#137—Peter Compo: The Emergent Approach to Strategy

 Peter Compo is the author of The Emergent Approach to Strategy: Adaptive Design & Execution. Unlike many strategists from universities and consulting firms, Compo builds his groundbreaking work first as a musician and a scientist (he holds a doctorate in Chemical Engineering), and then gained experience in the “corporate trenches” at DuPont.
 
Hired as a research scientist, he held leadership positions in product, marketing, supply chain, and business management where he served as the Director of DuPont Ventures, focusing on new business ventures, and later as the Director of Corporate Integrated Business Planning, where he was responsible for overseeing the company's strategic planning processes. His varied background and passions inspired his unique perspective that business—particularly business strategy—often mirrors science and music, inspiring him to write The Emergent Approach. 

Peter’s mission is to create a new level of clarity on strategy by debunking the idea that strategy is cascading and top-down. Instead, his concept of “emergent” strategy proposes that strategic planning is agile, constantly transforming as new information and situations present themselves.

In this podcast, we discuss:

• How strategy, similarly to evolution and scientific breakthroughs, isn’t just selecting what works, but rather a series of discarding what doesn’t work  
• How execution isn't just about following a list and getting good results — but rather adhering to a strategy until new information proves the hypothesis or framework is wrong
• How leaders can help facilitate and guide strategic direction across teams and functions without putting too many constraints that hinder performance 
• A preview of techniques and tools from his book that leaders can apply to jumpstart the emergent approach in defining your strategy

_______________________________________________________________________________
Episode Timeline:
00:00—Highlight from today's episode
01:23—Introducing Peter + the topic of today’s episode
04:30—If you really know me, you know that...
06:20—What is your definition of strategy?
07:44—Can two organizations with the same goals have different strategies?
08:51—The meaning of "Emergent"
09:40—How did your background in music and science lead you to strategy?
13:22—Peter's musical background
14:25—Strategy mirroring music: structure precedes improvisation
17:24—Strategy is more than just goals and execution
18:26—Trade-offs between departments require strategic guidance 
23:05—Strategy helps resolve conflicts between business functions 
27:22—Lessons from sports: the role of strategy in team coordination
31:32—Strategic adaptation and innovation
33:37—Entrepreneurs and scientists share an obsession with solving bottlenecks 
35:34—Strategy should focus on internalization 
38:24—Five disqualifiers to test if you really have a strategy
42:35—How can people follow you and continue learning from you?__________________________________________________________________________
Additional Resources:
Personal website: https://emergentapproach.com/
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/petercompo/
Link to book:

Thank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.

Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast

Transcript

Kaihan Krippendorff:  Peter, thank you so much for being here with us. I have been following your work, and I'm just ecstatic that we can get to talk to you a little bit. Thank you. Where are you joining us from today?
 
 Peter Campo: I am joining you from a little community called Arden in Northern Delaware, about a half hour out of Philadelphia. Actually, a planned community that has a little bit of history to it. Oh, yes.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: So are you a Philadelphia sports team fan?
 
 Peter Campo: No. I know. Well, yeah. They're my secondary sports teams. I grew up in New York, so I'm a New York man.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: I gotcha.
 
 Peter Campo: Whenever the New York teams are out of it, which in some cases, pretty early in the season these days. I then I go to then I switch over 
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Okay.  Well, I'm from Philly. So I'm a Philadelphia team fan. Alright. So we have so much to cover, and, you know, there are so many aspects here work, then we're only gonna really focus on one area. If people can buy your book, they can find other podcasts you've done, there's so much great material that you've done, so we're gonna focus in one area. I do wanna start with the same questions I start with everyone. The first one being just to get us to know you a little bit more personally, if you could complete the sentence for me. If you really know me, you know that.
 
 Peter Campo: If you know me, you know that I'm obsessed with the question of how change happens. And how things get better, how they evolve. And this is small scale, you know, your own personal life all the way up to culture at large, and I study that whole range. Strategy is a part of that. It's a tool.
 
 It's thought process that's part of how to make a positive train.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: So I love that you look at change, small, big, the full range. Do you have a framing of it? Is it a psychological? Is it an organizational? Is it a philosophical?
 
