STRATEGY IN A TIME OF DARKNESS AND LIGHT SERIES (PART 1)
Ma: The Interval That Gives Everything Its Meaning
The Japanese word ma (間) is written with a gate and the sun shining through it. It names the space in between: the pause between two notes, the room between two pillars, the silence that gives the music its shape. In Japanese aesthetics, ma is not emptiness. It is the interval that gives everything around it its meaning. Remove it and the music becomes noise, the building becomes a wall.
Leaders are living inside a ma right now. The old pattern has loosened and the new one has not yet set. We tend to hear uncertainty as an order to stop: hold the budgets, freeze the hiring, wait for the picture to clear. But uncertainty does not mean that everything has to freeze. It is the moment when the questions buried under yesterday’s certainties come to the surface: what do we really know, which assumptions have we never tested, what could change the game that we have not yet imagined. Rarely are all the questions in front of us so visible, and rarely is it so valuable to ask them. The interval will not stay open, because as others commit, patterns harden and the new becomes the obvious. What matters is whether we fill it with questions of our own, or let it be filled by the answers of others.
The Board Has Gone Dark, and the Temptation Is to Wait
Every leader we speak to describes the same control board. A few months ago, one or two indicators were amber. Then they turned red. Now some have gone black, and the whole panel is unreadable. Tariffs, rates, AI, geopolitics, energy, talent. Each signal contradicts the next.
The temptation is to wait. Wait for the board to settle, for the data to clear, for someone else to move first.
We want to make the opposite case, in four steps. First, strategy is the cheapest and the smartest investment an organization can make right now. Second, waiting is not neutral: it is a trajectory. Third, an unreadable board is not an absence of information: it is a wide-open field of possibility, and a field can be mapped. Fourth, the map is best drawn from within, by the people who will have to live with it.
The Cheapest and Smartest Investment on the Table
Start with the economics. A serious strategy process takes a few days of the time of the most senior people, and of those around them. A failed acquisition, a mistimed restructuring or a technology bet made on a stale assumption costs orders of magnitude more. The downside of strategy work is small and capped. The upside is not capped at all.
It is also the smartest investment, and its value rises with the uncertainty. When information is scarce, each decision carries more weight, and the organization that has thought through its options before the pressure arrives decides faster and better than the one improvising under it. Strategy is the one investment whose return grows as the board goes dark.
There is a condition. The real cost of strategy is rarely the writing of it. It is what happens afterward. Most of the value is lost long before anyone starts implementing, because the strategy never becomes the organization’s own. How a strategy is made matters as much as what it says, and we come back to that below.
Rohrbeck and Kum found that the companies best prepared for the future showed 33% higher profitability and 200% higher market capitalization growth than their peers. (Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2018) McKinsey’s own fifteen years of research on corporate transformation found that the success rate of large-scale transformations has hovered around 30% for over a decade, and that nearly half of the value they lose disappears before implementation even starts, in the target-setting and planning phases. (McKinsey & Company, “Losing from Day One,” 2021) Mankins and Steele found that companies realize on average only 63% of the financial performance their strategies promise. (Harvard Business Review, “Turning Great Strategy into Great Performance,” 2005)
Waiting Is Not Neutral. It Is a Trajectory.
“Wait and see” feels like prudence because it avoids commitment. But an organization that stops deciding does not stop moving. It drifts, at the speed and in the direction chosen by everyone else. Worse, the pause is collective. When uncertainty rises, almost every firm freezes at the same moment, which means the advantage falls to the few that do not.
Waiting has real value in one narrow case: when the uncertainty will resolve by itself and the decision cannot be undone. Neither condition holds today. The fog is not a front that passes. It is the new weather.
