Strategy Differently

2025-08-16

The term “Safety Differently” involves adding to a dominating “What goes wrong” paradigm with “What goes right” thinking to offer a better both/and picture.

I sense a similar “Strategy Differently” movement with The Cynefin Company WRAS framework. The prevailing strategic approach is to craft an idealistic future state and then produce a linear blueprint with goals, targets, KPIs.

For a better both/and picture, we now add a different risk/strategy approach when the environment (substrate) is uncertain, unpredictable, and deals with unknowns, unknowables, unimaginables.

[Christian Harris]

Really like this framing. In safety, the shift from “what goes wrong” to “what goes right” helped broaden the lens; we stopped reducing everything to incidents and began seeing the strengths, adaptations and capacities already in play.

Strategy has a similar blind spot. Traditional blueprints with KPIs can be useful in stable contexts, but when the environment is volatile and uncertain, they can quickly become brittle. The WRAS framework feels like the kind of both/and thinking that helps leaders balance the necessity of structure with the reality of complexity.

The hard part, as you point out, is that we’re still caught between paradigms. Many systems demand linear accountability while the work itself requires adaptive governance. That tension is where the most interesting questions, and the most meaningful innovations, emerge.