Aspiration After Observation: Why Strategy Starts with Seeing, Not Saying

Most organisations rush to declare their intent. The real work starts with observing what's actually happening.

We've all heard the calls: "Find your purpose." "Be more purposeful." "Align around a common goal."

It sounds noble. In a volatile world, a clear purpose promises stability, clarity, and direction.

But there’s a trap in this well-worn advice.

Too often, purpose is treated as something you declare, design, and disseminate. It's written on the walls, embedded into decks, and broadcast at town halls. But when leaders treat purpose as real simply because it's been said, they mistake narrative for reality, and control for coherence.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: It doesn’t matter what you say your organisation exists to do. It matters what your organisation actually does.

Declared Purpose vs. Lived Reality

This distinction sits at the heart of strategy, but too few leaders act on it.

The declared purpose is aspirational. Lived reality is what your organisation routinely produces: decisions, habits, structures, and incentives.

That difference matters—because organisations don’t get the outcomes they intend. They get the outcomes their design reinforces.

You might say you're customer-led. But if internal politics shape decisions, your actual purpose is preservation, not service. You might talk about empowerment. But if decisions still route through senior management, the real driver is control, not autonomy.

Strategy fails in the gap between what’s said and what’s done.

POSIWID: Strategy Is What You Produce

Stafford Beer’s principle—The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does (POSIWID) makes this explicit.

You don’t get to define your organisation’s purpose. Your organisation defines it through its results.

• Say you value innovation but punish risk? Your purpose is safety.

• Reward individual heroics over shared success? Your purpose is competition, not collaboration.

POSIWID isn’t cynical—it’s clarifying. Strategy isn’t what you claim. It’s what your structure delivers.

Autopoiesis: Why You Can’t Declare Your Way to Coherence

To change what an organisation produces, you need to understand how it sustains itself.

The biological concept of autopoiesis, introduced by Maturana and Varela, describes how living systems maintain their own structure. They don’t absorb meaning from outside; they generate it internally.

Organisations behave in the same way. They reproduce themselves through what they routinise: feedback loops, decisions, communication, and norms.

Niklas Luhmann extended this further, arguing that organisations are structurally closed. They filter external signals through internal logic. They don’t adopt purpose, they translate it based on what they already are.

So, when leaders roll out a new strategy or purpose, it often collides with what is already being reinforced.

You can’t overlay intent on a structure optimised for something else. You have to interrupt what’s currently being reproduced.

The Risk of Premature Aspiration

There’s a seductive appeal in bold vision. But when strategy starts with declaration rather than diagnosis, three risks emerge:

• Blind spots: “We’ve said the right things—so we must be doing the right things.”

• Misplaced accountability: People get blamed for structural outcomes.

• Reinforced fragility: The plan is reinforced, even as the environment shifts.

Declaring purpose too early leads to theatre, not traction.

From Control to Coherence

So, what does a strategy grounded in reality actually look like?

It doesn’t start with what you hope to do. It starts with what you consistently do.

Coherence isn’t alignment-by-force. It’s when the parts of the organisation reinforce each other in a way that supports viable direction.

This requires leaders to:

• Observe behavioural patterns and decision-making

• Understand how the organisation interacts with its environment

• Design structures that reinforce desired behaviour

• Act on what’s viable, not what’s idealised

Affordances and the Adjacent Possible

Strategy doesn’t unfold in a vacuum. It emerges from the interaction between current capabilities, available options, and the environment.

Two concepts help illuminate this:

• The Adjacent Possible (Stuart Kauffman): The next viable moves from where you currently are, not a distant vision, but reachable next steps.

• Affordances (ecological psychology): The opportunities for action the environment offers, relative to your capability. A locked door affords nothing unless you hold the key. A decentralised model affords autonomy only if your people are ready.

Together, they ground strategy in context.

The adjacent possible is shaped by what’s structurally available. Affordances are shaped by what you’re actually able to perceive and use.

Your ability to see and act on them depends on sensemaking, trust, skill, and design.

Structural Coupling: Why Fit Matters

Organisations don’t float freely. They are structurally coupled to regulators, markets, technologies, customers, and more.

These relationships shape how organisations move and how they can move.

Strategy is not just about your internal logic. It’s about how you evolve with or against the environment you’re entangled in.

Improving fit means either adapting yourself or reshaping your environment. But you can’t do either until you understand the nature of your coupling.

The Ethical Imperative: Enabling Choice

So, where does this leave leadership?

If organisations reproduce themselves, and the environment constrains movement, what can leaders really do?

They can shape conditions. They can create space for viable action.

Heinz von Foerster’s ethical imperative captures this role clearly:

“Act always so as to increase the number of choices.”

This wasn’t abstract idealism. It was about constructing systems where others can act, choose, and adapt.

Russell Ackoff said it plainly:

“Choice is essential for purposeful behaviour. Therefore, if the parts of a system are to be treated as purposeful, they must be given the freedom to choose, to act.”

Designing for choice isn’t a separate ethical layer. It is the design.

When organisations remove agency in favour of control, they don’t just limit people—they limit themselves.

A truly responsive organisation doesn’t just deliver outcomes. It enables futures.

Strategy After Observation

This isn’t a rejection of ambition. It’s a challenge to get the sequence right.

You don’t lead with aspiration. You end with it.

Because strategy isn’t what’s written. It’s what gets done.

To lead with strategy, ask:

• What are we actually doing?

• What does our structure reinforce?

• What does the environment afford?

• Where can we move next?

Observe. Orient. Then act.

Only then does intent have traction. Only then does purpose become more than projection.