No Grand Plan

For every complex problem, there is a solution that is clear, simple and wrong.

- H.L. Menken

Welcome to the first series of Provocations. We’re delighted to be able to start this journey. Over the last few months, we’ve been at quiet work, piecing together the spine and musculature for this blog. Our work has involved a lot of conversation, many iterations and rounds of review. A labour of love, thought and experience. We hope you feel as moved by the work we’ve created here as we’ve been researching and writing it.

In putting together this debut release, we reviewed our years of work in boardrooms big and small. Our goal was to identify the throughlines of the modern workplace, cultural habits and traditions and study them more carefully.

Now with over a decade in leadership development, we’re blessed with raw experience. As we laboured over these stories, we began to observe many similarities across them - particularly how desires for control manifest. So, we thought it would be interesting to explore Complexity here in our first release.

Complexity is a word you’ll see quite often in public thought spaces. The fear of complexity often results in the “The 5-Step Framework That Will Solve Everything” or the “Master Plan That Will End Your Worry”; a symptom of a world that has grown atomised into falsely discrete parts. But these vague, off-hand platitudes delivered in an easy guide will always fail.

While the business of industry may present a clean and dry exterior, it is abundant with complex dynamics of connection and interpersonal navigations. This is a world of nuance and depth just like any other.

It is not simple. You know this. The work of organising people at any scale - making sure they are adequately compensated for their time and effort, accounted for, their grievances addressed, their hard work rewarded. Small, micro-interactions that stack over time. That builds the organisational culture.

Having now worked in the industry for over a decade, we see the resistance to embracing complexity. This resistance is ignorance; in its face, the ‘perfect’ strategy’ falters and the company buckles under pressure.

To understand why this happens, let’s look at the work of Ralph Stacey, Douglas Griffin and Patricia Shaw who argue in their seminal work, Complexity and Management (2000), that the belief that we can stand ‘outside’ our company to design its future is an illusion. We are always a part of the system and it is shaped via our conversations.

In the traditional theory of management, the company is a ‘system’ or ‘machine’ that can be observed and controlled from the outside. Ralph Stacey argued against this and developed the Stacey Matrix. He stated that an organisation isn’t a thing at all but, rather, is made up of a pattern of human relating. His collaborator, Patricia Shaw, expanded this hypothesis and focused on narrative, improvisation, and embodied dialogue.

The matrix comprises two dimensions: agreement and certainty. Projects thrive on predictability when cause and effect are known. This allows for accurate forecasting predicted on past experience. However, the work of innovation pushes projects into the realm of uncertainty, where previous data provides little solace. Complexity compounds in relation to the level of agreement among stakeholders; differing perspectives dictate the necessary management style.

The Stacey Matrix maps these dynamics across two axes (i.e.,the degree of certainty and the level of agreement) and identifies five distinct areas. For further reading on this, please refer to our bibliography list at the end of this page.

The purple area marked ‘4’ is what Stacey refers to as the Zone of Complexity. When low agreement and high uncertainty meet, projects become complex

management problems. This zone demands creativity, innovation, and a moving away from traditional constraints. In this space, rigid planning fails and success depends on the adaptability and agility of everyone involved - from sponsors to the team and stakeholders.

What do we do when the Zone of Complexity is the place where projects live? In relation, if the perfect plan does not exist, is planning a worthwhile endeavour? We’d like to expand that query, asking instead, how do we plan?

Patricia Shaw suggested that rather than seeing strategy as fixed, we can view it as a ‘Strategic Provocation’. In her work on changing conversations, she notes that a leader’s role is not to just provide solutions, but to create the space for new conversations.

When a CXO presents their Master Plan to the company, the goal is often to resist uncertainty, to predict and negate doubt. But perhaps the way forward is to stay with the uncertainty, to acknowledge its presence and the fact that it will continue to be a part of most conversations, allowing for new perspectives from all kinds of stakeholders to emerge.

But how is this done in practice? In our work and drawing on Stacey and Shaw, we have found that the following has proved successful. To caveat, these may not always be the right answer, and so, we recommend reaching out to the right development advisor to create a conversation-based framework that is attuned to your company.

• Notice the local: Rather than a grand global strategy, observe and respond to the quality of small, day-to-day interactions. Is there trust in your team meetings? Are people able to be honest about their apprehensions and are they able to contribute deeply and freely without consequence to their careers?

• Work on accepting the chaos: Shaw states that change is ever-mutating and unpredictable. When a project does not follow its timeline exactly, how can we hold that uncertainty without resisting it? How can we work with setbacks without them dictating the terms?

• Holding the anxiety: We have found that leaders struggle quite intensely with sitting with the fear of not knowing. Often being those responsible with making tough decisions that have major consequences, the pressure is undeniable. Saying “I don’t know” to those looking to you for guidance may seem like relinquishing power or may contribute to the fear of being perceived as an incompetent leader. However, we have found that there is value in using “I don’t know” to invite perspectives and collaborate on the process of leading a project.

The Grand Plan steers us into a fantasy of control, pushes us to believe that the future is somehow controllable through a series of ‘perfect’ choices. But that’s simply not the case, and it’s why most leaders end up feeling disillusioned and ill-equipped. In India, our leadership landscape requires culture-sensitive approaches that are still being developed. Thinking Partners is working to be one such shaper. We believe that the Zone of Complexity can help create great ideas and greater thinkers.

Bibliography

1. Stacey, R. D., Griffin, D. and Shaw, P. (2000). Complexity and management: fad or radical challenge to systems thinking?. London: Routledge.

2. Shaw, P. (2002). Changing conversations in organizations: a complexity approach to change. London: Routledge.

3. Praxis Framework (n.d.). Stacey matrix. Available at: https://www.praxisframework.org/en/library/stacey-matrix (Accessed: 14 May 2026).