Shaping or Being Shaped? Strategy, Identity and Structural Disposition
Why strategy starts with understanding how you're already being shaped
Leaders like to tell themselves they are shaping the game.
Most of the time, the game has already decided which kinds of moves they will even recognise as “strategic.”
The uncomfortable starting point is this: strategy is never just a set of choices about the external environment. It is always an expression of what the organisation already is, its identity, structure, relationships, and the stories it tells itself about what counts as success. Those organisational facts shape what leaders see, which options feel legitimate, and which possibilities never make it into the conversation.
The interesting question is not “Can we shape the environment?” but “Given who we are, how are we already being shaped and what would it mean to shape on purpose without pretending to stand outside our own organisation?”
The Fantasy of Separation
Western strategy usually smuggles in a fantasy of separation: first define the goal, then design the moves, as if the strategist sits outside the organisation and the market looking in.
This is comforting. It makes strategy feel like an engineering problem. Define the destination, plot the route, assign resources, and execute.
The trouble is that this fantasy only works when:
The environment is stable enough to predict
The organisation is plastic enough to be reshaped at will
The strategist can stand outside both and direct traffic
None of these conditions holds in any environment worth calling complex. The organisation you have shapes the strategies you can conceive. The strategies you pursue reshape the organisation you become. And you are never standing outside, looking in. You are always embedded in the configuration you are trying to change.
This is where Chinese strategic thought, Boyd, Patterns of Strategy, and structural coupling converge. They all, in different ways, refuse the fantasy of separation and offer something more useful: a dispositional view of strategy.
Shì: The Disposition You Are Already Carrying
Sun Tzu’s concept of shì is often translated as “strategic advantage” or “momentum,” but that undersells it. Shì is better understood as the configuration of forces, terrain, timing, and morale that gives a situation its latent direction of travel.
You do not start with a blank sheet. You start in the middle of a configuration that is already leaning in some directions and away from others.
The skilled general does not rely on fixed plans or brute strength. The skilled general arranges dispositions so that victory follows “naturally” from accumulated advantage. The key insight is that shaping the situation precedes action. You work on the conditions before you commit to the move.
Translate that into organisational terms, and shì looks like what I have been calling structural disposition:
The identity the organisation has internalised—who “we” think we are
The organisational form that makes some moves easy, others expensive, and some almost unthinkable
The web of external relationships and expectations that defines what looks “credible” or “responsible” for you
Most strategy work treats this disposition as noise, something you can fix with a new org chart and a town hall. In practice, it is the main filter through which “strategic options” ever reach the boardroom.
Strategic ambiguity, seen through shì, is not dithering. It is the decision to work with the disposition you actually have to shape the situation by accumulating small shifts in position, perception, and relationship, rather than declaring a destination the organisation’s current shì simply cannot carry.
Boyd: Orientation as Identity in Motion
John Boyd gives you the internal side of the same problem.
Most people who cite Boyd’s OODA loop reduce it to “move faster than the enemy.” That is not wrong, but it is shallow. The real power is in orientation.
Orientation is usually described as a cognitive frame, but under real conditions, it behaves more like identity in motion. It is not just how the organisation sees the world; it is who it understands itself to be in that world:
What “people like us” do and do not do
Which risks feel existential, and which feel like hygiene
Which kinds of evidence leaders trust, and which they discard
In Destruction and Creation and throughout his work, Boyd argues that effective action depends on the ability to keep breaking and re-synthesising these orientations so they remain loosely coupled to reality. His line about the need to “both shape and be shaped by a changing environment” is, at heart, a demand for identity that can revise itself without collapsing.
That lands directly on what I have been arguing about strategy and identity. If identity is too rigid, orientation locks, and your OODA loop degenerates into theatre: the organisation observes selectively, decides slowly, and acts symbolically. If identity is too diffuse, orientation never stabilises; there is no shared sense of “who we are becoming,” so action fragments.
Strategic ambiguity sits in the narrow corridor between those poles: clear enough about what we are trying to become that people can align, loose enough about “how exactly” that orientation can keep updating as reality pushes back.
