The winner of the SAP’s Best Paper Award in 2019 is Saouré Kouamé (University of Ottawa) with the paper “CEO’s Temporal Strategies to Pacify Warring Coalitions.”
Congratulations for receiving the best paper award! Tell us: what is your paper about?
Thank you! It is a great honor to receive this award, which I did not expect at all. I am especially happy that this recognition is from the SAP interest Group, since this area is of great interest of me. I am very grateful to them. I also thank Quy Huy with whom I developed this paper during my stay as a Visiting Scholar at INSEAD last year. His insightful advice has been key to bringing this paper to this level of quality.
This paper puts forth the simple idea that some very micro factors in strategy process, often perceived as negative, have the capacity to facilitate strategic decisions when the decision-makers have trouble getting along. Specifically, I have documented how the CEO's temporal strategies and subsequent emotional fatigue at the TM/MM level play an important role when two camps are in a frame battle and are difficult to reconcile. I reached that conclusion after spending two years observing the management team of a major Canadian philanthropic foundation which was looking for new strategic directions to achieve its poverty-reduction goals. At first I had a very negative view of the dynamics that was going on in the team, given the many battles and tensions between the actors and the apparently lax attitude of the CEO in dealing with the situation.
However, an in-depth analysis allowed me to see that, in reality, the laisser-faire behavior of the CEO was in fact a strategic behavior to handle the tension. Time becomes a political and strategic tool, and emotional fatigue, which has a negative (sometime toxic) effect at the individual level, becomes a facilitating mechanism at the collective level, leading battling coalitions to an acceptance of decisions. This analysis has therefore changed my perspective on these phenomena. Instead of focusing on the negative effect of the battle, I chose a more pragmatic view to explain how these factors facilitate decision-making in such a situation.
The paper focuses on temporal, political, and emotional dimensions of strategizing. What motivated you to examine the role of strategy-making at the beginning of your study?
This research interest came from a personal frustration. Before studying management and strategy in Canada, I studied social psychology in Ivory Coast (in Africa). At that time, the 2000s, I was involved as a junior consultant in a project designed to help a pharmaceutical company improve its competitiveness. I was in a multidisciplinary consulting team with senior consultants who were competent in financial analysis, strategic environmental analysis and everything that was needed to define new strategic directions. But we came up against a serious challenge very quickly: we realized that the problem for that company was not its misunderstanding of the market and the incompetence of its managers but the inability of the management team to make strategic decisions together. There was a deep division within the top team, with two camps fighting each other. The CEO was challenged by the Quality Control Director who formed a clan (a political coalition) with other senior managers. This Quality Control Director (an accreted pharmacist) had much power and was officially recognized by the country’s authorities as guarantor of company products. Also, she was supported by some of the key shareholder of the company. No new product could be launched without her approval. Because of that, the CEO and the Deputy CEO were literally hiding in secret places to make strategic decisions. They avoided sharing decisions and information with the part of the team that was in coalition with the opponent director. This generated a lot of tension, emotions and everything you can imagine happening in such a situation. Worse, it undermined all the strategic moves of the organization in the market because the CEO was unable to consistently implement his strategy.
Given my background in psychology, I became a key person in the consulting team to help solve the problem. The senior consultants felt incompetent. Unfortunately, I too felt limited because my training in psychology had not prepared me to solve this kind of tension at a top-management team level, especially when it came to strategic decision-making. I was very frustrated that I could not help anymore.
I learnt two lessons from this experience. First, the very micro phenomena at the top-team level can have a very important impact on the outcome of companies (here competitiveness). Second, decision-making at the top management level is very emotional.
This opened my eyes to these phenomena, and I tried to understand more. At that time, there was little information about micro-practices and emotions (the SAP movement was at its beginning, and there was little knowledge about these phenomena). I therefore decided to make this my field of interest for my doctoral studies. This interest in the micro-macro link resulted in an article (with Ann Langley) published in SMJ. This study was naturally in line with this interest, and I did the ethnography during my doctoral studies.
You conducted a multi-faceted 2-year ethnography. What where your experiences of entering and exiting the site of your research and what changed over time?
I was introduced to this organization by Taieb Hafsi (my thesis supervisor at HEC Montréal). I thank him very much for that because it was an ideal field to study this kind of phenomena. I remember he told me: "Saouré, this field would be perfect for you because that organization is facing significant strategic challenges right now." At that time, the organization was in the process of negotiating a renewal of a strategic partnership with the government, and there were many challenges related to this because the two partners were struggling to find common ground. I started the study by investigating this negotiation process. However, three months after data collection began, the decision was made by both partners to end their partnership and the negotiation. I was very worried when I heard that news because it meant it was the end of my study. However, a member of the organization reassured me by saying: "Saouré, do not worry, the hardest for us is yet to come ... I'm sure you will learn more by observing us redefine our strategic direction following the end of the partnership." The facts showed that that person was absolutely right. At first, the strategy-making process was planned to finish in one year, but it actually took almost 2 years. I therefore had to extend my stay in this organization, as this process was out of my control (a typical constraint of ethnographic studies). I was able to witness, in close detail, what was happening in the organization during that period. The first three months of observation allowed me to build trust with all key people (including the CEO), which meant that those actors did not hesitate to share information, even the most sensitive ones. This was very helpful for the in-depth understanding of the phenomena that were happening there.
What challenges did you face during data collection, data analysis, and the writing process? How did you overcome them?
I encountered a few challenges during the data collection beyond those that I mentioned above. I was fortunate to be dealing with great people in that organization. I had a lot of fun with them all. I thank them very much because their openness and willingness to share made it possible to carry out this work. For example, the CEO and vice-presidents accepted that I become, for almost 2 years, an observer of the top management team. I was invited to all management meetings, even the most sensitive ones. That kind of access, very rare, helped me to advance knowledge. The biggest challenge was getting interesting and useful knowledge from this data. My stay at INSEAD, in Fontainebleau (France), alongside Quy Huy helped me a lot. I spent two months working in depth on the data to make sense of everything I observed. I was able to benefit from Quy Huy insights and his experience in this kind of studies to produce and refine this work.
Your paper provides rich insights on a private organization interacting with politics to address grand challenges. What are the key learnings of your paper for the practice of such collaborations?
This paper raises the issue of leadership and micro-management in this type of situation. Societal grand challenges are addressed by individuals, even though those individuals are working for private or public organizations, and their micro-interactions can have a very important effect at the societal level. If these micro aspects are not well managed, these organizations will have a hard time reaching their gaols. Unfortunately, these micro phenomena are not always closely examined by practitioners. For example, I focus on the temporal and emotional dimension of these micro-interactions. These kinds of phenomena are still very poorly understood. Documenting this is a way for me to get practitioners to pay more attention. Of course, this work is only a beginning, and much more needs to be done to more effectively help practitioners involved in the processes of solving these grand challenges. I am pleased that the SAP community is beginning to look at this issue. For example, I participated in a special subtheme devoted to strategizing and grand challenges at EGOS this year in Edinburgh. All of these efforts will certainly have a structuring effect for the future.
Thank you very much! Do you have any advice for colleagues who aspire to win the award in the future?
As I said earlier, I did not expect this award. My guiding principle is to do my job as well as I can and do my best to produce a good theory that brings something new to knowledge and practice. I think that is the attitude we need to have as researchers—and so much the better if it is rewarded.