Abstract
Since supplanting the older term “corporate policy” in the 1960s, strategy has come to represent a field of research in its own right, essentially focused on how organisations can establish a decisive and sustainable competitive advantage. And while there has been some talk among contemporary researchers about opening up the field of strategy to more participatory practices (Belmondo & Sargis-Roussel, 2023), it nonetheless remains largely the preserve of specialists and experts who pride themselves on constantly “rearming” organisations in the face of uncertainty. The military analogy should come as no surprise, since stratos is the ancient Greek word for the army, a domain from which strategy has never really managed to break free. Is it not high time that we took a fresh look at the very question of strategy (Dobusch, Dobusch, & Müller-Seitz, 2019)? However, as far back as 1964, Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb already offered a clear warning as to the inherent limitations of martial approaches to such matters: once the doomsday device has been set in motion, it is already too late to philosophise over questions of strategy. Mutually assured destruction (or MAD, fittingly) is perhaps the nec plus ultra of military strategy, a combination of warmongering spirit and benevolent cooperation designed to make the apocalypse impossible or else, in the case of Kubrick’s film, to pave the way for the total destruction of the world. In this case, strategy understood as the art of preparing military defences and coordinating the actions of one’s forces results in failure. Indeed strategy fails on two fronts: as a system, and as a principle. Even the perfect dissuasive strategy cannot guarantee an end to conventional warfare; it simply intensifies the risks involved.
Does this nuclear reality not have some profound implications for the managerial predicament? In other words, shouldn’t the atomic threat hanging over the destiny of humanity inspire us to ask some probing questions about the workings of our organisations, shaped as they have been by the earliest developments in cybernetics? To be even more precise: would we not do better to apply these questions to the context of economic warfare, wherein strategy has ascended to the same anonymous, omnipresent (omniscient, some would have it) status with the same doleful consequences, whether or not we realise it?
Considering these questions inexorably leads us to ask some more wide-ranging questions about the very meaning of strategy. And this is precisely the intention of Robin Holt and Mike Zundel, in an essay that is sure to cause a certain amount of astonishment. They set out to reexamine the tools and purpose of strategic thought, arguing that in its current state, it is preventing us from investigating the meaning – triply defined as the direction, sensation, and signification – of our contemporary organisations. Railing against a “world which arrives already mediated into neat configurations ready to be counted, weighed and measured” (p. 188), they propose an entirely different method and a completely different relationship to the world and its component elements. They offer a vision of organisations no longer obsessed with controlling everything, engaged instead in a quest for authenticity, a form of perspectivism made possible by the emergence of new questions and new possibilities that remain unexplored – because they have not yet been noticed – by “strategists.” The authors thus contrast the “map” of strategy, where reality is represented by a series of more or less approximate images, or in categories designed for the instrumental tasks of weighing and counting, with its real “territory,” in some respects the “thing in itself,” the element of strategy that cannot be calculated, measured, or quantified.
Overcoming the Usual Poverty of Our Definitions
Let us make it clear from the outset that the territory that Holt and Zundel propose to unlock is one where strategists generally fear to tread. The contemporary strategic systems with which they are more comfortable, based primarily on the automated manipulation of digital data, by and large fail to take account of Cicero’s subtle distinction between facts-of-the-past (facta) and facts-yet-to-come (futura). As such, our possible futures are ranked on the basis of what has gone before, whether we are calculating insurance premiums or predicting consumer behaviour, to such an extent that we are incapable of imagining a genuine event, let alone a new fork in the road. The past tells us about the past, offering nothing more than a projection of itself. In these conditions, to return for a moment to the Kubrickian illustration, we may as well stop worrying and learn to love the bomb indeed, since it appears to be the only future available to us. Or perhaps the only future that the doomsday device seems to have in mind for us. Life is thus programmed to disappear from the universe twice: once before the bomb goes off and once more when the world has been reduced to smouldering ruins. Here strategy has achieved nothing apart from hastening the arrival of the unthinkable, the very thing it was supposed to avoid. One could be forgiven for thinking that we were somehow incapable of seeing beyond this definition of strategy, inhibited by a form of reasoning which Jean-Pierre Dupuy (2019, p. 139) has likened to “the absurd story about the man who was in the habit of throwing elephant repellent powder out of the window of his train carriage. To him, the fact that he never encountered a pachyderm on the line was proof enough of the efficacy of this method.”
In an attempt to tackle the shortcomings of such definitions, Robin Holt and Mike Zundel draw upon sources from a remarkably diverse array of disciplines, not least among which are mathematics, art, and philosophy, to propose a model of strategy in three parts, which also form the three main sections of the book, centred upon the concepts of authenticity, technology, and “the Open.” “Who am I?” and “What is it?” are two of the simplest questions imaginable, but also two of the most transgressive when it comes to a field of knowledge that is supposedly firmly established. It is these two questions which provide the point of departure for the authors’ singular exploration, an approach that they describe, in typically ironic style, as “elliptical” (p. 363). In fact, what they offer are 375 pages, remarkable for their density of ideas and references. The supposed naïveté of the questions merely serves to highlight the gravity of their consequences, analysed here in a manner that is politically sober – the spectre of Hannah Arendt looms over proceedings – but nonetheless radical, and indeed postcritical (Deslandes, 2023).
