Understanding Enactive Strategy: Moving Beyond Command and Control

One of the most common questions I receive is, “What do you actually mean by enactive strategy?”

It’s a valid question, and one that requires a bit of unpacking, especially given the historical context of how we’ve approached leadership and management. The concept of enactive strategy emerges from a broader framework of enactive leadership, which fundamentally challenges the traditional command-and-control mindset that has dominated organizational management for centuries.

In this issue of Luck Hacker, I’ll explore what enactive strategy means, how it differs from conventional approaches, and why it represents a powerful shift in how we lead organizations in an increasingly complex and uncertain world.

The Limitations of Command-and-Control Management

To understand enactive strategy, we must first recognize the limitations of the prevailing management approaches.

For centuries, organizations have relied on command-and-control structures to manage large groups of people. Almost every major advancement in management science has been aimed at improving the effectiveness of this model.

Take the hierarchy, for example. It was developed as a way to cascade information quickly throughout an organization, theoretically ensuring that directives from the top reached every level without distortion. But in practice, hierarchies rarely function as smoothly as we would hope. Information bottlenecks, miscommunication, and the human element of interpretation all create noise in the system. Hierarchies, in fact, are notoriously poor at scaling information distribution efficiently, especially when human beings are the ones transmitting that information.

Similarly, consider the planning systems we’ve developed—whether annual plans or five-year forecasts. These systems represent attempts to control the future by predicting and planning for every possible outcome. But the future, by its nature, is unpredictable, and rigid plans often fail to adapt to changing conditions. Then there’s budgeting, an innovation credited to James McKinsey, the founder of McKinsey & Company. Budgeting is essentially a tool for controlling future spending, locking organizations into financial commitments based on projections that may no longer hold true as conditions evolve.

Finally, there are more recent innovations like OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), which aim to provide measurable targets for performance. While these tools have their place, they too are part of the broader command-and-control toolkit that seeks to impose order and predictability on inherently fluid and complex organizational environments.

The fundamental problem with these approaches is that they are all based on the assumption that human behavior can be controlled in the same way we control machinery or production processes.

Command-and-control management essentially treats humans as cogs in a machine, designed to follow orders and execute tasks with precision. But humans are not machines. They are creative, adaptive, and capable of much more than simply doing what they are told.

And this brings us to the heart of the issue: command and control is a fool’s errand when applied to human organizations. It doesn’t scale well, and it undermines the potential for people to contribute fully to the organization.

Enactive Leadershp: A Different Model for Leadership

Enactive strategy offers a fundamentally different model for managing and leading organizations. Rather than focusing on how to control people’s behavior through top-down mechanisms, enactive strategy is about creating the conditions for success.

A useful metaphor to illustrate this concept is a river. No one tells a river how to flow. There is no central authority directing the water or forcing it to take a particular path. Instead, the river flows naturally, guided by the conditions of the landscape—the mountains, valleys, and riverbanks that shape its course. Gravity pulls the water toward the ocean, but the river’s exact path is determined by the terrain it encounters along the way. The riverbanks, in this metaphor, represent the conditions that channel the river’s energy in a particular direction.

In much the same way, enactive leadership is about creating the right conditions within an organization that guide and shape the behaviors and actions of individuals without the need for constant oversight or control.

Strategy, in this sense, becomes one of the tools we use to set those conditions.

The Three Layers of Enactive Strategy

Enactive strategy can be understood in three distinct layers, each of which plays a critical role in shaping how organizations function and how people behave within them.

1. The Strategy Development Process

The first layer of enactive strategy is the development process itself—how we go about coming up with a strategy. Historically, this has involved extensive analysis, data gathering, and design thinking. While these methods are useful, they often fall short because they assume that we can predict the future or fully understand the complexities of the environment we operate in.

What they miss is the importance of provoking and generating information from the environment to inform the strategy.

This idea is rooted in neuroscience’s concept of active inference, or as I prefer to call it, enactive inference. Humans don’t passively absorb information from the world around them; they actively probe their environment, gathering feedback through their actions and using that feedback to update their mental models. Similarly, when developing strategy, organizations must take action to generate the information they need. This means running structured experiments, probing the unknowns, and using the results to build better models of the world.

In this sense, uncertainty becomes opportunity. Uncertainty represents a lack of information about how the world works, and by actively seeking out that information, organizations can uncover new opportunities. The first step in enactive strategy, then, is to mine that uncertainty through proactive engagement with the environment.

2. Strategy Formulation

The second layer is the actual formulation of the strategy. Traditional strategies often seek to dictate actions, providing specific directives for how people should behave. But enactive strategy takes a different approach. Rather than trying to control behavior, we focus on creating a framework—like the riverbanks—that allows individuals and teams to make decisions autonomously, within certain boundaries.

This requires a shift in how we think about strategy design. Instead of prescribing every action, we provide guiding principles or overarching frameworks that empower people to act effectively within the strategy’s parameters. In this way, strategy becomes less about control and more about enabling spontaneous action that aligns with the organization’s goals.

3. Activating the Strategy

The final layer of enactive strategy is activating the strategy. This goes beyond simply communicating the strategy to employees. It involves proactively shaping the organizational systems and processes so that the strategy becomes the natural and intuitive path for people to follow.

One example comes from a client I worked with, where we aimed to shift the focus from selling to a broad range of accounts to targeting large, high-value program accounts. To support this strategic shift, we didn’t just roll out the new strategy; we redesigned the entire sales process. This included how sales teams were organized, how account planning was conducted, and how target accounts were selected. The new system acted like the riverbanks, guiding people to naturally adopt the behaviors we wanted as part of the strategy.

This is the key to enactive strategy: making it easier for people to act in ways that support the strategy by creating systems that channel behavior in the right direction. When done well, this process allows for spontaneous action, where individuals are empowered to make decisions and take actions that align with the strategy because it’s the most natural thing to do.

The Role of Enactive Leadership

Ultimately, enactive strategy is about more than just strategy itself—it’s about enactive leadership. As leaders, our role is to create the conditions that enable our teams to succeed. This means designing strategies that guide behavior without micromanaging it, developing systems that empower people to take action, and actively engaging with uncertainty to uncover opportunities.

In the end, enactive leadership is about fostering an environment where productive behaviors emerge naturally, driven by the systems and conditions we create as leaders. It’s a departure from the command-and-control mindset and a recognition that human organizations thrive best when they are allowed to flow, much like a river, within the right boundaries.

If we can adopt this mindset, we will not only become more effective leaders but also create organizations that are more adaptable, innovative, and resilient in the face of complexity and uncertainty.

I hope this exploration of enactive strategy helps clarify the concept and why it matters. As always, I’m happy to answer any questions, and I look forward to diving deeper into these topics in future discussions. Thank you for your attention, and feel free to reach out with any comments or thoughts!

Until next time, be someone who happens to the world; Be enactive.

Best,

Alex

P.S. When you're ready, here are 3 ways I can help you:

(1) Contact me for 1:1 CEO coaching and advisory services

(2) Apply to the Enactive CEO program for mastering business, leadership, and life.   

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