Crafting Strategy

Critical Analysis

In this text, Mintzberg argues that business strategy is analogous to craftsmanship of art production: that developing a business strategy bears resemblance to manipulating clay.

The argument of this metaphor is inconsistently established. He describes that as a potter “sits before a lump of clay on the wheel her mind is on the clay, but she is also aware of sitting between her past experiences and her future prospects. She knows exactly what has and has not worked for her in the past. She has an intimate knowledge of her work, her capabilities, and her markets” (66). He has painted a picture of a ceramicist as one who is hyper-aware of the externalities of art, which runs counter to the majority of theories of flow—the state where these externalities disappear. Yet he correctly describes that craft demands a “feeling of intimacy and harmony with the materials at hand” (66), recognizing that the relationship an artist has with their material is highly personal, and the relationship during making largely rejects cognitive awareness of context.

He argues a peculiar perspective of the nature of craft engagement, claiming that a majority of art is established through emergent trial and error. Yet this rejects the true tacit connection between hands and artist; an expert craftsperson, by definition, is able to manipulate material with a high degree of purposeful proficiency.

What Mintzberg does correctly observe about ceramics, however, is the nature of repetition leading to expertise and patterning. He recognizes that purposeful form-making occurs “eventually, after days or months or years” (69). This observation offers a meaningful connection between craft and business strategy: the development of tacit knowledge comes through repetition and intimate engagement with material, and a purposeful commitment to an approach over this elongated process. He argues that there are potters who “seize on the perfection of a single theme and never change… and then there are those who are always changing, who flit from one idea to another and never settle down. Because no theme or strategy ever emerges in their work, they cannot exploit or even develop any distinctive competence” (72-73). There is a “just right” feeling to strategic development and execution, and if the metaphor between clay and business strategy holds up, it is because of the need for intimacy with material to emerge slowly and over time, so that the intimate knowledge can be “aimed,” over time, in different directions.

While unstated, Mintzberg hints at what the material of an emergent strategy is: a business, in action. He describes a business owner visiting their own stores each weekend as a person developing tacit knowledge of business operations. This knowledge is “not intellectual knowledge, nor analytical reports or abstracted facts and figures… but personal knowledge, intimate understanding, equivalent to the craftsman’s feel for the clay. Facts are available to anyone; this kind of knowledge is not” (74). This is described as a form of peripheral vision, a feeling at the edge of perception that shapes a form of knowing about a business.

A ceramicist has an intimacy with the material of clay, and leverages that, intuitively, during the production of a form. A business strategist has an intimacy with the material of the business in action, and leverages that, intuitively, during the creation of a business strategy. It follows that a successful designs strategist must have an intimacy with the material of design itself in order to “leverage” that while strategizing about the future, and so this presents a question: what is the material of design itself? It includes people and the way they encounter the artificial that has been designed by the organization. The sum of the encounters (inclusive of experiences, awareness, interactions, and so-on) is the material.

This is at the heart of the problem of teaching design strategy: defining the material, in detail, that is design.