.
Sam Mazze
(received through email - posted by BJ Hilberts on behalf of Sam)

[Berend Jan Hilberts]

Hi George - great point: creativity in strategy can't be coerced. there are great tools and methods developed by firm's like yours - Strategos - and others. The methods of Cognitive Edge can do this as well when applied in the right context (full disclosure: I am an Accredited Practitioner in the Cognitive Edge methods). Having some professionals with a lot of strategy crafting experience on the side to faciliate this whole process - and 'keeping the left brain honest' - is certainly not a luxury in my experience. I am sure you would agree to that!

[George]

Excellent post! I agree with Berend and Prof Martin's observations that strategy is a creative act and the creation of good strategies require managers to go beyond basic analysis. However, most people can't will themselves into being more creative simply because their boss (or a professor) says being creative gets to better answers. Instead, they need tools, techniques, processes, frameworks, and complementary organizational levers to enable their endeavors. As Berend described, Strategos, over the last 15 years, has developed a comprehensive set of frameworks/tools/techniques/process to help clients get to creative answers in a disciplined approach. Much of this is discussed in Peter Skarzynski's (CEO of Strategos) book, Innovation to the Core.