The problem to solve

Are you intrigued by ceaseless surprises swarming your personal or corporate plans? Working to improve risk management? breaking unexpected news to other people? in need to perplex a pack of competitors with strategy "out of the usual box"?

Managing what we do not yet know.

From early childhood, we hear that surprise happens and how important it is to be prepared. We know that authentic change is newness. We know that newness surprises and unsettles people. It appears that managing change is managing surprise. But who taught us how to manage it? How to anticipate something that is - by definition - sudden? And how to take initiative?

These lines are for people who need to manage surprise.

We call "surprise" an unexpected event, one’s reaction to the situation, and the action of surprising ⁱⁱ . A surprise is a critical situation of danger and opportunity, a unique event that can be decisive. You don’t have a second chance to make a first impression and you don’t get a second run for a surprise.

The consulting model I propose helps to "make surprise simple" and to manage change across the situations of being surprised and surprising other people ⁱⁱⁱ .

In short:

Response to the unexpected is a pattern.

We can improve our surprise behaviour.

There are three useful ways to relate to surprise: prepare against it, prepare for it and prepare it ourselves.

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Let me now develop my argument:

We experience and produce sudden change as a surprise.

Receiving surprise is disorder. Something unusual or that appears at the unusual place and time. Something of unexpected magnitude or nature. Something contrary to our expectations and rules ^iv . Maybe something totally new for us ^v . Suffering surprise is stress, a critical situation, a possible turning point out of our control.

The surprise pattern

When surprise happens (even positive surprise) people react in phases, first instinctively and then rationally:

1. Confusion and alert

The natural process of being surprised makes one vulnerable and inefficient for a while. Groups and whole organisations give similar but much slower and even less accurate responses to the unexpected.

Caught unawares - as we naturally encounter surprise - it is hard to do our best to meet the risk and to seize the opportunities of the new situation. (This is why surprise is the substance of all strategies. Managing surprise is a strategic advantage ^vi . In one way or another all strategies work to prevent, steer or originate unexpected change.)

I am confident that the surprise-process can be optimised. Instead of remaining born victims of surprise we can learn to manage it. We can grow better at controlling change.

How to put your arms around surprise

How to manage something not yet known? Complexity is trouble. We need a rational approach to visualise and handle the unexpected - the things that will come out of the blue sky. I found that we can do this by thinking as if surprises were hypotheses that we can make operational.

To help surprise management I re-value the notion of surprise. From marginal and vague I make it central and practical.

I will explore three intuitive modes to anticipate and to improve this encounter.

As promised, I will claim for a while ^vii that there are only three ways of managing surprise:

preparing against it, preparing for it and preparing it.

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Preparing against surprise

Let us look first at "preparing against surprise". I mean by this doing our best to prevent, block or defuse surprises.

There are several ways to understand and practise this approach:

1. Avoid surprise - keep away from surprise fields. As the old prudent saying goes "Deep in the sea you find riches beyond compare. But if it’s safety you seek, it’s on the shore."

2. Keep surprise away from you by impregnable protections. Make things as solid and unchangeable as possible. The Chinese Wall is the classic image for this.

3. Avoid creating unwanted surprise. I call this the driver approach; on the highway, it may be more important not to surprise other drivers than to keep with the rules. In crowds and complex negotiations, it may be the same.

4. Detect and reduce potential surprise to non-surprise by prudent exploration and analysis, exhaustive forecasting, detailed planning and preventive problem solving to suppress deviation. Turn potential surprise into known contingency. At least diminish the number of possible surprises or their magnitude. I would say that this is the concern of nearly all forecasting and planning.

5. Break your way trough eventual surprise by pre determined and uncompromising responses. Take all the risk and defeat surprise.

This is - it seems - a samurai approach: according to the Bushido, the samurai wakes up in the morning, cleans himself and his sword carefully, dresses his best garment and says, "This is the day when I will die". With these words, all metaphysical hesitation ended for the day. One is ready for the worst. When suddenly attacked, the samurai will "function". He knows in advance what to observe and do promptly. It will be attack by one, two, three or many. It will be with slashing, stabbing, burning, clubbing and so on. It must be frontal, lateral, from behind, downwards, on the low line, waistline, and chest or head level. He does not have to win or survive, just to do the right thing. No surprise, make it or break it promptly with perfect positions, riposte and attack.