 Peter Campo: No. I have a no. I have a very clear framing of it, and I didn't invent it, but I'm part of it. And that is that change is evolutionary. It is darwinian.
 
 It is by the mechanisms of adaptation and complex adaptive systems. And which can be thought of in very simple ways sometimes, but it goes very deep. And it's hard to really figure out how to convert understanding of essential knowledge of adaptation into How do you create a strategy? How do you execute? How do you live day to day?
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Great. Well, I could follow-up with questions on that, and we will, but I wanna get to my next package question first. What's your definition of strategy?
 
 Peter Campo: My definition of strategy is that a strategy is a central rule. It is a and if rule bothers you, you can think principle, you can think policy, you can think guideline, but it's central. All of those things are different terms or something you adhere to. So it's essential rule designed to bust the bottleneck. That's what's in the way of achieving your aspiration.
 
 And I'll add one more piece to it that it is a central rule that's part of your overall strategy framework. And there's a big distinction here between a strategy statement that rule, that policy, and what we traditionally call strategic plans. What I call strategic the practitioners' strategic framework, which includes strategy tactics goals, diagnosis, metrics, plans, all the things that we lump together into what generally is called a strategic plan. But the ironic thing is that the one component missing, and the majority of strategic plans I've ever seen is a strategy. Got everything else.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: So let me just double click on that a little bit. What I'm hearing is we could have two organizations that have the same goals, the same metrics, the same plan, the know the same priorities. But maybe each of them have a different bottlenecks, so they're strategies end up being different?
 
 Peter Campo: Absolutely. Yeah. And maybe the plans would be different as
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: well. Sure.
 
 Peter Campo: But the key would be just the way you framed it. Same goal. One company wants to grow in a new two companies wants to grow in the same region. One's bottleneck is they have no local presence. They have no local understanding, but they have great products.
 
 Another one has great local presence and understanding but don't have the right products for that market. The strategy would have to be different between the two as the bottlenecks to it. And this is really one of the most essential aspects of my work, the emergence approach and what I think is the magic road to strategy, and that's what's in the way.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: And can you explain to us what you I think I think I have an idea, but what do you mean by emergent as distinct from what?
 
 Peter Campo: Emergent is as opposed to you can directly influence the outcomes you want, that you can directly influence the high level, the outcome level of your organization or your life. And it comes from complex adaptive theory, the idea that its interactions at low levels, its disciplines at low levels, that add up to and shape in an emergent way, the outcomes.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: And so, you know, what I'm hearing from that I mean, you're what I'd like to understand is your background. So You're a musician. You've looked at studied biology, use a scientist. How does just tell us a little bit about that background, and how does that then lead to business and technology and strategy?
 
 Peter Campo: Well, that actually is exactly how I got into this question of emergence. And I'd like to when we get a chance, talk about the use of the word emergence strategy and deliberate strategy, but we can come back to that in a sec. So I was always interested in the question of creativity, and I grew up in a musical world. And I was always not only interested, but amazed by how great musicians created, whether that was you know, Beethoven Motes are bronze or whether it was jazz or whether it was even rock in the Beatles. And I, you know, I grew up with all of that.
 
 For various reasons, we don't have time to get into. I ended up going into an academic type career, and I ended up getting my doctorate in chemical engineering. But when I did, I started understanding some and read the history of science as well. And even my graduate research in engineering, turned out to be many small particles combining in certain ways. And I somehow, many years ago, came to awareness that creativity, that creating new configurations, whether it was a lab situation or a music or a scientific inquiry that it was an adaptive process.
 
 You weren't directly choosing what was right. You were constantly destroying what was wrong. And tell what's right emerged. And I read Mauricio's biography of written by her daughter, and her daughter was a pianist and a journalist, not a scientist like her sister. And Eve Currie
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: because we people might know her as a writer, but she's a scientist.
 
 Peter Campo: Eve Currie. No. Marie Currie, of course, was the great scientist. Her daughter wrote her biography. A very famous book published in 1937.
 
 And her daughter caught the insight into how Marickory had discovered her great discoveries. And she said, she destroyed all of the evident possibilities to explain what was going on, all the obvious. And she was left forced to look at what wasn't so obvious. She had to go deep. And a light bulb went off in my mind, and ever since then, I've been thinking about adaptive systems.
 
