Knowledge, Co-Design, and Strategy

Note from the Editor

When it comes to corporate strategy, there’s a powerful synthetic, top-down alternative to the analytic, bottom-up strategy favored by management consultants. One of our long-term clients mentioned this at breakfast the other day.

This top-down approach to strategy comes about from our method of co-designing interventions with clients, combining their knowledge with our expertise in a manner that is similar to what doctors and lawyers do, and less like what management consultants do.

—Ellen

Knowledge, Co-Design, and Strategy

A friend of ours was hosting visitors at his family’s country estate in New Zealand. When asked how they wanted to spend their first day, the couple said they’d like to go hunting for wild orchids. 

He assured them that there were no wild orchids to be found—he knew the property well and had spent his boyhood summers here—but his visitors persisted. They said they knew about orchids, and the highly favourable terrain meant there were certain to be lots of orchids growing wild.

Oblivious to his scepticism, they grabbed their cameras and together the three of them hiked through the fields.  Every hundred yards or so the visitors, with great excitement would shout, “Aha! There!” leaving the path to part an unremarkable looking clump of grasses and, to our friend’s astonishment, reveal a magnificent specimen. The wild orchids seemed to be everywhere.¹

Doctors and lawyers

There is more than one way to know your way about territory you know well. You always know about it only in some respects but not others. When you seek the assistance of a doctor or a lawyer, for example, you are asked questions that only you are in a position to answer, but questions which they, and not you, have the knowledge to ask. You know your situation in terms of what already matters to you, but you don’t really know what might be relevant to the doctor or lawyer if they are to bring their specialist knowledge and know-how to bear on your situation.

Most of the time, the reason they are asking what they ask is opaque to you. To be of assistance they certainly don’t need to share with you the knowledge guiding their questions. And besides, even if they could, there just isn’t time. Instead, the two of you work together, in a collaborative process, each contributing your particular kind of knowledge of the territory.

The doctor or lawyer asks questions and is guided to their next question by your responses to the previous ones, drawing on selected aspects of their specialist knowledge. To be able to do that yourself, you’d probably need first to go to medical school or law school.

In this exchange of question and answer, the lawyer contributes knowledge of the law that she can see pertains to your situation—something you cannot know—while you contribute knowledge of the details of your own situation and the outcome you are seeking—things your lawyer cannot know until you tell her.

At the doctor’s office, you can report how you feel—which the doctor, of course, is not in a position to know.  Listening to your account, your doctor, for her part, tries to figure out what your story is likely to mean—something you are not in a position to know yourself—and based on what she learns, she may order some tests or write a prescription.

These two kinds of knowledge of the territory go hand in hand, complementing one another—your own in-depth knowledge of the rich idiosyncratic detail of yourself and your situation, on the one hand, and the doctor’s or lawyer’s more generic, in-depth contextual knowledge of the aspects covered by their specialism. Legal or medical knowledge is useless without knowledge of the details of your unique case to which it is being applied; while your own intimate familiarity with the details of your personal context won’t get you very far without their knowledge of the medical or legal context, if indeed it’s a medical or legal matter you’re ultimately dealing with.

It is the same with our own work in the C-suite. The content-knowledge we bring, like the doctor’s or lawyer’s knowledge, consists of in-depth, specialist knowledge of selected aspects of the client’s situation. In our case, it is specialist, scientific knowledge necessary to design tiny interventions catalyzing large-scale transformations rapidly and with precision. But like the doctor or lawyer, we rely entirely on the client for knowledge of the idiosyncratic details of their own unique situation, without which our knowledge cannot even begin to be applied.

Co-designing: bringing two types of knowledge together

We have always described our work in creating rapid, large-scale change as a process of co-designing an intervention together with the client.  This co-designing consists of a particular way of bringing the client’s intimate knowledge of the territory together with our own very different kind of knowledge of the territory.

In this, we are very much like doctors or lawyers and very unlike management consultants, for example.

