ESSAY

How Things Happens: A Cross-Cultural Look at Collective Action

Part 1 – Strategy and Efficacy

This essay by collaborators Julien Leyre and Patrick Laudon, explores how collective action happens, contrasting Western “top-down” strategic planning with Eastern “bottom-up” efficacy. Western models emphasize linear goal-setting and execution, while Eastern approaches focus on adapting to evolving situations by sensing and guiding momentum. Organizations often blend both, but leadership norms favour top-down structures. The essay argues for greater recognition of bottom-up models, highlighting their potential to address global challenges. This is the first in a series of five essays, where future essays will examine how organizations can implement and strengthen these alternative approaches.

‘How can I make things happen?’ This is the core question guiding human efforts at organizing collective action. It’s what leaders are expected to do, what MBAs are supposed to train, and what any manager struggles with. Over the course of 2023, we got together to explore this question. Our year-long conversation resulted in a series of essays which will be shared here over the coming weeks.

We consider the matter primarily from the perspective of business organizations. Our reflections derive from our own practice as executive coach, organizational designer, and philosopher in residence. Assisting executives in their attempts to ‘make things happen’ gave us a first-row view of the challenges involved. This text is also shaped by our cross-cultural understanding of the world – a shared French background, an experience of migration to Japan and Australia, and extensive engagement with East and South-East Asia.

Our goal is not to provide practical advice for a better bottom line. It’s about fundamental empowerment. Organizations are the key structure we use to shape our collective reality. If we’re too mired in our own contradictions to get anything done, any good intention to tackle our global challenges will remain just that. But if we’re able to ‘make things happen,’ even at the level of just one organization, then we can imagine directing our collective efforts towards regenerating the planet. And there is hope for success.

A Note on East and West

Before we jump into this essay proper, let’s begin with a note on language. Throughout the text, we will use the words ‘East’ and ‘West.’ This vocabulary reflects our own background, and the fact that we chose to write in English, for an English-speaking audience. ‘East’ and ‘West’ describe two geographical areas and associated civilizations (roughly speaking, Asia vs Europe and North America). It also points at those two cultural spaces, as it were, in the abstract, from an absolute point of reference. In Chinese discourse, the more native distinction lies between ‘Centre’ and ‘Periphery,’ and is anchored in a subjective sense of space. This is reflected in the very name of China as 中国, or middle country. If we were to sum up our core argument in line with this semantic clarification, we might say that the present essay draws a contrast between two models for human action. One sees it as linear movement towards a goal articulated in the abstract, the other as circular movement to protect and enrich a concretely experienced core.

On this note, let us unfold the argument.

Strategy vs Efficacy

Humans are social animals. Our achievements depend on our capacity to coordinate. By getting together and organizing, we can do more complex and ambitious things than we would on our own: pyramids, iPhones, or Olympic Games. In this sense, ‘things happen’ because people act together towards a shared goal. ‘How things happen’ hinges on another question: ‘how can I get people to do things?’ More specifically, ‘How can I get a group of people to do things together?’

One model is predominant in Western organizations. Commonly described as ‘top down,’ it addresses this question by separating two sequential sets of challenges.

• The first is about mapping the steps towards a chosen goal. This is what we typically label ‘strategy’. (We will get back to the challenge of setting that goal in later essays). Imagine I want to build a pyramid: what needs to be done for that desire to become a reality? What exactly needs to happen ‘out there’ so that my vision or goal can be brought to reality?
• The second set of challenges can be framed under the common labels of ‘execution,’ ‘implementation’ or ‘tactics.’ The focus here is dealing with the chaos of the real, and all the unexpected elements that might interfere with the plan. No matter how carefully I do my research, some things are likely to not go as expected. One step takes longer, one thing goes missing, and meanwhile the conditions change – weather events, new tech, or a pandemic. In addition, with time passing, perturbations happen. People get sick, or fight, or resign, and things need to be jiggled around. The art of implementation consists in making the right compromises when ‘life’ gets in the way, so that the final outcomes come as close as possible to the original vision.

In practice, of course, there is a measure of back and forth. Challenges in implementation invite a revision of strategy. Strategy takes implementation into consideration. At a conceptual level, however, they’re distinct and happen in a sequence.