 To finish the story quickly, I went to work for EYE DuPont, the great multinational materials chemical, and then later biology company. And I found out how strategy was done in the corporate world. And how innovation was thought about in the corporate world, and it didn't jive with what I had come to learn in all those other fields. And in fact, it was kind of ironic. They would hold up jazz as an example of creativity And they would say, well, it's all about being free.
 
 You know? And, of course, if you're just free in music, then you just write cliches just like in business or random stuff. So and DuPont was no different than anybody else. They had all this stuff from all the big consultants in this and that they were perfectly as good as anyone else in this. And I just slowly but surely developed theories of both innovation and strategy over the years.
 
 In the company, and then I left to work full time on it.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Got it. And just describe to you us your musical background or the that that history.
 
 Peter Campo: Well, both the I come from many generations of musicians. My parents were my father was a jazz based player and violinist. My mother was a singer and a dancer. They met on the road with a group that nobody remembers now called Fred Wearing in his Pennsylvania. If you go to Stroudsville, Pennsylvania, you'll see a road named after him.
 
 They were huge from the twenties to the fifties, and my mother was a my mother sang in the chorus, and my dad was in the pit, and that's when they met in 1955. So it's a long time ago. But I grew up in music all around me, and I've never lost the music in my life. I played the base in Trumpet and guitar and piano, and I write music now and play a little bit, but I spend a little more time writing because it's a little easier to catch time to do it. And you don't have to develop technique, which I've got no time to do.
 
 So let other people plan.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Got it. Yeah. I mean, I've got so many questions I wanna go you know what? Since we spoke and I listened started listening to your podcast, I had to give a talk. And I just got into this idea of as I think what you're saying, and I'm sure I'm getting this not correct here.
 
 But I started thinking of strategy as, you know, a musician, like, they don't just, as you say, don't they don't just played the notes that come to mind. They learned the music. They learned the instrument. They practiced the song as it was supposed to be played over and over again, and then they can improvise. And I think that is really a beautiful metaphor for strategy.
 
 So I was wondering, could you No.
 
 Peter Campo: What you're saying is completely accurate, and I use examples of the great jazz musicians in one very much in particular, Charlie Parker, who was an extraordinary not only improviser and composer and player, he had enormous technique as well, virtual also technique, but he somehow was able to unlike many musicians, he was able to verbalize the process. And he said it in many different ways. What you just said, he said in many different ways, he'd say, learn your instrument, learn the music, learn it so well, and then forget all that shit he would say. And then and just whale. Or he said it in my favorite way he expressed it was learn the changes and then forget them.
 
 The changes are the chord changes. That was jazz slang for the chord changes that, you know, people who know piano music or guitar music, you see the chords above the line where the vocal is. Those are the chord changes. And in jazz, they were very sophisticated, chord changes, very chromatic as we say. And very virtual.
 
 So playing went along with that, and he would say learn it so deeply that you could forget it. And this really does capture. The difference between the idea of freedom as creativity as this kind of you don't need any rules, you don't need any boundaries. It's quite the opposite. You need boundaries and rules, but they're a special kind of boundary and rule.
 
 There's so much they have to be internalized, and they're not at that outcome level. Charlie didn't parker didn't say, come on, man. Play a great piece. Write a great piece. You can't.
 
 That's trying to directly manage the outcome. It can't be done. It can't be done. You can't say when I you know, I'm, you know, a very modest composer, but I take advice from really good ones, And, you know, they couldn't just say, I'm gonna write a great piece. Even if you said it, it wouldn't mean anything.
 
 What have you taught yourself? What are you holding to when you make decisions as you write the piece? What's the discipline of that process?
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: So yeah. And I love what you're saying. There because there's a common understanding of what strategy is versus execution is. One is strategy setting the goal and execution is achieving the goal. Why is that not right?
 
 Peter Campo: It's not right from the start with well, if you could just achieve your goals by this thing called execution, why would you need a strategy at all? Just set a bunch of goals and just go do it. Great. Hey. In some cases, it would be better to do that than have some huge 55 page PowerPoint bogus strategy.
 