Homeostasis - changing to avoid change

Some of this choice is quite familiar. Towards unknown future we attempt to provide against surprise that could interfere with our being and with our actions. We do our best to barricade windows and doors against unwanted change. We prepare best weapons and warm clothes and logical justifications, plan work, battle and contingencies to defend our property, culture and identity. We try to buy insurance and avoid risk. Humans are able to go a great length, even to change in order to avoid change.

This is all wonderfully useful homeostatic activity. Frankly, it is less than navigating the flow of change and much less than leading that flow.

I can not devalue this effort, though. Preparing against surprise is the core of human science and business. It is another wording for understanding the world and planning to succeed. Such understanding belongs to the traditional field of strategy and follows a general model.

Most of the strategic tools - grids, matrixes, diagrams, and maps - are materialising this power of representing complicated and fuzzy things with simple and logical models, so that other people can join and follow action.

SWOT charting, GE and BCG matrixes and all the two-by-two grids, Porter's industry structure analysis or value-chain are all break-through instruments managing to reduce complexity ^viii .

It could appear wrongly though, that planning against surprise is so well managed that there is nothing left to contribute to it with a "surprise" model.

First level surprise curriculum

I was often amazed by the usefulness of taking time with the management of a company to list the "surprises" they knew as inevitable for say, the next six-months. Then we asked everyone: "What do you do to prepare for each of them since you are aware that these things will come sooner or later?" Not much was done, curiously. For various reasons, there is a stealth syndrome I call "waiting to be hit by a slow moving truck" through which such quasi surprises keep being ignored until they hit us unprepared.

We can overcome this paralysis in a rational way. Working out the surprise questions helps the organisation to prepare against the unexpected. Some examples are illustrated by a mind-map used in one of my workshops:

A workshop "preparing against surprise" rises questions that detect or highlight pseudo surprise i.e. "unexpected" (but often imminent or inevitable) events. Priorities and compelling actions result.

To diminish the surprise effect and the resistance to newness, imminent critical situations are simulated and rehearsed until they are mastered.

As a thought experiment, let me ask you, dear reader, are there such imminent surprises hanging over your head?

What do you do to prepare against them?

Preparing for surprise

And what about preparing for surprise?

No anticipations of the world can protect us from being surprised now and then and even very often. There is a perception at this turn of millennium, of accelerated change and unforeseen developments becoming the rule rather than the exception. Supposing that is the case, we need to improve our surprise fitness, the readiness and the competence to deal with all kinds of sudden encounters best described as surprises in general.

Preparing for surprise consists in increasing the readiness to meet the unexpected in general, to make sense of it fast, and deal with it optimally. Someone prepared for surprise will be less unsettled, with a better chance to seize opportunity and face threat.

Preparing for surprise starts with understanding that there is something similar in a multitude of unique surprises. Preparation is an attitude of actively expecting surprises, being mentally and organisationally ready, open to them and, most important, being trained to do our best in a state of surprise.

Some people appear naturally gifted to live surprise. They adapt and improvise, eager to see the benefits and opportunities rather than the threat and use events with protean art while "going seamlessly with the flow". This is a mental attitude of lightness, as some Taoist thinkers and strategists practise it.

You will probably ask; how to do that rationally? How can one learn lightness? How could a big corporation ever learn lightness? I will give some short examples, from my own practice, of what can be done to design and apply a strategy of surprise readiness. A possible start is to ask some useful questions:

There are several ways to understand, learn and practice the preparation for surprise:

1. Recognise the fact that disorder exists and surprise is inevitable, not an accident. Study and understand the common anatomy shared by many surprises. Our surprises tend to follow patterns (because they are our own reactions) and come in recognisable forms. There are signals to detect them. Our response to surprise is predictable. It can improve or worsen the situation.

Surprise readiness

2. Adopt a mental attitude and an organisational culture of preparedness to meet surprise "normally" as part of continuous change. It may be useful to alert the organisation from time to time. Becoming tense, alert, "ready to jump" is the simplest degree of preparedness, close to "preparing against surprise". At the other end of the scale, your organisation forms a habit to use surprises to learn and to grow. It actively seeks, rehearses and delights surprise - with curiosity, a taste for new experiences, diversity of people, new opportunities and challenges even adventure.

