In our element: Why we turned our strategy into a periodic table (Yes, really)
There is no shortage of models for change in the world, so this year we’ve been reviewing how this plurality of approaches can coalesce into a coherent living strategy for Regen Melbourne’s work. Kaj and Nicole explain why we’ve chosen – of all things – a periodic table to help us make sense of our unique alchemy. After all, our natural world is an emergent property of the interactions between elements, so what better metaphor to understand an emergent strategy centring life?
Regen Melbourne is an engine for ambitious collaboration in service of the regeneration of Greater Melbourne. Our purpose is to move Melbourne towards a safe, just and regenerative future. Such an ambitious framing and purpose clearly requires new ways of thinking, doing and being. As a result, Regen Melbourne’s work sits at the intersection of many new models, frameworks, worldviews and approaches. These include Doughnut Economics, mission-oriented innovation, systems thinking, regenerative practice, collective impact, and a variety of inner practices that connect our personal development to the outer change we aspire to.
Importantly, one of the grounding ideas we keep coming back to is that “all models are wrong, but some are useful”. Paraphrased from the statistician George Box, this sentiment is critical as we review and (re)consider how we understand our work and our ways of being in the world. There is no single model that can cure our world or build anew. Instead, with a plethora of models and approaches, we centre our work on our place, on the future of Greater Melbourne. We focus on what she needs to triage the harms of our current system, while creatively transitioning to something new, ultimately transforming into a beacon city for others to follow.
This year we have been reviewing how this plurality of approaches coalesce into a coherent overarching strategy for Regen Melbourne. In doing so, we have been thinking a lot about what ‘strategy’ needs to be right now. One thing is for sure, 20th century approaches to strategy are severely limited by linear theories of change, narrow boundaries, and first-order measurement frameworks. They are also underpinned by centralised and hierarchical leadership models where “strategy” is the domain of “leaders”, and the potential rarely makes its way out of PowerPoint (or perhaps Google) slides. This feels disjointed from the approaches we need to move towards a systems transformation made up of the messiness, participation and dynamism we expect when centering life.
“For some answers we turn to nature itself. Nature is beautiful, messy, non-linear, distributed and emergent. It is the most perfect and intuitive system known to us.”
However, the practices, processes and performance of strategy coming out of the new systems transformation landscape are yet to define tangible approaches to organisational strategy.
This isn’t to dismiss the work; there is a lot out there on emergent strategy that's incredibly important. In the last month alone, we’ve drawn from the likes of adrienne maree brown, Henry Mintzberg and Nora Bateson, in order to apply frameworks and thought patterns to our context.
Rather, from our experience it feels like there’s an overemphasis towards intuitive strategy and emergence that risks being untethered from intentionality and structure. This isn’t helping us move from where we are to where we want to be.
It could be that in the 'future', strategy looks fundamentally different. It might be navigating by constellations of stars, or all intuitive, more akin to instinctive seasonal flows of life. But we're not there yet. We're up against a dominant culture that is asking for a new way of organising and that needs more than intuition.
We’re finding that the messy, non-linear reality of how systems change, the nature of emergence and multi-order effects, and the associated difficulty of attribution have hampered the ability to develop new organisational strategic models.
So in thinking about our strategy this year, we are asking:
How can we build a coherent organisational strategy for systems change when there is so much that is inherently uncertain, the focus is on relationships not just projects and feedback loops are so long?
For some answers we turn to nature itself. Nature is beautiful, messy, non-linear, distributed and emergent. It is the most perfect and intuitive system known to us. With such brilliant complexity and inter-connectivity how do you even begin to find understanding, or navigate where the most potent points of healing and reconnecting might be? Of course, our understanding of the natural world begins with a child-like awe as we realise how magical it truly is.
“we have built our new strategic model using the analogy of the periodic table. Just as in nature, certain elements of our strategy are stable and strong, and others are unstable and dynamic. And of course, there is a spectrum between.”
As we develop and learn, we discover the periodic table of elements, the distillation of the fundamental building blocks of life itself. It turns out we can understand our natural ecosystem by diving into the foundational elements that interact to create our universe. These elements don’t all behave the same way. Some are abundant, some are scarce. Some are incredibly stable and strong, others are reactive and dynamic. The reality that our messy, complex, beautiful, inter-relational natural world is made up of mappable, powerful, discrete elements makes the periodic table an enticing metaphor for new strategic thinking!
We believe that our strategic model should be in conversation with the principles of systems thinking and regeneration. As such, we have built our new strategic model using the analogy of the periodic table. Just as in nature, certain elements of our strategy are stable and strong, and others are unstable and dynamic. And of course, there is a spectrum between.
As an example, at the top of the RM periodic table you will see strategic elements like our vision and purpose (Vp), our Horizons (Ho), our principles (Pr) and our governance structure (Go). These are all highly stable elements that create the founding building blocks of our work. In contrast, as you work your way down the RM Living Strategy, you will find elements like our impact model (Im), our projects (Pp) and our operations (Op), all becoming more and more dynamic. Of course, neither stable or dynamic is inherently good or bad. Instead, it is when these elements combine in practice that we see their true magic. Further, as we discover more through our work, new elements may be added or combined or shifted to reflect our ongoing learning and development.
In practice, our team (Lt), our board (Go) and our community (Al) can draw on constellations of these strategic elements to make decisions, guide their posture and endeavour to create systemic impact. As such, these strategic elements become alive in our work and evolve over time. We can’t wait to play with this model together with our alliance and see how it can usefully support our work together.
So, in summary, we turned our strategy into a periodic table, which does three things:
It makes strategy more fun – what alchemy awaits!
It recognises the elemental, playful and emergent nature of systems work
It tethers us with a dynamic set of foundations we can rely on in uncertainty
We’re sharing it because we think there might be some value in creating replicable patterns across places doing similar work. We hope you can feel the chemistry.
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