For unlike the doctor or lawyer, the management consultant has knowledge of the same kind that the manager might also have, or is even expected ideally to have, but perhaps he knows things the manager doesn’t know, and the management consultant can share this knowledge with the client, who then comes to know it, too.

Whereas we ourselves, like the doctor or lawyer and unlike the management consultant, have knowledge of a kind that the manager cannot possibly have and need never acquire, and which cannot and need not ever be shared with the client in order for us to be of assistance.

Instead, a session designing a minimalist intervention, like a visit to the doctor or lawyer, takes the form of an interrogation bringing together these two very different kinds of knowledge of the client’s territory to achieve a particular outcome.

Stages of Intervention Co-Design

This takes place in a number of different ways as we work closely with the client face-to-face over a period of some hours, co-designing an intervention through this process of ceaseless questioning, exploring, probing.

First, as the client, you are seeking a particular outcome which you want badly, but articulating it is quite another matter. You may think you know what you want and why you’re here, but only in terms too general to be of any use to us in taking you nearer to the desired outcome.  So first, each and every time, we must help you articulate what it is you want in a way that will enable us to get you all the way there. Along the way, you will likely come to see what you’re really after in a new, much clearer light.

Second, once we both know what we are seeking to achieve together, couched now in terms that are meaningful to us as we draw upon our specialist knowledge in order to design an intervention, we are once again entirely reliant on your knowledge of the territory that you know intimately and which we could never come to know at the level of detail required.

Here, in this next phase of the questioning, we know exactly what we are looking for, but only you can know where to find it. From the way you respond to our probing, from what we learn and the patterns that emerge in your responses, we come to know where it would be most fruitful to explore further.

Third, as the intervention design slowly begins to take shape, we rely entirely on you to provide the raw materials out of which the solution, the intervention design itself, will be fashioned.

Finally, in the last stage of the design process, we need to tweak the design according to your own knowledge of what will and won’t work locally, not least since you are the one who will be implementing the intervention.

Two approaches to corporate strategy

Perhaps we can best bring out the contrast by considering two very different approaches to crafting corporate strategy adopted by those who advise the C-suite of major corporations.

Management consultants like McKinsey and Co approach the crafting of strategy in a bottom-up, analytical kind of way—conducting research, analysing the implications, and so on, all summarized in a report, and from such an analysis, carefully discussed with the client, the choice of strategy is meant to follow. The consultants provide information and expert advice, two things we ourselves would never do.

By contrast, at Interchange, when we work with our client on strategy, we approach the crafting of strategy in a top-down, synthetic kind of way—in a process of co-design. Since the CEO is ultimately responsible for setting and owning the strategy, we start there.

Here’s why:

A corporate strategy is a statement of where the corporation is headed. Where is the CEO wanting to take the firm? Using the CEO’s existing knowledge of the firm’s capabilities, sometimes supplemented by forays to answer very specific questions that arise to which he doesn’t already know the answer, we apply our own knowledge of how to create change, that is, how to secure desired outcomes rapidly and with precision. And together we co-design the strategy and a set of tactics sure to get him where he ideally wants to go.

For us, this is readily doable because we ourselves look at the world through our “photographic negative” epistemological lens of flux-and-constraint, which we explore in more detail in Releasing Change: Understanding Flux, Pattern, and Constraint and Realizing Possibilities Part II, and our entire body of proprietary scientific knowledge is grounded in this way of looking at events and circumstances. It makes most sense from this point of view to build a strategic path out of curb stones marking where the path is not.²

Crafting competitive strategy in this way, synthetic and top-down rather than analytic and bottom-up, apart from being much faster and more certain, has the advantage of not being constrained by the tacit choice of playing field in which everyone else is already competing as if it had somehow already exhausted the range of possibilities, and instead opens the door to changing the game.

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© Copyright 2022 James Wilk and Ellen Arkfeld
The moral right of the authors has been asserted

1. This rather delightful story was told to James many years ago by Mr Philip Pryor

2. We owe this point about kerbstones to Dr D. J. Stewart

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