Bloom’s work on uncertainty shocks shows that when uncertainty spikes, firms pause hiring and investment until the picture clears, producing a collective stall followed by a rebound. (Bloom, “The Impact of Uncertainty Shocks,” Econometrica, 2009) Gulati, Nohria and Wohlgezogen studied 4,700 public companies across three recessions: 17% did not survive, and only 9% flourished, outperforming rivals by at least 10% on sales and profit growth. The winners neither froze nor merely cut costs. They defended and attacked at the same time. (Harvard Business Review, “Roaring Out of Recession,” 2010) The average lifespan of an S&P 500 company has fallen from 61 years in 1958 to under 18 years today, and is projected to reach around 12 years by 2027. (Innosight, Corporate Longevity Forecast; American Enterprise Institute, 2020)
An Unreadable Board Is a Field of Possibility
Unreadable, unknown, unpredictable. We hear these words as threats. They also describe the widest field of options leaders will see in a decade. The board is unreadable because too many futures, and too many questions, are still open at the same time. That is what the ma looks like from the control room.
Thinking the unthinkable, while everyone else is waiting it out, is not a luxury. It is the work of this moment. The question is how to do that work without being paralyzed by it. For this we use a tool from the MG Taylor Modeling Language, developed over decades of research into how organizations navigate uncertainty: the Best Case / Worst Case model.
Draw the Envelope: Best Case, Worst Case, Most Probable
The model starts from where you stand: at the mouth of the Trunk, the moment when the future branches out in front of you. Behind you, the Trunk holds the past and everything you carry from it. Ahead, you set the limits of what is possible.
The Best Case is what happens if everything goes as planned. It is not a utopia. It is simply the outcome in which your plans worked. The Worst Case is the devil’s advocate scenario, where plans go wickedly awry. It is not the end of the world either. The Most Probable Case is what a practical mind expects, and the path that leads there.
What lies between these paths is the envelope of possibility. Between the Best Case and the Most Probable lies the Profit Range. Between the Most Probable and the Worst Case lies the Survival Range, survival being not necessarily pleasant. Beyond either edge lie outcomes the model treats as collapse or death.
Two properties make this model decisive for the present moment. First, the width of the envelope changes over time. Sometimes the future is a narrow band. Today it is wide open. Second, you are always standing at the mouth of the Trunk. That is the present, and it is the only place from which you can act. Every action must bring “there” to “here,” and the easy actions that do not move you toward the Best Case move you, quite clearly, toward the Worst. This is the strongest argument against waiting that we know: inaction is not outside the model. It is a path inside it.
Mitchell, Russo and Pennington found that “prospective hindsight,” imagining that an outcome has already occurred and explaining why, improves the ability to identify the reasons for it by about 30%. (Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 1989) Gary Klein turned it into the pre-mortem, a practical way to work on the Worst Case. (Harvard Business Review, 2007) In the early 1970s, Shell’s scenario planners explored an oil supply shock before the 1973 crisis, and the company is widely credited with responding faster than its peers. (Wack, “Scenarios: Uncharted Waters Ahead,” Harvard Business Review, 1985)
Audit the Trunk: Keep What the Future Needs, Drop What It Does Not
The Trunk holds everything you bring to this moment: experience, knowledge, relationships, finances, reputation, and the history that shapes the field ahead. Managing the Trunk is the core discipline of the model.
Once the envelope is drawn, it shows every resource you would need to follow any of the paths. That reveals two things: the resources you need and do not have, and the resources you have and do not need. Then comes the harder question the model asks every leader: is your Trunk made of requirements driven by the model, or of old habits and organizational leftovers?
Most organizations never ask. They carry structures, products and commitments because they exist, not because the future calls for them. Strategy is the moment to unload what is dead weight and invest in what is missing.
McKinsey’s analysis of resource reallocation found that companies that shifted capital most actively returned about 30% more to shareholders than passive ones. (Hall, Lovallo and Musters, McKinsey Quarterly, 2012) Bradley, Hirt and Smit show that a middle-ranked company has roughly a 1 in 12 chance of reaching the top quintile within a decade, and that companies making three or more big moves were more than six times as likely to make that leap. (Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick, 2018)
Keep Options Open Until the Cusp Appears
The aim of Trunk management is to preserve options for as long as possible, before they are eliminated by default. A premature choice among seemingly comparable options is a bet made with the least information you will ever have. Maintaining variety in both opportunities and resources increases the chance that something pops: that a clearly superior strategy emerges from a group of options that looked equal. The model calls these moments of emergence cusp points.