 You'd be better off just saying, go do it if that's all it really was about. But you can't directly get the outcomes you want. Not to mention, what if you work in a diverse large organization in different places physically and mentally with different subgoals and different needs and requirements? What do you just tell them all? Here's the main corporate goal.
 
 Go ahead. Do your part.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Got it. Okay. So I'm sure. So we're saying we can't just say set the big goal and, hey, product team, you just do whatever you gotta do. And HR team, you recruit whoever you have to recruit and process team, you just operations, you can just do whatever.
 
 Why can't we just do that?
 
 Peter Campo: Because there are trade offs between what everybody does and what I would start with is illustrating what happens when you do it. And it's really the basis of the flow down concept, the cascading down from an overall organizational goal, whatever that organization is, this could apply to military government, nonprofits, business, anything, school education. What happens is everybody gets their silo view. Okay. Operation, your job is to get stuff out the door and do it cheaper and cheaper.
 
 Sales, your job is to increase, you know, the market size. HR, you had to hire the best people. Everybody has kind of a cliche definition of what their contribution. To that picture is, to that overall goal is. But if it was true that you could just have everybody do their cliche, we wouldn't need strategy at all.
 
 You would just bust up every goal into its into smithereens, into parts until everybody had their part. But the problem here is that operations numbers are not helping in the or at odds. Operations numbers are technically at odds with marketing's numbers. For example, you I know how you can reduce your fixed cost to almost nothing. Don't produce a bloody thing.
 
 Right? It's a silly. It sounds ridiculous when you say it like that. And, of course, it is. But now put yourself in the spot of operations as being beat on to reduce cost, and marketing is saying, well, we need a whole range of new products.
 
 And these products run slower on the line, and they take more quality. Management. And maybe they take new raw materials that are harder to get, and now we're gonna triple the number of SKUs we have. And we're gonna have to increase our inventory by twofold. Well, why not just go do it?
 
 Marketing says, just go do it. Of course, any real situation has enormous trade offs between these things. And a strategy rule is something that can help make those trade offs. And I use this example a lot because it's very simple and very clear, and I think what many businesses have to deal with all the time. You might have a rule where leadership strategy it creates a strategy that bust this bottleneck of this marketing operations challenge by saying something like, okay.
 
 We're gonna target only these new products for this various reason. Or we're only gonna start with this market. No marketing you can't have for every market. You can't have a new product for every market. And then they go to operations and say, okay.
 
 We've given you that reduction. Now you gotta do this. And, essentially, what the strategy would say, what guidance it would give is guidance that neither organization could possibly come up with on their own. This is because they can't see it. Their metrics are not what makes them successful is the opposite of what might make another group in the company successful and the bigger and the more developed the company gets, the more this is obviously true.
 
 For a tiny startup, when you only have two products, maybe it's not. But now you get into a corporation that has product lines and platforms and diverse locations and all kinds of multifaceted nature of a company, then it gets more and more difficult to allow each individual to see the whole. And they can't see the whole. And so strategy is for giving guidance that no one in isolation at their local level could possibly see just on their own. Either technically or emotionally.
 
 You know, you're beating up my bonus is how many, you know, how many new customers I get. Well, I need new products for that. So you're gonna beat on me and to get my bonus, but you're telling operations they don't have to do it. You need a strategy for that.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: So is there a mechanism that can we lay out the strategy and then give each function the rules and then they operate within that does there have to be continual interaction between them? There's sort of, like, it seems to be a trade off. Right? Between, hey. I'm gonna give you all the details and just you're gonna follow the steps from that are given down from the top to we just want you guys to talk a lot.
 
 And debate and understand each other. That takes both that that take that's a huge cognitive effort that we probably don't have time for. So what's the reconciliation?
 
 Peter Campo: You know, that's exactly the challenge of leadership, isn't it? And the way that's handled is something called nested strategy frameworks. Meaning operations has to have a strategy framework, meaning essential rule for how they're gonna bust their bottlenecks, their own diagnosis, of the situation, their own plans, their own tactics, their own metrics, and the same in marketing. And, of course, anybody else where we're just keying on those two. But here's the thing and the thing that really makes it work.
 
 Both of those organizations and any other is constrained by the strategy of the c suite, assuming that's the structure. Right? We have a c suite, and then we have operations, and then we have manufacturing. The c suite created that strategy that busted the trade off, it said we're here's what we're gonna do with products. No marketing.
 