Learn to learn

3. Improve the practices through which you detect unexpected change, learn from it, respond and manage it.

Excessive centralisation and formal problem solving procedures inhibit the early detection of unexpected change and the flexible response to it.

To be better at assimilating all kinds of surprise individuals and groups must learn how to learn. (As opposed to waiting to be taught). Organisations need methods to learn from "other people's experiences" or at least from their own experience.

Learn to forget

4. Preparing for surprise also consists in deliberate unlearning, cultivating a habit to discard and forget fast what worked yesterday when it suddenly stops working.

For an example how quickly are you able to change your accepted corporate strategies?

I know that "unlearning" sounds paradoxical or wishful, because we never learned in school, even to conceive such a thing. But it can be done and I have some practical experience with doing it and with helping other people to purposefully "forget". To prepare for surprise we can for an example work out planning principles to make rules, regulations and practices obsolete in due time or under defined conditions. Such a surprising procedure can be introduced even in a rigid bureaucracy.

5. Make certain that you will be organised to have available all your personal and organisational means, when confronted with unexpected change. Take the measures to grow and co-ordinate flexibility, mobility and the ability to acquire and discard knowledge, the strategies and habits to fit the pace of change. Surprise fitness grows with good team climate, flexible co-ordination, and open communication.

Travelling light

6. In business (and life) terms, preparing for surprise means also travelling light, with lean belongings and adaptable people, with low break even, minimal sunk costs and low exit barriers. Having less to loose is a strong preparation for surprise.

7. Reformulate corporate (and personal) strategy and planning with the specific purpose of resilience to permanent change.

The strategic plan to stay afloat

"Preparing for surprise" is a powerful paradigm to plan courses of action and response, opposed to rigid forecasting and planning. I like to interpret a phrase from the Hagakure - a book of the samurai - as an essential metaphor to prepare for continuous unexpected change. The Hagakure says, "When the water rises so does the boat".

The second level of surprise curriculum

8. Set up a "surprise curriculum" ^ix . As a part of it, practice (role-play) surprise to become accustomed with it. Train the mind and the skill of behaving optimally in critical situations.

A classical Zen story illustrates this sort of education: The son of a thief saw his father growing older and decided to start helping him. "If you become too old, I will have to be the breadwinner of the family. Teach me to steal, if you please." The old thief took him the same night to rob a rich house. The thief cut a hole in the fence and they tiptoed into the house. The thief opened a large chest and pointed his son to go inside and look for jewels. As soon as the young man got in, the thief shut the lid, locked it, and left throwing a stone in the courtyard to wake up the family while he quietly slipped away through the fence. The people of the house lighted candles but found nothing. The son froze frightened, confined in the chest. After a while, as his heartbeat decreased but his despair grew he had an idea. He scratched the wood to imitate the gnawing of a mouse. The family told a maid to take a candle and look into the chest. Once the lid unlocked the captive leaped out, blew out the light and fled. Everybody caught arms and ran after him. The boy ran for his life. Through the bushes, the party was getting closer. Then he saw a well. He threw in a boulder and hid in the thicket. As his hunters lost time to fish out his drowned body the boy crawled away and got safely to his house. His father looked at him with curiosity and asked him how he got off. "Why did you act so cruelly?" reproached the son. "Well my son, isn’t this what you wanted? Here you are, now you learned the art of burglary."

Preparing people for surprise is above all education by discovery, through safe experiencing. With role playing methods, I help people to discover what they tend to do when they are surprised. We find together what to do to respond optimally to some "typical" surprise situations. We develop a style and a repertory of means to diminish the risk known to come in most forms of surprise. We prepare to use the opportunities that are usually lost when surprised.

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Preparing the surprise

All we considered until now was surprise given, coming upon us. It is suddenly compelling to ask: -Why not create the surprise ourselves? Some surprises may be given to us but we can also create some. The question is then how to increase our ability to create unexpected situations and ideas?

We can surprise our competitors to overtake them and we should surprise ourselves to grow.

1. The simple way to surprise someone is to appear where we are not supposed to be and to do unexpected things.

2. The radical way to surprise is to break seemingly unshakeable rules and to make new ones.

Reframing

3. The inventor's recipe to surprise is to create new frames of reference. Authentic surprise is produced by new meaning, new points of view, new definitions of what is and what doesn't exist, what things are, what is possible and what impossible. The new frames of reference confuse adversaries completely or, better, create new territory and value leaving all competition way behind.

