Playing To Win
(Playing to Win) x 5
Being a Reflective Strategy Practitioner
This piece is intended to serve two purposes: to celebrate an important milestone; and to answer the many questions I get from people who ask me about how they can ‘create content’ like I do. This Playing to Win/ Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece is called (Playing to Win) x 5: Being a Reflective Strategy Practitioner. All previous PTW/PI can be found here.
The Milestone
I started the PTW/PI series on October 5, 2020 with The Role of Management Systems in Strategy. Including this one, I have published 191 original pieces (excluding the annual summaries and ‘best of’ pieces).
The inspiration for the series, Playing to Win, which I co-wrote with my great friend AG Lafley, was published in 2013 and totaled 67K words of content (excluding endnotes, index, and acknowledgements — actually 66,996 to be exact). With this PTW/PI, the series will be at just under 337K words of original content, and that is 5 x PTW (which would be 335K).
I am very gratified with the audience that the series has garnered. It has built from zero to 239K followers in under four years since its launch. There is no official list of Medium followership published but there are multiple informal lists and it appears certain that I have risen to the top 10 in followership — probably #7 or 8, and not far off #1, Tim Denning at 326K.
I am also gratified by the support of the Medium platform. In particular, it adopted a tool called Medium Boost, in late 2022, ‘to highlight and promote high-quality stories to a wider audience.’ Since Boost’s introduction, 58 (60%) of the 97 PTW/PIs I have published a PTW/PI have been Boosted — and 24 of the 34 (71%) thus far in Year Four of the series. So, thanks for the support, Medium!
I am also just a little bit proud to have written the equivalent of five full books in just under four years. I had kept a pace of publishing one major book every two years from 2007–2017 — six books, plus a couple of largely unreadable academic books, one on Canadian public policy, and one edited volume. I thought that was as much and as fast as I could possibly write — in part because being a business school dean or a CEO advisor has been my primary job — not writing.
And because so many people ask me about who is doing the writing, I write every word and serve as my own editor. The lag times waiting for an editor to get back to me would be impossible to manage/tolerate. So, I do it myself. The latter has been an interesting skill to develop. I probably need to get still better at it.
Being a Reflective Strategy Practitioner
I frequently get asked questions about how I can write so much and how the questioner can write like me. It feels slightly egotistical to discuss this subject — but people ask me so often, I have to swallow my unease and provide the advice.
The secret to both is being a reflective practitioner — an idea advanced by the late great Donald Schön (1930–1997). He was a long-time thinking and writing partner of my beloved mentor Chris Argyris (1923–2013), and he was always helpful and warm to me. In 1984, he published what most would see as his most important work The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. It inspired me and could arguably be causally responsible for PTW/PI.
Schön argued that to become ever more effective in a given knowledge domain, you need to do two things — practice in it and reflect on your practice. I think it immediately resonated with me because I had inclinations in that direction to begin with — but he gave me both encouragement and a way to conceptualize it.
In the professional field of business, I am pessimistic about how far one can get theorizing. I certainly think one can advance knowledge, but I think progress quickly hits a wall without practice.
And practice is what I have done my entire career. It has, in fact, been 43 years — and counting — of practice. Everything about which I have written in 13 books and nearly a thousand articles has come from my practice of working with executives on the management of their enterprise — whether for profit, charitable, government, or educational. I don’t ‘read the literature’ and theorize about how to advance it. I am probably very bad on doing that and undoubtedly would find some shortcuts if I read more. But almost all my reading comes post-practice and in response to a question that arises out of practice. I cannot think of a time when I read a book/article and said: “Wow, that is a great idea I should figure out how to apply.” But very often, I read something after practice has raised a question and have found helpful insights.
I remember vividly my first meeting with Argyris. Instead of just asking him about his theories, I presented him with a big client problem with which I was dealing in real time and the way I was thinking about it. He riffed off it and gave me a new way of thinking about it — a much better way. Argyris ended up working closely with me for a decade because he liked the way I integrated his work and ideas with my practice.
But practice alone is not enough — per Schön. Counter-intuitively, more practice can make you worse. For example, you can get more and more practiced at running meetings in ways that leave participants frustrated and angry. But if you got what you wanted from the meeting and didn’t take note that you had demoralized your whole team, you will probably do the same thing again with more confidence and enthusiasm. And when, inevitably, your meetings start to go really badly because your subordinates are so fed up, you will be mystified by the result.