 You don't get every product you want. No operations. You do have to do these products. Now those two groups are now constrained, but you don't over constrain them. You don't give them every little detail, plan, sub goal metric, You give them the freedom within that constraint of here's what we agreed on this very contentious trade off.
 
 Now you do the best you can. You figure out the rest because by doing that, you take advantage of the fact that the c suite is not living in the factory and not living at the customer and take advantage of them being what it is they say sometimes at the cold face, right, or on the front lines. That you are you have more knowledge of what's really going on there. There's an old line from the military. It was Molti in Germany, and I sometimes use this.
 
 An order should contain nothing only what the subordinate cannot figure out from themselves.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: I love that. I love that. That makes a lot of sense.
 
 Peter Campo: And then so you're not over constraining the people who are on the front lines and in their milieu, whether it's marketing or r and d, product, you name it, HR, any function. Right? You don't over constrain, but you do constrain them such that the overall corporate bottleneck is addressed. And this can you know, in a huge company, you might have several layers of this of these nestings. As many as you think is needed to make clarity.
 
 And one I'll just add one more piece to it. It's not this old saw that the tactics of your leadership are is your strategy. You know that all rule. You know, the idea that you take on, and I say no. The CEO's got a strategy framework with strategy and tactics and goals and diagnosis that are relevant to her.
 
 Operations leader, manufacturing leader, SPU leaders have the same. No one's job to execute on somebody else's strategy. This is part of this independence, this distributed capability. You are constrained by the strategy above you. But that's much different than you have to execute
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: a piece of that stream.
 
 Peter Campo: Right? Isn't that a big do you do you hear that as a big difference?
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Big difference. Yeah. Yep. I mean, I've heard you also relate your work to sports, and I was this weekend watching my cousins play during the Philadelphia Union soccer team.
 
 Peter Campo: Sure. Right.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: New coach. Right up. Yeah. Ravi had to get a new coach, and the new coach has a different system is what you would call it in sports. Right?
 
 And so they had to learn. So could you maybe relate those two for to have people kinda visualize what the speech
 
 Peter Campo: would make? Absolutely. And this was, you know, Aiden's podcast, the innovation show. I just love talking to him about sports because he played at the highest level, rugby, to lose in in France. I mean, he was there.
 
 You know? I think a sports analogy is very clear. You know, you have a defensive leader and an offensive leader, perhaps, as an American football. Right? I unfortunately don't know the world football, IE soccer as well as I know American sports, and I feel very guilty about that.
 
 Even though I know a little bit about cricket. But
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Oh, cricket is that all
 
 Peter Campo: of that is. Right? But, like, say you have an offensive leader and a defensive leader coach, and then you have a head coach. You would not want the head coach. Micromanaging, telling the defensive coach everything they should do, their strategy.
 
 But since it's the same players on the field at the same time unlike American football, right, where you're you got the same players on, you know, defending and not defending and not only you would not want to tell each one of those coaches every detail of what they should do. But you might tell them this is our overall game plan. Now within that overall game plan, for example, you know, what's a classic one? We are not gonna let the other team's best player beat us. We're gonna double that player.
 
 We're gonna double team, and this is done in so many sports. Right? American football, basketball, we are not going to let their transcendent player who's so great. Beat us. You know, we're gonna double them.
 
 And if the second best player beats us, Salavi. That that's life. So now what if the players or the sub coaches, the lower level coaches violate that rule because they see an opportunity. And this brings us right to execution. What does execution mean?
 
 It doesn't mean get good results. Why would you even need the word if it meant just go set goals and go get good results? Saltz? Or is one professor said, oh, it's not just following what you said you would do. It's seizing opportunities.
 
 Well, isn't that brilliant? Why wouldn't leadership do anything more than say, go out and get good results and seize opportunities? It has no meaning. It has no information or value. It means execution is adhered to what you said was your hypothesis.
 
 Your strategy framework, the strategy rules, the tactical rules, the milestones, and plans. You stick with them until there's some information that tells us we should modify it. Because we thought something was wrong. We thought something that turned out to be incorrect. Either internally, product development took three months longer than we thought or three months shorter.
 
