Frederick W. Taylor worked hard to understand the processes he was seeking to make more efficient. His idea was that unless they were well understood he could not program them well. His objective in programming these processes was to make them more efficient. He knew that people tend to modify the process in a way that makes sense to them. But he wanted the processes to be doing what they were for and assumed that the people involved would use their creativity to divert the process from what he had understood as the best practice. That is why he was trying to set them up in such a way that there no space would be left for creativity.

Following the ideas Frederick Taylor once established, others sought to transpose his ideal of efficiency into other areas. Where Taylor was dealing with manual processes, others believed they could apply his learning to the area of intellectual work.

What they didn’t realize was that what they had set out to do also involved understanding the process. That is, to understand how people develop and act on a strategy. Consequently, they didn’t pay attention to the differences between strategic planning, strategic thinking, and strategy making. They either believed that they were all of the same, or that they could separate them without harm.

What they left out of the picture was that humans think to act as well as act to think. They missed that the very nature of learning what the strategy can be requires one to remain involved in the doing.

This isn’t an invitation to let go of planning, but it is a reminder that planning cannot be all there is to successfully implement an idea. Without the desire to connect with the action and learn from it, plans are doomed to fail. That’s because the disconnect also leads to a loss of commitment and an inability to visualize the strategy.