In an article entitled, CEOs forced to ditch decades of forecasting habits (16 February 2023), The Financial Times’s Companies Editor, Anne-Sylvaine Chassany, wrote:
(…) Ikea has changed tack. Instead of setting out specific goals for the year, it has a set of “scenarios” to give the business wiggle room as the outlook changes. It means acknowledging that widely different outcomes are possible. “It’s teaching us agility in how we operate,(…)”
It’s good to see that the stated purpose is one of “giv[ing] the business wiggle room”. This is pivotal. Not only, as suggested here, in relation to high-level strategy, but also in the midst of people’s day-to-day practice. Scenario planning might well help to frame some aspects of what is happening, as well as provoking new insights, but organization doesn’t operate in the neatly packaged and predictable ways that conventional management prescriptions suggest that it does. It’s wiggly.
As such, it is continuously (re-)emerging - in predictably unpredictable ways - in the widespread interplay of people’s small-group and one-to-one interactions. This means that people also need “wiggle room” to enable them to anticipate and respond to whatever is emerging; not to what might have emerged, if the real world had been kind enough to comply with the planning assumptions.
So, first, we have The Times commenting on moves to “rewiggle rivers” (see previous blog post, Rewiggling Organization). Now the FT have reported a need for “wiggle room”, to accommodate changes in business outlook. What next? Recognizing the wiggly world of organization, perhaps!
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