This is Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety applied to strategy. Only variety can absorb variety. And Ashby said it plainly: “Nobody knows what to do against the purely new.” If nobody knows, the answer cannot be imported. It has to emerge, from a deliberate exploration of the options in the envelope, by the people who each hold a piece of the picture.
(Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics, 1956) Teece, Pisano and Shuen showed that durable advantage in fast-changing environments comes from dynamic capabilities: the ability to sense opportunities, seize them and reconfigure resources as conditions shift. (Strategic Management Journal, 1997)
Re-Map Often: Strategy Is a Series of Snapshots, Not a Document
A strategy written once is obsolete on arrival. The model offers a better rhythm. Plot the envelope for as far out as is relevant, then measure your actual path against it, using dashboards, and re-plot the best and worst cases often enough to keep the map current with the landscape. How often depends on the project and the terrain.
Systems rarely follow the most probable path exactly. They oscillate around their goal, correcting and overcorrecting because of lag. Two patterns matter most. The vicious cycle accumulates velocity away from the goal until a system hits the wall. The virtuous cycle is what happens when a system makes an innovative jump above the most probable case and sets itself a new one. In healthy systems, each new position becomes the Trunk of a new envelope, and the successive trajectories take the form of continuous improvement and continuous innovation.
De Geus, drawing on Shell’s experience, argued that the ability to learn faster than competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage. (Harvard Business Review, “Planning as Learning,” 1988)
Build the Map From Within
There are two ways to renew a strategy. The first is to commission one from the large strategy houses. It is costly, and it can be excellent. But it is an excellent strategy for a business like yours, written by a small team on the outside and handed to many on the inside. Implementation then becomes a long exercise in persuasion.
The second is to build the strategy from within. Bring the collective intelligence of the organization into the room, from the executive floor to the frontline, and let the people who will live with the strategy shape it. The result fits, because it is made of the organization’s own knowledge of its customers, its constraints and its possibilities. And it removes the largest line item of implementation: the cost of convincing. People believe in what they help build.
Woolley and colleagues showed that the intelligence of a group is not explained by the average or maximum intelligence of its members. It is predicted by how well members listen to each other and how evenly they share the conversation. (Science, 2010) Norton, Mochon and Ariely demonstrated the “IKEA effect”: people place significantly higher value on what they have helped to build. (Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2012) Kim and Mauborgne found that people commit to decisions, even ones that go against their own interests, when the process is fair: they were engaged in it, they understood the reasoning, and expectations were clear. (Harvard Business Review, “Fair Process,” 1997)
How The Collaboration Principle Supports a Strategy Renewal
This is the work we do. We have designed and facilitated new strategy and strategy update exercises many times, with groups from 20 to 400 people, in organizations of very different sizes, sectors and cultures. We use the Best Case / Worst Case model as the backbone, in four movements:
Stand at the mouth of the Trunk. We establish what you carry into this moment and where you truly stand.
Draw the envelope. We map the Best Case, the Worst Case and the Most Probable Case together, and test whether they bracket the risk and the opportunity.
Manage the Trunk. We identify the resources the future requires, the ones you lack, and the habits and leftovers you can let go.
Navigate. We build the way to gather intelligence, to recognize the cusp, to move toward the Profit Range, and to re-map as conditions change.
We bring the structure, the methods and the facilitation. You bring the intelligence, which is already in your organization. What comes out is a strategy that comes from within, owned by the people who will carry it out.
The control board will not turn green. The space in between is open now, and it is the only space from which you can act. The question is who will fill it, and with what.
If you recognize this in your organization, we would be glad to have a chat with you.
Antoine Viornery — Founder, The Collaboration Principle
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