On strategy dialogues

I was reading M.M. Bakhtin for a paper I am writing with Richard Whittington on how individuals become strategists (see here). I was interested in his work on speech genres, seeking to understand, how everyday utterances are structured by stylistic considerations.

What I was most struck by the essay "Speech Genres", however, was Bakhtin's reminder that communication is dialogical.

It appears that strategy implementation gurus, seem to be smitten with Claude Shannon's notion of communication, where communication is characterized by the transmission of a message between a sender and a receiver (figure adopted by Shannon's 1948 Mathemathical Theory of Communication, which can be read here).



In such a scheme, if the meaning of the message changes in transmission, it is either the result of noise or misinterpretation. In strategy implementation, it is easy to be lured into thinking that this indeed is how one communicates strategy. After the top management team has come up with a brilliant strategy, the role of communication is to ensure interpretation of that strategy across the organization. The resulting view of a strategy process looks a little bit like this:
The educated reader might suspect that I have drawn the figure to set up a straw man. That reader is only urged to go to the local library and borrow a few books on "strategy implementation". Consider, for instance, Hrebiniak and Joyce, who in their 1984 book Implemeting Strategy, after presenting a model of implementation, not much different from the one above argued that:

Our view of motivation and the employment contract enables us to develop a straightforward stimulus-response-reinforcement model of the application and use of incentives and controls in the organization. (ibid. 189)

Hrebiniak and Joyce have a chapter on strategy implementation ("Implementing strategy" in Hitt et al's (2001) Blackwell Handbook of Strategic Management), where strategy implementation is still built on structure, reinforced by "incentives and controls". It does not pay to be openly behaviorist in many other fields of science, but in strategic management people seem to appreciate behaviorism. After all, the top management is the one who is supposed to know about strategy and the role of implementers is to conform.

Bakhtin provided a fresh and valuable reminder of just how feeble such behaviorism is. For strategy to be implemented, strategy must be communicated. And all human communication is dialogical. Have you ever experienced a communication situation, where somebody is telling you something and your sole intent has been to make sense of every word as the communicator intends them to be interpreted? Bakhtin's (1986/1952-1953: 68) answer is no:

Still current in linguistics are such functions as the "listener" and "understander" (partners of the "speaker") , the "unified speech flow," and so on. These pictures produce a completely distorted idea of the complex and multifaceted process of active speech communication. [...] diagrams of the active speech processes of the speaker and the corresponding passive processes of the listener's perception and understanding of the speech. One cannot say that these processes are false or that they do not correspond to certain aspects of reality. But when they are put forth as the actual whole of speech communication, they become science fiction. The fact is that when the listener perceives and understands the meaning (the language meaning) of speech, he simultaneously takes an active, responsive attitude toward it [...] Any understanding is imbued with response and necessarily elicits it in one form or the other: the listener becomes the speaker.

In terms of strategy implementation, the dialogical view takes the notion "Any understanding is imbued with response and necessarily elicits it in one form or the other: the listener becomes the speaker" seriously. The corresponding schema might look something like the following:
The dialogical view is in line with the views of lots of the dissidents in strategy literature such as Mintzberg, Gioia & Chittipeddi and Barry & Elmes. However, it appears as if the literature focused on "implementation" seems to have built a behaviorist fortress around itself.

You could argue that, adding a feedback loop to the linear model would make it look a bit like the dialogical model. Maybe, if you drew lots of loops. Indeed, many practitioners have accepted the need for "strategy dialogue", yet the strategy processes in these very organizations may look strikingly linear. The key, uncomfortable question regarding whether a strategy process is dialogical or not is, I think:

"are you willing to let the strategy change in implementation".

If you want the organization to implement your strategy, dialogue is just sugar frosting. When I was working in the STRADA program, my previous employer, we often had phone calls from strategists saying: "You are a strategy implementation program. We have our strategy together now. How could you help us implement it?" Indeed, we were a strategy implementation research program. Petri Aaltonen, a colleague of mine, had drawn a nifty figure to denote our key problem.


After a while, I begun to realize that maybe the chasm was something that one creates oneself. It is not a fact of nature, but something created by behaviorist views on how to build a strategy process.

November at its best

We saw first snow today. My family took some friends on a picnic in a national park nearby to experience the first snow, as well as to barbecue some sausages on an open fire (a favorite of the dids, and in particular, the parents).