03 Apr Balloons and Anchors
The accumulated wonder and detritus of strategies past
We are building up to our April conversation café on “Developing Change Capability”, and this blog looks at an underlying factor that sometimes weighs change down, and at other times makes it soar like a helium balloon.
The story starts with the time-old relationship between strategy and structure. As soon as an organisation has a strategy (however weak), it has a structure – of some or other form. That is obvious and well known. So too is the idea that if the strategy changes, so does the structure in some or other way.
Sometimes things move the other way too – a new person comes into a role, shifting team dynamics and bringing new capability – and that structural change drives a shift in strategy. Imagine a new Marketing executive with the ability to elevate a firm’s brand in key markets – that will drive a change in operational strategy. Strategy and structure are symbiotic.
Strategies should change as circumstances change – that’s sensible. Structures also change as circumstances and strategies change – that is sensible too. People leave, technology shifts, new people arrive. So it goes.
Each step in the strategy-structure-strategy-structure march does not leave a clean slate. The strategies and structures that came before are the ingredients for the next step. Each new step drags the past with it. That is because an organisation is quite unlike a kitchen. In a kitchen, we can clean up entirely after preparing a meal such that the kitchen is clean before the next meal is prepared. In an organisation, the previous strategy had its image in the structure – in people’s goals, their sense of purpose, their playbooks and work-processes, their unit and team structures, their technologies, their roles and job descriptions and the kind of people who work there, and in the daily hum of certain meetings with certain agendas at certain times with certain people.
This accumulated history has a light and a dark side – including the beautiful aspects of the culture, any capability in operating units, and any identity in the minds of customers. Those could be balloons that lift your next strategic step or historical anchors that bind you tight to particular ways of organising.
So for the first few strategic changes, in the start-up, (“pivots” maybe), the structures haven’t accumulated much in the way of history. Down the line, that story changes. The Agile organisation movement, well suited for smaller project-based organisations, sometimes pursues the dream of making elephants break-dance. If you can picture that, you have a creative mind – now try to picture large machine bureaucracies adopting agile approaches. This is not impossible, but there are many layers of tangled structural history that would need to be cleared before that elephant could boogie.
Understanding the past is a key element in strategic change. Being able to frame that understanding in some sort of strategic and structural language is very useful, as a way of making sense of the contribution that the past will make to the next strategic shift. WorldsView has language and frameworks that help to make sense of the past in ways that is useful for the future. Helping or hindering, the past will play a role as a balloon that lifts or an anchor that binds. Let us help you to decode your strategic and structural history and encode the future of your organisation.
This article forms part of our build-up to the April 2025 WorldsView Conversation Café – a free, online event for people who want to improve their organisations. Our April conversation is about internal change agents. Titled “Developing Change Capability”, the café asks, “What internal practitioners can and cannot do”. Change has become an industry, with global players, to whom large firms pay license fees for approaches to change management. If you can afford them, they are superb. If you cannot, what can you do? What are the kinds of things that managers anywhere, in any role, can practice to drive change – such as the change that is needed to be a more effective organisation?
Register here to join the April 2025 online conversation café, and if you like our content then subscribe here for our newsletter or follow us on LinkedIn.
Written by: Craig Yeatman