 And we're gonna we're gonna modify. Or competition came out with something. We're gonna modify. Or interest rates tripled, or a new government comes in and changes the way people are doing business, and we modify. Whatever that might be.
 
 But until you've got something that tells you the hypothesis is wrong, your strategy framework is wrong, let you stick to it.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Yeah. So in that execution, what I hear and I think this is coming back to what you talked about at the very beginning about destroying and in science, youth ideas are often destroying old ideas.
 
 Peter Campo: All of the
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: I guess there are a set of patterns of behaviors and habits and mindsets and things that were consistent with the old strategy that we need to destroy in order to embed these new ways of being and doing.
 
 Peter Campo: Yeah. It's a very, you know, adaptation is a very tricky thing for humans because it's such an upside down way of looking in the world that you're creating by taking away. It is really for all of us, it is such a kind of a backwards way of looking at the world, and I think it's part of what makes evolution in all fields difficult to comes to terms with sometimes. You know? How could Darwinian natural selection work by only taking away certain individuals?
 
 It doesn't pick them. We say selection, but that's a metaphor. As if there was somebody selecting. But no one is selecting in nature. And I argue that in business and music, you're not really in science, you're not really selecting either just like Marie Curry's daughter, Eve.
 
 Intuitive. She wasn't a scientist, but I think she really saw something. She saw that Marie didn't select the truth. She saw that Marie constantly destroyed untruth, allowing the truth to emerge. And you know there's a technical reason for this.
 
 The ability to prove that something's right is very difficult. So many things have to be in that argument. It's very easy to prove one thing wrong.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Right. Right.
 
 Peter Campo: At a low level.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Right. You can have a hypothesis that is consistent with what euro observations have been. But it's hard to run that forward and know that is true every yeah. But it does seem to be an intensity or intentionality. There has to for there to be a right I think there must be some objective.
 
 Right? So she wasn't just sort of thinking about different things and is it true or not. There was something driving her. Right? So I imagine there's not No.
 
 No. Call that.
 
 Peter Campo: I would say And for so many entrepreneurs and for so many scientists and musicians, it appears to us as obsession. She was obsessed with finding out how to explain this new thing called rays, which she coined the term radioactivity. She was obsessed. I think on a higher level, she was obsessed with physics. I think that, you know, I have some obsession with understanding how change occurs, how creativity and innovation occur in our nature, culture, and physical nature.
 
 And that different goals appear all the time. And you try to solve those, and you try to discover it, and then you move on to the next one. And you're just constantly staying in this obsession. How about great entrepreneurs? They have an idea.
 
 They're just obsessed to figure out how to get it out into the world. What do they do? They constantly bust bottlenecks. They're constantly saying what's in the way? What do I have to solve today?
 
 To buy another card. Right? What do I have to pay to buy another card? To see another card here in this game? Can I afford another one?
 
 And I'm gonna keep going. I'm gonna bust bottlenecks. And then one day, it starts to emerge.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Yes. So then what are the tools that we use then to translate that obsession into an organization when I'm not an individual to activate that intensity or that rigor or that discipline or what how does if that is the material of execution, what do you suggest that leaders implement or use?
 
 Peter Campo: That is exactly what I tried to achieve with the emergence approach with the book that I try to show the fallacy of cascading down from a goal in a relatively short process that you call the strategy process and then move on. You know? What I've created are ways to work at that lower level where you're constantly destroying things that are untrue or that are not useful, clearing them out, allowing what might not be so obvious at first to get a voice. And to do it in a way that's much more focused on the word we talked about early, internalization, which I think is the key. And was the key for Adam Curry and was the key for Charlie Parker who and I think any creative situation.
 
 It's getting it inside of you so deeply that you start to make connections. It's not about writing all these PowerPoints. It's and it's Definitely not about making lists of things, lists of goals, and plans, and metrics, and choices, and actions, and pillars, and values. You know? It's struggling on a single piece of paper in several of the tools that I offer.
 
 I say keep it on one piece of paper. Now you can click you can double click on an item and go to a detail. But the focus is always on this single thing. Either a strategy, an aspiration, bottleneck strategy, triad, what I call, or a strategy matrix, then I'm not the first to suggest the strategy matrix, but I think what I've offer is something much more sophisticated and something that I believe business leaders can really connect with, and that can be used more as a communication in an internalization tool rather than a calculation tool. Or let's get done with it and move on to execution tool.
 