Let me illustrate inventive surprise by one of P. Watzalawick's reframing anecdotes:

A king, visiting one of his villages, noticed a man in the crowd who bore a striking resemblance to his own exalted person. He beckoned to him and asked: "Was your mother at one time in service at the Palace?" "No, your Majesty," was the reply, "but my father was."

This third approach to preparing surprise invents forms and casts them upon reality or removes forms to create new space like in the story of Yu the Chinese governor.

Some three thousand years ago under the Shun dynasty torrential rain ravaged the Central Plain every year. The king appointed an official named Gun to govern and remedy the disaster. Gun ordered the building of dikes to stop water on all banks and valleys. For one whole year, Gun made the whole population work to the limit of exhaustion. The floods were worse than ever and Gun was beheaded according to local best practice. His son Yu was sent to replace him. Yu ordered everything that could ever stop water to be removed under the penalty of death. He had dikes removed and mountain sides opened up at the edge of the plateau to let the rivers flow free. The cataclysm was subdued. Yu was later to become king.

Casting new patterns

I would like to represent the strategic invention of surprise as the unfettered creation of patterns to reconfigure reality. In other words, "giving new form to known facts" as opposed to "adding more facts to known forms".

In another old Taoist story, a man asked a famous artist: "Master, how can you turn a block of stone into a dragon? It's easy, replied the sculptor, I chisel out of the boulder everything that is not dragon, and there I am"

Some invention is a sculptor’s approach - carving out of a formless mass of facts the pattern you conceived in your mind.

The inevitable question is; How can we do such a wonderful thing? How can one increase the ability of strategic discovery and invention in normal individuals and teams?

The third level of surprise curriculum

One solution is to use reframing techniques. We can invent sizeable surprise rationally by declaring war to the unknown, the impossible and the obvious. This is done by means of finding the limits of what we know and can, and gaining an intuition of what we do not know and of what we find impossible. By detecting the axioms that set our certain boundaries and systematically trespassing those boundaries. By breaking and making rules ^x .

Alexander the Great provides two traditional examples of such reframing exemplary for their logical nerve rather than for their wilfulness:

For his conquest of Asia, he needed an auspicious prophecy from Delphi. Arriving at the wrong time he was told by the Pythia that Apollo was not available that day. He dragged the seeress by her hair to the tripod shouting that for him there was always time. The frightened Pythia exclaimed, no doubt to appease him: "You are invincible my son!" To this Alexander said: "O, voice of Apollo, this is the prophecy I needed!", taking the words for the message of the god as it suited him.

At Gordium, Alexander was confronted with the legendary phrigian Knot, said to be undone only by the one who would conquer Asia. Countless minds were known to have unsuccessfully tackled that entangled maze. Alexander quickly and brutally reinterpreted the task and simply chopped the knot. He was certainly not shy to reinterpret things.

Barbarians at the gates of logic

This path is a sort of logical guerrilla. Doing new things in new ways requires some kind of intellectual barbarism to disturb the endless replication of past successes, received ideas and analytical rituals. I think that educating this candid indiscipline meets our urgent need to do better in a fast changing world.

The practical answer to this difficult challenge is in my opinion a technique of reframing.

Creative surprise-strategy sessions favour this state of mind needed to find things that surprise us and to turn some impossible things possible.

Questions to start preparing surprise

The process of taking strategy out-of-the-box requires concepts, coaching and "homework" not described here. I will illustrate the beginning of the effort, as I did previously, with questions:

Mind opening questions require divergent thought to follow up. The challenge is to make divergent thought rational and feasible in a corporate environment.

The "frontier" approach.

A voyage of a thousand miles starts with a first step. I suggest a "frontier" approach to start it. To reach the unknown and the impossible we need first to come upon their borderline, the limit of our strategic box.

Where starts the unknown? Where the known ends. So, I ask people to describe the limit between what they know and the contiguous territories they consider unknown.

Detect the unknown and impossible

Where does the impossible start? Where the possible and the necessary ends. Therefore, I ask people to word what things must happen on one hand and what things are desirable but unfortunately impossible on the other hand. I also ask them to formulate why it is so.

With this, we can establish a frontier. The next step will be to trespass the frontier.

Trespass

It is easy to understand that we can trespass into the unknown by investigating it ourselves or by learning about it from outsiders, present and past. (I grew convinced that often the fresh idea comes from the far off past or from making distant ends meet.)