The key is to be reflective as you practice, to ask yourself to what extent the theory you put in practice generated the results you expected. If not, what did you learn about your theory as you practiced it? How could you modify it? And even if your theory worked reasonably well, what surprised you about the reaction to its use in practice? And what theory could you develop based on that piece of anomalous practice?
That is being a reflective not reflexive practitioner. The entry price of being a reflective practitioner is to have an explicit theory of your practice. You can’t be a reflective practitioner if, for example, you go into a client meeting without a theory of how you want to conduct the meeting and what you expect to happen. If you don’t, you will have no way of judging the delta between what your theory predicted and what actually happened. You will learn nothing and will be a reflexive practitioner.
But, if you do, you are not done yet to be a reflective practitioner. You need to reflect on the differences between what your theory predicted and the outcomes you achieved to come up with an enhancement to your theory. For example, if you expected the opening exercise to get the meeting participants enthused but it left them perplexed, how could you interpret what caused them to be perplexed and use that to design a better opening exercise.
Reflective Practice and PTW/PI
So very many PTW/PI ideas and themes have come out of reflecting on my practice at clients. When a client struggled with how to think about the consequences of a decision they were contemplating, I realized that I had to write The Whether/How Distinction because at that point in the process, some questions were about whether to do the thing in question while others were about how to do the thing in question. When a client refused to really engage on strategy the way I thought it needed to, I wrote My Business is Too Fast-Moving for Strategy. When a client was despondent about executives not meeting their Objectives & Key Results (OKR), I had to write Stop Letting OKRs Masquerade as Strategy. I wrote The Delusion of Single-Point Accountability because the client needed a more powerful and actionable theory of how to distribute responsibility. At least half of the PTW/PI articles have come directly from reflections on client interactions. These pieces wouldn’t exist without those interactions.
Now it may seem obvious that any smart practitioner would be reflective. Why not? Isn’t the opposite so stupid that you wouldn’t be reflexive? Sadly, it ain’t so. And I have lived that truth. I spent over a decade at strategy consulting firm Monitor Company. During the period I was there (from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s), Monitor was arguably the hottest firm in the industry. With relative ease, we recruited the very best and brightest from the world’s top business schools. I can’t think of another organization in that era that had a higher proportion of exceedingly smart professionals than Monitor did.
For a decade, I was in charge of Research & Development/Intellectual Property creation. One of my early initiatives was to ask the consultant responsible for each client engagement to write a one-page memo at its conclusion on the one thing that they learned from working with the client on the engagement. I made it easy: only one page and one idea. I could have easily given five to ten on any assignment I ever led and written it up in 30 minutes. So, it was a very low bar. The total number of one-pagers I ever received was zero: not a single one.
It became evident that Monitor Company was chock-a-block full of super-smart, exceedingly hard-working practitioners, but few reflective practitioners. I had no idea that I was such an outlier. That is why I believe it is true that I have personally written more content than the sum total of everybody who has worked fulltime at Monitor in its entire history (that excludes academics who have done work in conjunction with Monitor but always maintained a fulltime academic job, like Mike Porter, Chris Argyris, and Mike Jensen).
The Reader Accelerator
The cool accelerator for PTW/PI ideas is readers. As readership has increased, so have reader ideas. Exceptions and Rules was written in response to a reader question/comment about the prior one, The Importance of Strategic Tension. Strategy & Design Thinking, The Proper Role of the Chief Strategy Officer, and Where is the Business Model in Playing to Win were responses to reader questions. And readers provide more than questions. Sometimes they provide great ideas for stories like Heuristics, Management & Strategy and Ways of Understanding.
It is a cool reinforcing system. My practice with clients feeds me ideas that are generalizable enough to collect an audience, that provides more ideas still — and so on.
Practitioner Insights
It really doesn’t take all that much time and energy to be a little more reflective than reflexive. Write — even if it is just for yourself. As you practice (regardless of what you practice), reflect on what you have learned. It may not seem like much, but the learning is still learning — and like compound interest, Warren Buffett’s 8th Wonder of the World, it cumulates wonderfully.
Give yourself a reason to reflect. That is what writing makes me do. When I reflect on my experiences with clients and my interactions with readers, instead of getting lost in the mists of time or never being developed, my habit of writing forces me to organize me thoughts. And the self-editing forces me to challenge those thoughts, and improve them, and refine them. And the cool thing is that it gets easier and more fluid over time.
Most people, including most of the ones who want to write, say they hate writing. But it is because they don’t have a system. Don’t be daunted — start slow and modestly. But always reflect and learn.
