Strategic insight lives at the edge
What we see is what we get
Last week I spent a day with a group of senior leaders working on a complex strategic challenge. One that was full of tensions, competing commitments that the group was grappling with.
Across the public sector right now, there are a myriad of challenges which seem almost impossible to resolve. They hold tensions — balancing quality of care, financial sustainability, adoption of AI and new technologies, new models of care, workforce expectations and more.
There is never an easy solution, or just one path forward. There were no easy promises that could be made to the constituents with stake in the issue.
Instead of trying to push for a way forward, in my work on complex challenges I often lean on two interrelated capacities — our capacity to perceive more of what's going on, and our capacity to strengthen the quality of relationships we have across the system.
In this workshop we focused on opening perception. The more we can see, the better we see the challenge — not just the multiple perspectives, but the patterns and dynamics that are more hidden, less obvious — the more options we have available to us.
The patterns we don't notice
We all have default patterns of attention, which shape what we see and what we miss. They become the lenses we have built over years — through our profession, our role, what's worked in the past.
They are sometimes useful, but also, almost by definition, narrow. They reinforce a particular sense of what's going on.
In any complex challenge, everyone in the room brings their own pattern of attention to bear on it. Strategic insight, I'm increasingly convinced, doesn't happen inside our existing frame. It happens at the edge of it — in the territory just beyond what we are currently able to see.
Widening the aperture
In the workshop, we worked deliberately to widen the aperture. We held the same challenge from different angles. We asked what trends were shaping it that no one had yet named and explored the implications. We mapped the interests, loyalties and losses of the people with different relationships to the issue — what were they trying to protect, what would they need to give up, what was at stake for them that we hadn't accounted for. We looked at the relationships and dynamics underneath the presenting problem, rather than just the problem itself.
What shifted wasn't the challenge. What shifted was what we could see — and therefore what was now available in how to respond.
This is the move I find myself making, often with leaders who feel stuck. Not "what should we do?" but "what are we not yet seeing?" Because the more we can see — the patterns, the dynamics, the interconnections, the things just outside the edge of our usual pattern of attention — the more options we have.
A small invitation
You probably have a challenge right now that is wearing a familiar groove. Something you have turned over many times, in much the same way.
Before you turn it over again, ask yourself: what are the familiar patterns of attention I'm bringing to this issue? What am I reliably seeing? And what, given those patterns, am I almost certainly missing?
The threads of insight and possibility we are looking for are rarely inside the frame we already have. They are sitting just beyond it, waiting for us to widen our gaze.
Warmly, Claire
PS — Strategy Lab
This is some of the work we do together inside Strategy Lab — a space for senior leaders to bring the complex, knotted challenges they are carrying and widen what they can see. We work with the patterns of attention we bring to the issue, the dynamics underneath it, and the moves that become available once the frame opens.
If that sounds like the kind of company you'd value right now, you can find out more here.
