Culture and ethics explain more about a team's success and failure than most other factors, but as size of team and complexity of environment weigh in, guidance is decisive.

1. Executive Information
Aligning Strategy and Execution

2. The Fluid Dynamics of Soccer
How is it that any good soccer team, on public display, already knows how to work well, and so
many business managers are struggling to figure it out?
• At the start of the game, the team has a theory of winning.
• In the game’s passage of time, the team’s production intends to stay “on course” by continually
generating effects in accordance with decided types of value.
• However, the levels of opportunity and impact for those effects are variables increasingly difficult
to dictate in the “open” operating environment.
• This requires a primacy of real-time orchestration over the typical primacy of prescriptive process.
• Within orchestration, feedback represents the variability of the operating conditions of
production -- both as demands/causes and as reactions/effects.
• Feedback triggers managed changes in production structure and flow, within predetermined
boundaries of tolerance and prioritization that represent alignment with strategy.
• Boundaries may be reset as a consequence of learning during the passage of time.

3. What is the “Work” of the Team?
The work of the team is goal-seeking. But regardless of the goal, the nature of the work is
Intentional Production with An Expected Beneficial Impact.
What would be the point of “work” without the above being true? Yes, the wording is
generic enough to be nearly impossible to deny.
But more importantly, it is the unifying principle of means, motive, and opportunity – and
no one on a good team wants to work without all three elements in place.
Good teams are organizations that have obviously “bought in” to the point of the work and
into the responsibility. In other words, they have both a culture and an ethic that
characterizes their readiness to succeed.
Notably, those organizations demonstrate the capacity to find a win both with a strategy
that is working and without a strategy that is too vulnerable to realities to maintain.
So what is it that strategy most significantly adds to their execution?

4. Strategy versus Execution
It is still erroneously accepted that execution is “of a” strategy.
This happens mainly because strategy itself is erroneously thought of as a “plan”. But we know that
both execution and plans exist and are prosecuted without strategy all the time.
Strategy is a goal-oriented conceptual predisposition even without a plan. It can be expressed as a
“standing” hypothesis.
Execution can proceed entirely reactively and circumstantially, yet also be explicitly directional.
The ongoing problem, however, is that the above notion of execution obscures the clarity of factors
in production operation.

5. Alignment of Strategy and Execution
“Execution” (noun) is actually a view of progress measures synonymous with “performance”.
Those measures can attend to what is working well and why, but also to what is not working well
and why not. It is both logical and actual that we can be “already working really hard but not
executing.”
Therefore, the necessary understanding is that both strategy and execution are not “about” each
other but about something else in common: namely, production performance.
As related to production, semantics would correctly identify strategic and executive dimensions – or
as applied to production management information we get production strategy and production
execution.
The operative relationship of the two is not cause and effect, but instead is alignment.

6. Intelligent Response
It is improbable that execution will show deliberate success-as-intended without
production’s including:
• Leverage vs. resistance, maintaining advantage (opportunity)
• Agility vs. uncertainty, maintaining priority (motive)
• Commitment vs. risk, maintaining capacity (means)
Much of the basic need for “intelligence” is to detect and decide what resistance,
uncertainty, and risk is at hand. But that view will also show those factors continually
shifting both independently and together.
Actors respond primarily to the communication of this view.
But being “responsive” means being both effectively reactive to what has just happened,
and effective proactive about what happens next.

7. In the face of continually varying conditions, progressive
production relies on:
• Leverage vs. resistance, maintaining advantage
(opportunity)
• Agility vs. uncertainty, maintaining priority (motive)
• Commitment vs. risk, maintaining capacity (means)
As part of the known views, the leverage, agility, and
commitment that keeps all acting parties applied to the
overall task requires:
• a framework for maintaining perspective,
• a model for sustaining resiliency,
• and a system for coordinating activity.
The other basic job of intelligence is to help develop and
deploy the framework, model and system that organizes
and proactively directs the response of actors.
Need To Know Basis
©2017 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra Research

8. By virtue of business intelligence, Strategy, Game Theory, and Change Management
together supply the information needed for progressive production. The consolidated
view of production alignment allows real-time adaptation to operating circumstances
at the correctly identified points of adjustment or constraint. Good teams are highly
adaptable in production.
Strategy + Game Theory => Game Plan for leverage versus resistance.
Game Theory + Change Mgmt => Rules & Playbook for agility versus uncertainty.
Change Mgmt + Strategy => Formations & Positions/Rosters for commitment vs. risk.
Proactive Direction of Response
©2017 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra Research

9. Archestra notebooks compile and organize decades of in-the-field empirical findings. The notes offer explanations of why things
are included, excluded, or can happen in certain ways or to certain effects. The descriptions are determined mainly from the
perspective of strategy and architecture. They comment on, and navigate between, the motives and potentials that predetermine
the decisions and shapes of activity as discussed in the notes. As ongoing research, all notebooks are subject to change.
©2017 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra Research
©2017 Malcolm Ryder / Archestra Research
www.archestra.com
mryder@archestra.com