Beyond Control: Cultivating Informed Aspiration Through Integrated Strategy and Risk
How values-guided autonomy replaces command-and-control in adaptive organisations
The industrial era's greatest fiction was the belief that organisations could be controlled like machines—that strategy could be executed through precise commands, risk could be eliminated through comprehensive planning, and culture could be managed through policies and procedures. This mechanistic worldview created elaborate control systems that promised predictability in exchange for autonomy.
But complexity has revealed the fundamental limitations of control-based models. Like attempts to engineer natural ecosystems through excessive intervention, organisational control systems often produce the opposite of their intended effects: decreased adaptability, suppressed innovation, and cultures of compliance that mistake following rules for achieving purpose.
The emerging alternative isn't chaos, but rather what we might call "informed aspiration"—organisational systems that integrate strategy and risk to create frameworks for autonomous decision-making guided by clear values and deep understanding of consequences. This represents a fundamental shift from control to cultivation.
Decomposition of Control Models
The classic business school teaching tells us that the bigger an organisation gets, the greater its need for control measures, as the ability of individual leaders to directly influence staff behaviour erodes. But traditional control models are experiencing a systemic breakdown; command-and-control organisations are discovering that their apparent efficiency was actually brittleness in disguise.
The symptoms are familiar: endless approval cycles that slow decision-making to the point of irrelevance, risk management systems that create more risk through delayed responses and myopic assessment, and strategic planning processes that produce documents rather than direction and adaptability. These systems create what organisational theorists call "learned helplessness"—environments where people become skilled at following procedures but lose the capacity for independent judgment.
The breakdown accelerates under conditions of uncertainty and rapid change. Control systems become actively counterproductive when conditions shift faster than centralised systems can process information and adjust responses.
Integration of Strategy and Risk
In healthy forests, root systems and soil networks create sophisticated information-sharing systems that allow individual trees to make intelligent decisions about resource allocation based on both local conditions and network-wide intelligence. Trees don't wait for centralised commands about how to respond to drought, disease, or nutrient availability—they integrate information from multiple sources and adapt their behavior accordingly, still within the context of group membership (no selfish opportunists here).
This provides a powerful model for integrating strategy and risk in organisational contexts. Rather than treating strategy and risk as separate functions that occasionally coordinate, adaptive organisations create living integration—mutually reinforcing processes that enable every decision-maker to understand both strategic intent and risk implications in real-time, with localised and systemic clarity.
This means that strategic context and risk intelligence become embedded in the decision-making environment rather than applied as external constraints. Instead of risk management systems that say "no", integrated approaches help decision-makers pursue ambitious goals aligned to the organisation’s strategy and risk appetite.
Values as Decision-making Attractors
In natural systems, what appears to be random behaviour often reveals underlying patterns when observed over time. Individual organisms make countless micro-decisions, but these decisions tend to cluster around what complexity scientists call "attractors"—stable patterns that emerge from the interaction of multiple forces.
Organisational values, when properly cultivated, function as ‘attractors’ for decision-making. They don't dictate specific choices, but they create gravitational fields that influence how people interpret situations and select responses. This allows for diversity in tactics while maintaining coherence in direction.
The key distinction is between values as compliance requirements versus values as decision-making strata. Compliance-based approaches treat values as rules to be followed, creating the same rigidity problems as other control systems. Ecological approaches treat values as living principles that inform judgment in novel situations.
Values-guided decision-making requires what we might call "principled improvisation"—the capacity to respond creatively to unexpected situations while maintaining alignment with deeper purposes. This demands not just clarity about what the organisation stands for, but sophisticated understanding of how those principles apply in complex, ambiguous circumstances.
The Emergence of Autonomous Advocates
Traditional organisational models created two primary roles: those who make decisions and those who implement them. This division assumed that decision-making required special expertise or authority, while implementation required compliance and execution skills. But complexity reveals the fallacy of this distinction.
In adaptive environments, everyone becomes "autonomous advocates"—individuals who understand organisational purpose deeply enough to make independent decisions that advance collective goals. These aren't loose cannons operating without regard for others, but rather sophisticated networked intelligence that can coordinate emergent responses to complex challenges.
Autonomous advocates develop "requisite variety"—sufficient internal complexity to match the complexity of their environment. They understand not just their specific roles, but how their functions connect to larger organisational purposes and how their decisions impact other parts of the system. In practice, this looks like contextualised, place-based approaches that hold a cohesive narrative and advance collective goals. It requires education, empowerment, trust and accountability. Instead of constraining decision-making to minimise errors, we build error-recovery and learning capabilities that allow for experimentation and adaptation.
Cultivating the Conditions for Success
Creating cultures of informed aspiration requires specific cultivation practices that develop both individual capability and collective intelligence.
Context Broadcasting: Instead of information hoarding that maintains power hierarchies, adaptive organisations develop "context broadcasting"—systematic sharing of strategic context, risk intelligence, and environmental sensing in integrated parcels that model integrated thinking. This creates the shared situational awareness that enables distributed decision-making.
Scenario Fluency: Rather than trying to predict specific futures, organisations can develop collective resilience to disruption and fluency with selected likely scenarios and their implications. This creates adaptive capacity that can respond effectively, recovering from disruption and capitalising on opportunities.
Values Integration Practices: Moving beyond values statements to create regular practices that help people understand how principles apply in specific situations. This might include story telling, lessons learned workshops, and/or structured reflection on how values guide decision-making in ambiguous circumstances.
Rapid Feedback Systems: Like biological systems that rely on constant feedback loops for adaptation, organisations need mechanisms for quickly sensing the results of distributed decisions and adjusting approaches accordingly - at system and local levels.