 Something you live with as you, as I say, walk down the road, as you start to implement, and start to learn about what you're doing. So there's a whole series of tools, and I'll add one more quick one five disqualifiers, new tests for those strategy.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Mhmm. Yes. So I'd love to yeah. I mean, your book, the merchant approach strategy, has these very well thought through tools. And I can tell that you have as you said at the very beginning, you have ruled out a bunch of stuff that's not true, and what's left is sort of not hop it's not even obvious.
 
 It's just clear. So could you give us one of those? I don't know if it's did leave us with one of those?
 
 Peter Campo: Well, there's I would say there's two classes of things that are part of what I just described. One is that I don't give people strategy advice. I'm not telling any people how to grow anywhere or how to reduce cost. I mean, I have opinions on that because of my work in a corporation for twenty five years. But, really, it's designed to help people discover their own world.
 
 And that means it's design principle based versus advice based. I don't say, here's a good example of a goal. I say, here's design principles by which you can audit whether your goal is right or not. Here's guidelines for whether or not you've discovered the bottleneck that's really in the way or not. And then I have these five disqualifiers, which are five disqualifiers.
 
 Five test of your strategy that say, if you can answer yes to any of them, what you have is either a goal or often a cliche. Okay? And they are the opposite test. If the opposite of your of your statement is absurd, You can say yes to that. What you have is either a goal or a or a cliche.
 
 Our strategy is to be the best in the world when so or grow faster than the competition or whether, of course, take the opposite of any of those. You get silliness. Right? I'm not the first to use the opposite test that's kinda been out there. Roger Martin has used it.
 
 Others have used it. But the other four are new. If your strategy has numbers, it's probably not a strategy. Our strategy is to grow in emerging markets 10% and maintain our existing markets. It's a goal.
 
 If a strategy statement has a number, it's probably a goal except it could be a tactic. Almost never a strategy. Duplicate, and we talked about this. If you just repeat the strategy of the nested strategy above you, if you just repeat the CEO's strategy so let's go back to our example. CEO says, we're gonna switch to a product development timeline that looks like this.
 
 This is now our product, and then you go to the product development people, or the operations people, and they say, that's my strategy. No. It's not your strategy. That's your boss's strategy. You now have to figure out how to make that happen in your world.
 
 So that's the duplicate. If you're just saying the same thing as the person above you, it's a trueism. Next one, does it exclude anything? So say you've got lots of fancy new products and a bunch of old products, and you say, our strategy is to do market driven growth innovation, and it doesn't apply to the cash cow products, then it's not your strategy because it doesn't take in everything. In of all your resources.
 
 Big trap people fall in. And the last and maybe as good as the opposite test, is it a list? If you've got a list, I 99% of the time, it is not a strategy. A list of anything. And I'll add Roger Martin is correct when he says a strategy.
 
 He defines strategy as a set of interlinked choices. Couldn't agree more that it's a set of interlinked choices. But that's not the strategy. The strategy is the thing that would make them all make sense together because you don't make all the choices you're gonna make at the beginning. Most of the choices faced by an organization our choices they don't even know about in the beginning.
 
 So I think we have to take his point, which I agree with, we have to take it one step further.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Yes. Yes. I love it. Great. Well, I would love to we've so many more things to talk about.
 
 We only talk really about one area of your work. We encourage people to buy the emergent approach to strategy, adaptive design, and execution. Where else can people connect with you and continue to learn from you and follow you?
 
 Peter Campo: Few places at LinkedIn. We post a lot, and you can look through those and get a pretty good feel for the basics here. You'll find several podcasts and presentations and we also chop those up sometimes and put them on LinkedIn. And then there is emergentapproach.com, where you can get my strategy work. And there's PeterCampo.com, where if you're interested in music and in my work in the sciences and biology, you can see that there.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Wow. Well, Peter, thank you so much for your curiosity, for following your curiosity, and packaging it into tools that we can adapt and evolve with. Thank you for taking the time to share some of that with us.
 
 Peter Campo: It was good to be here. Good talking with you.