AGLN Blog

Charles Conn is a 2001 Henry Crown Fellow. He is co-founder of Monograph, a life sciences venture firm, and chair of Patagonia. Charles co-authored best-selling Bulletproof Problem Solving, and newly released The Imperfectionists: Strategic Mindsets for Uncertain Times (Wiley 2023).

---

Our Operating Context

We live in a different world than the one in which most of us learned how to develop strategies. We all feel it: change has been accelerating, with greater uncertainty and threat of disruption in every segment. Artificial intelligence, programmable biology, robotics and other technologies are transforming existing fields and blurring old boundaries. External shocks, from pandemics to disruptive technologies, cut across borders and impact all organizations, even those that appear to enjoy structural advantages.

I co-wrote The Imperfectionists to encourage both companies and non-profits to rethink how they solve strategic problems in fluid, fast changing times. The original impetus to write both this book and the previous one came out of my Henry Crown Fellowship venture, which was doing large scale problem solving around environmental problems, including the wild pacific salmon initiative that ultimately became a decade-long role for me with the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation. Working on global scale problems, with lots of external shocks and many sources of uncertainty, required different approaches from the world that I came from, and led to the research behind these books.

In this volatile environment, established structure-conduct approaches to company strategy development don’t work very well. There is no stable structure or new market equilibrium to return to when change abates. More than ever, the player to topple a current dominant company in a particular space is likely to enter from outside with a de novo approach than to be an existing rival. Just look at the battle of Instagram, Quibi, and TikTok in the short-form video social media space—the now dominant player was unknown five years ago. All this is even more true in conservation and other nonprofit spaces. We need dynamic and responsive strategic approaches to match external uncertainty to be successful.

One repercussion of this changed environment is that most company and nonprofit strategic planning processes are floundering; management teams are stuck in a nervous wait-and-see posture as volatility rolls through. Other leaders avoid stasis by making panicky bets, including ‘leap before you look’ acquisitions, typically with scant success. Think of Time Warner’s purchase of AOL, or more recent escapades at Twitter.

How Embracing “Imperfectionism” Help Us Lead Through Uncertainty

The Imperfectionists puts forward a dynamic approach to developing organizational direction under uncertainty based on harnessing six reinforcing strategic mindsets:

1. Curiosity
2. Dragonfly Eye
3. Occurrent behavior
4. Collective wisdom
5. Imperfectionism
6. Show and tell

Imperfectionists are deeply curious, they look at problems from several perspectives, gather new data via experimentation, and source new approaches from outside their current space. They deliberately step into risk, proceeding through trial and error, utilizing nimble low consequence and reversible moves to deepen their understanding of the unfolding game being played, and to build capabilities. They accept ambiguity and some apparent failures in exchange for improved learning and market position. Imperfectionists succeed with fluid, real time strategic problem solving, carefully moving forward while others wait for certainty…or make impetuous bets.

The book is based on a decade of research and fifty new case studies, with examples drawn from both nonprofits and companies. These include Amazon’s entry into consumer financial services, and The Nature Conservancy’s use of crowd sourced artificial intelligence algorithms to crack the problem of detecting capture of endangered fish species aboard vessels at sea. It has been endorsed by Daniel Kahneman, Jennifer Morris from TNC, Professor Richard Rumelt and Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard.

I would like to think the six strategic problem-solving mindsets that we collectively call imperfectionism are strong medicine for solving tough problems in uncertain times. They will help leaders fight stasis and decision biases, and give them the right knowledge to develop informed strategies.