Philosophies more commonly adopted in Asia offer a different default model for ‘getting people to do things,’ roughly corresponding to the label ‘bottom up.’ ‘Strategy’ and ‘implementation’ blend into what we will call ‘efficacy.’[1]

The core premise is that situations evolve constantly, as a result of changes in the environment and/or changes in the relationships between people. In a business context, this could be shifts in technology, market conditions, social expectations, regulations or team dynamics, together with political and weather events.

Although change happens ‘no matter what,’ it does not happen randomly. Each situation has various potential forms of unfolding. We might call those ‘propensities’ or ‘imminence.’ The way to ‘make things happen’ is to detect imminence, and guide the situation towards a more desirable outcome. At the least, it is to anticipate undesirable evolutions, and guard against their consequences until the situation shifts again. This mode of thought is well captured in the Dao de Jing. Human achievement is not about moving a world imagined as static. It’s about sensing the natural ‘flow’ of things, and resist, guide or lean into their movement. Rather than directly causing any specific thing to happen, our attention is better placed increasing the likelihood of what we desire, and preventing what we don’t.

Two Models for Getting Things Done

Most organizations combine both models: it’s not an either or. However, in our experience at least, the first tends to dominate discourse, practice and systems in Western organizations. When acknowledged at all, bottom up is often understood as spontaneous emergence. The conscious effort needed for self-organization is overlooked. What’s more, the current balance of power is skewed against the model. Our perception of leadership is largely aligned to top down models, as are all the systems to nurture and develop organizational leaders. The vast majority, in most parts of the world have been trained, recruited and rewarded for their top down skills. Meaning, there is a large group of powerful people with a vested interest in preserving the status quo.

One thing we wish to achieve through this text is offer some mental tools to better describe and understand bottom up approaches, therefore improve the capacity for organizations to adopt them.

This is about far more than improving organizational efficiency. In the context of the polycrisis, we need things to happen at the global level – whether it’s for environmental preservation, AI alignment, or a fair redistribution of resources. Top down models have shown their limits when it comes to systemic challenges such as those. Bottom up approaches make it possible at least to envisage steady progress towards radical change, without uncontrollable waves of chaos. What’s more, there is a measure of homology between those societal challenges and those facing organizations today – from tech integration and human connection to reputation and supply chain management.[2]

If bottom up leadership models can help organizations, there is an incentive for their adoption, opening a mid-term opportunity to normalize and scale those same models in other areas, including societal crises on the global scale. This prospect opens a window of hope for collective action towards our most pressing planetary challenges.

In the rest of this series, we will explore various dimensions of this bottom up approach, and how it can be concretely put in place, or reinforced, in various organizational settings.

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[1] We adopted this word from the works of French philosopher and sinologist Francois Jullien. We do, however, want to resist the sense of any essential difference between ‘East’ and ‘West.’ We’re more modestly proposing that different models are more or less foregrounded in each tradition. Another source for the distinction we propose in this introduction is a commonly quoted 1969 paper by AG Haudricourt called ‘Domestication of animals, cultivation of plants and human relations.’ The author explores a difference between two dominant agricultural practices: European and Middle-eastern pastoralism vs East Asian rice farming. He further associates those with distinct understandings of leadership. Guiding sheep requires direct positive action – the leader is closely involved in the outcomes. Tending to a rice field involves indirect negative action. Outcomes happen in a seemingly more spontaneous manner. Human efforts focus on maintaining a conducive environment to fertility.

[2] We identified four key systemic challenges faced by most organizations today. The first is the difficulty of integrating fast evolving technology – such as artificial intelligence in its fast-changing incarnations – to processes and products with a much longer life cycle. Whether it’s building planes or managing long-term customer relationships, when is the best time to invest in new technology, rather than waiting for the landscape to stabilise? The second is managing reputation in a context of increasing scrutiny. This applies to social and environmental matters, as well as geopolitical alignment. Missteps can affect recruitment, sales, and government relations, from licences to public contracts. The third is supply chain management in a world that is both highly uncertain and interdependent: where to set the balance between risk and cost? Finally, there is a loneliness and mental health epidemic – amplified by remote work – affecting all aspects of HR, from recruitment to retention and performance.

Read the second essay in series …