Doing the impossible is a little bit more complicated. However, it helps quite often to ask steadily: impossible for whom? Impossible where? When? With what kind of means?

The answer could hide in broad daylight, on top of a higher and larger outlook.

More subtle is to investigate what makes something impossible. At times, an idea appears to be impossible because of some habit or taboo we carry in our own mind. It may be called impossible just because it was not done before or because it looks ridiculous.

The challenge of the obvious

If nothing works in exploring exotic lands of the unknown and the impossible, then it is time to challenge the obvious and examine the ground under our own feet - the axioms we never question.

The use of paradox to shake the obvious

The difficulty is to make us see the glasses we look through and even the eyes with which we look. There is one good way to make axioms visible. It is paradox. We need to create discovery situations where people find themselves in contradiction, blocked by their own correct thinking. "The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground". Confronted with paradox, people suddenly sense the limits of their own mind. To transcend paradox we are forced to radically examine our beliefs and to rise to a higher view.

Submitted to paradox people sense that some clear and stable limits of the obvious are far from being unshakeable. It is an emotional experience to suddenly figure that all we know is a small island, that our certainties are as many anchors chaining us to it. It is even more difficult to bear the insight that beyond our horizon is infinity. Understanding this obliges people to see unexpected implications.

A wider frame

There is a lot of space in infinity. Other laws and solutions must wait in an endless raw. If that is so, and if we can bear the feeling, there is good reason for optimism. It is worth to make an effort and think bold.

Result: new choices

This is the right time to invent some surprises, creative or competitive, as appropriate, suspending for a while the inhibition of what is possible.

After idea generation in an appropriate climate we need of course to revisit facts and look at feasibility. Analysis closes the circle and preparing surprise becomes rational planning to prevent unwanted surprise.

I must say that we do not need to always reinvent the whole world to produce surprise. An open mind discovers many surprisingly simple ways of being where we are not expected to be and doing things unanticipated by competitors.

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Conclusion

Surprise, this elusive thing, can be part of our plans. Strategy of surprise is a way to complete hard headed planning with a touch of inventiveness and flexibility.

Surprise management avoids costly loss in the same way good locks, alarm systems and swift intervention services do. Managed surprise readiness will cope faster and more adequately when it comes to the inevitable but slippery encounter with the unexpected. Creating surprise is a source of competitive advantage. It is an instrument of change management and innovation.

Stages of excellence in managing surprise

Where is your own, personal and corporate skill to manage the unexpected? The practice of the surprise strategies can be evaluated as stages of excellence in managing change.

Preparing against, for and the surprise can be represented as a ladder with stages of excellence effective in increasingly complex conditions.

Roughly speaking we could differentiate four such stages:

Danger zone!

UNPREPARED, an individual or a corporation can perform in controlled environments. As reality is obviously moving, business at this level is an imminent victim of surprise produced by competition or by unexpected evolution.

Old things in old conditions

PREPARING AGAINST SURPRISE provides optimal performance of known activities in known conditions. It is the mandatory, basic level of responsive defence.

In this stage, you may succeed to slow down unwanted newness but you have no competitive advantage in a changing environment.

Exclusive preparation against surprise leads to stagnation as competitors move further and further ahead while you react to their actions and threats.

Basic wisdom in new conditions

PREPARING FOR SURPRISE diminishes your vulnerability and leads to holding your own by being able to match your competitors' actions accidents and unforeseen developments with seamless response. You will do your best.

This is an effective survival attitude with a bonus of temporary competitive advantage.

New things in new conditions

PREPARING THE SURPRISE

Capability to create surprise leads to sustainable advantage. Your competitors are wrong footed and fall behind while you create new territory and new value.

i THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN' Ó Words and Music by Bob Dylan 1963, 1968 Warner Bros. Inc Renewed 1991 Special Rider Music

ii Surprise for the surprisers is what they do to take people unawares. It may be done in order to attract attention or to delight, but most of the time the purpose is to gain initiative and advantage.

Pascale, R. T., Athos, A. G., "The Art of Japanese Management", Penguin, London, 1986

Whipp, R. "Creative Deconstruction: Strategy and Organizations" in Clegg, S.R. Hardy, C. Nord, W. R., ORGANIZATION STUDIES, Sage, London, 1996