Peter Compo: The Emergent Approach to Strategy – Episode 174

Content Strategy Insights

Peter Compo Peter Compo says that "the number one thing missing in most strategic plans is a strategy." He's talking about the tendency of executives and managers to draft plans that present lists of goals and include a bullet point for every possible stakeholder in their purview. Peter points out that true strategy involves tough trade-offs and lots of collaboration. His pragmatic approach lets strategic objectives emerge organically, includes a variety of stakeholders, and applies adaptive thinking to address tough questions that have no obvious answer. We talked about: the origins of his book, The Emergent Approach to Strategy: Adaptive Design and Execution how the "number one thing missing in most strategic plans is a strategy" the reasons that real strategy always involves trade-offs and even pain how to help teams and people cope with the pain of inevitable loss the difference between granularizing the goals you're hoping to succeed into a list and formulating a true strategy how to deal with the bottlenecks that impede your path to achieving a strategic goal a fantastic analogy showing how emergent strategy is like solving a jigsaw puzzle that doesn't have a picture on the box top how emergent strategy "has nothing to do with organizational hierarchy" and can come from anywhere in an organization how an emergent-strategy practice facilitates stakeholder alignment the foundation of his work in complex adaptive systems how the concept of adaptation forms the foundation of not only strategy, but also innovation, creativity, and org change how creativity and innovation and making change require a different kind of discipline than we normally apply to business processes Peter's bio Peter Compo is a corporate business veteran, scientist, and musician who spent twenty-five years at E. I. DuPont in diverse leadership positions, including director of corporate integrated business planning. Peter’s broad view of strategy and innovation began developing during his graduate research. In addition to his studies, his musical background led him to recognize common adaptive patterns in science and the arts, the same patterns he then also found in business and technology at DuPont. He left DuPont to work full time on developing a comprehensive theory of strategy and innovation based on complex adaptive systems and incorporate the theory into practice. Peter comes from a multi-generational family of musicians in the New York City metropolitan area, where he was born and raised. He currently lives in Arden, Delaware. Connect with Peter online EmergentApproach.com LinkedIn Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/3fc9WlUlaFU Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 174. If you're aiming to create truly strategic guidance for your business efforts, you'll have to address some painful trade-offs. In his book, The Emergent Approach to Strategy, Peter Compo shares a pragmatic theory of strategy and sets out the skills you'll need to formulate a broadly inclusive and genuinely strategic strategy. I think content and UX strategy nerds will really appreciate his design-minded approach and the book's themes of emergence and adaptation. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 174 of The Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I'm really happy today to welcome to the show, Peter Campo. Peter is a 25-year veteran serving in a variety of leadership roles at DuPont, the big chemical, and they do other stuff too, but the big company, the big enterprise, DuPont. More to the point, and the reason I invited him on the show today is he wrote a book called The Emergent Approach to Strategy: Adaptive Design and Execution. So welcome Peter. Tell the folks a little bit more about your book and how your work led you to write it. Peter: Thanks. Yeah, good to be here.