Re-examining strategy as a question of authenticity and raison d’être is undoubtedly a “radical” way of approaching the issue, a tabula rasa levelled at the very roots of the question, without theoretical prerequisites, hidden injunctions, or predetermined limits. It is to this task that the authors devote the first section of their book, namely, to enabling an interpretation of what strategy might be without immediately encasing it in a rigid, unmoving definition, girt round by injunctions that preclude any attempts at innovation: the idea that there is no alternative. In this case technological sequencing reigns supreme, anything deemed unusual is by the same stroke ruled impossible, and “organised reality” is nothing more than the ingenious, and never entirely completed, accumulation of supposedly rational instruments. Indeed, the authors argue that action is nothing more or less than the locus at which the self is constructed and divulged, in a process that is perpetually renewed in response to events (or “known unknowns,” a list of which on p. 44 includes “market collapse, nervous disorders, computer and biological viruses”). For ultimately, even the extremely probable is essentially unpredictable. And yet, our strategic intelligence is now largely founded upon an ever-growing number of forecasting systems that imagine themselves to be capable of offering predictions! The result is a diminishing world, particularly in the economic sphere, restricting our capacity for action (in the strongest sense of that word) and initiative, forbidding us to even question the validity of the strategy.
In strategy, only an “experience of altering” (p. 47) and its perpetual renewal can guarantee the authenticity of a quest, as opposed to the supposed control over the future imposed by technē. The authors illustrate the ever-tightening grip of the machines over our processes of production – to the extent that no human is required to “grip” anything anymore – by means of a dramatic interpretation of Jean-François Millet’s painting The Gleaners. This work captures a moment – the painting dates back to 1857 – just before the mechanical might of the machines quite literally steamrollered the old ways into obsolescence. Even in this painting, the spectre of the machines can be detected, despite the apparent absence of tools. This steamrollering would soon usher the humble worker into a network of machines. And a system of surveillance, of course. That network has continued to grow to this day, transforming technē into technology in a process which reached its apogee with the advent of cybernetics, that first emerged in the United States in the 1940s and which Heidegger himself believed might represent the death knell of Western metaphysics (Rappin, 2015). The results are still present within strategic systems in the form of “feedback,” “corrective action plans,” coding and “build-measure-learn” loops, put in place to minimise life’s variabilities at all costs and to do away with any residual differences between living beings and machines. In the process, all emotional consciousness is swept away in the flow of information. We as humans are deprived of all opportunity for wonder, wisdom, or play, so that the pristine dominance of technological mediation in the organisation of people and things, defined here as “technogenesis,” might continue unimpeded.
Resisting the Gestell
The final section of the book is a rallying call to resist this “enframing” (Gestell), this “world of capture without the possibility for rapture” (p. 321) ushered in by our predictive, supposedly strategic systems. To avoid a future in which the human individual is simply a “shadow on a wall” (p. 277) or “an unavoidable appendix to the machine, as the weakest link or bottleneck” (p. 235), we must rethink the conditions that make our collective individuation possible, starting by revising our accepted notions of strategic reasoning in order to finally allow for the creation of something new and independent of all causes. What is needed is not a science of objects but rather a certain attitude of opposition towards immediate organisational imperatives, leaving room for open questions, nurturing the possibility of situation potential, maintaining contact with the culture at large.
We might nevertheless be tempted to suggest that this quest for authenticity on which Holt and Zundel embark, the “thing” that strategy prevents us from grasping, has a corporeal dimension that is rather absent from their analyses. Indeed, what is really missing from strategy – a domain in which we are asked to place our faith in that which the science of probabilities has deemed to be “certain” and where, to borrow the terms employed by a critic of Heidegger, “anything can take the place of anything else, individuals becoming as interchangeable as things” (Henry, 2000, p. 315) – is “living labour.” By that, I mean the productive force of the living individual, embodied in the “flesh,” which is in itself a necessary condition (Deslandes, 2023; Henry, 2000). And yet, in the realm of strategy, fixated as it is on objectivity and depersonalisation, the flesh is conspicuous by its absence.
The authors do in fact come close to recognising this absence when they discuss the spirit of “conformity” (p. 200) as well as the indifference of connected networks towards the real people they replace (p. 11). And again, when they describe a world “burdened with busyness and fact, so much so that those who labour bend their heads so low they can no longer see how, in striving to fireproof the world, they make it more combustible, and in the process squander life” (p. 91). The absence of such life, the progressive elimination of living subjectivity by the automated technical processes that strategic thought has foisted upon us, is, in my view, the real crux of Holt and Zundel’s message, the lesson that emerges from the exploratory dialogue they establish between the humanities and this particular field of knowledge.
Or perhaps another reading might be more apt; what the authors are inviting us to undertake is more like an exercise in daemonology. Combating the poverty of our modern world would thus be a matter of listening to our inner voice, that Other which speaks within us. It is the Other who holds the key to social life, and thus the potential for (strategic) imagination, that always arises from a form of splitting-of-the-self, a contradiction which forever sets us apart from the machines. What those infernal machines lack is an inner monologue, a voice capable of prompting a change of trajectory in order to avert the coming catastrophe. Within ourselves, on the other hand, the daemon is still in fine voice. It may sing to us of our poverty in its most manifest forms, but also, perhaps, of the authentic riches we are yet to explore.