Patterns of Strategy: The Roles You Play
Patterns of Strategy adds a relational layer. Patrick Hoverstadt and Lucy Loh treat strategy as shifts in the roles an organisation plays in its wider environment—consolidator, insurgent, platform, niche specialist, and so on. Each pattern is not just a sequence of moves; it is a distinct way of being in relation to others.
Stick with any pattern for long, and it feeds back into identity and structure:
Play the consolidator long enough, and efficiency, control, and predictability become moral virtues.
Play the insurgent long enough, and speed, provocation, and edge experimentation become non-negotiable.
When I say that organisation shapes strategy, this is what I mean in practice: the structure and habits built to execute the last role become the main constraints on adopting a new one. The moves that once made perfect sense for who we were can narrow what feels thinkable for who we might become.
The question most leadership teams never ask is:
“If we take this strategic trajectory, what kind of organisation will we become in three years’ time? And would we like what we become?”
That is where execution and identity meet. You are not just choosing a market play; you are choosing a trajectory of self-modification. Execution is the messy, political work of actually becoming the kind of organisation that can play the new role without tearing itself apart.
Structural Coupling: Where the Shaping Actually Happens
Maturana and Varela’s idea of structural coupling is a useful antidote to the language of heroic strategy.
Their basic claim is that a living organisation preserves its identity while changing its structure through repeated interactions with its environment, and the environment co-adapts in turn. You do not simply “adapt to the market.” You change your own structure, processes, offerings, and interfaces in response to repeated pressures. Customers, regulators, suppliers, and platforms, in turn, adjust their expectations and behaviour in response to you.
Over time, you and your environment lock into relatively stable patterns of mutual dependence, expectation, and constraint. The shaping power sits in those couplings: contracts, standards, APIs, regulatory categories, shared practices.
If you treat strategy as working on structural coupling, a lot of “mystery” evaporates:
Many so-called strategic choices are really decisions about which relationships to deepen, which to loosen, and which not to enter at all.
The organisation’s identity is not just an internal narrative; it is how others have learned to rely on you, fear you, route around you, or ignore you.
Execution as the management of freedom of action becomes concrete here. Freedom is not an abstract value; it is the slack and flexibility built into these relationships and constraints:
Contractual terms that leave room for new behaviours
Technical interfaces that do not hard-wire a single way of working
Governance that can incorporate new information without triggering an existential crisis
As more of business life gets embedded in platforms, standards, and infrastructures, strategic ambiguity changes character. It stops being just a leadership stance and becomes a property of the landscape itself. Ambiguity about who holds which levers, how algorithms decide, or how data flows are governed starts to reshape agency upstream, long before any executive team sits down to “do strategy.”
The Real Test of Strategy
Put shì, orientation, strategic patterns, and structural coupling together, and “shaping” looks less like heroics and more like an honest practice grounded in three moves.
1. Start with how you are already being shaped.
Begin from the identity and disposition you actually carry: the structure, relationships, and stories that currently define the organisation. That is your shì. If you skip this, your strategy slides become a list of wishes unmoored from what the organisation can recognise or sustain.
Ask yourself: What have we become through repeated interaction with our environment? What identity have we actually earned—not claimed, but earned?
2. Choose who you are becoming, not just what you are doing.
Treat every strategic move as a bet on identity and form:
“If we adopt this pattern, what kind of organisation will we become?”
“Which freedoms will we gain or lose—for leaders, for teams, for customers?”
This is where strategic intent and organisational identity meet. Intent is not just about markets; it is about the organisation we are deliberately growing into.
3. Work directly on couplings, not just on plans.
See execution as the deliberate modification of relationships, constraints, and interfaces so that the future you talk about becomes structurally easier to live out. That might mean renegotiating key contracts, redesigning decision rights, changing how teams connect, or altering how regulators see you.
Plans are scaffolding; the real work is in those moves.
Shaping as Honest Practice
In this frame, strategic ambiguity is not a clever communication trick. It is the practical choice to maintain sufficient looseness in identity, orientation, and coupling so that the organisation can still be shaped by reality in ways that make it more capable rather than more fragile.
Shaping or being shaped is not a binary. You are always doing both. The real test of strategy is whether leaders are willing to see and work on how the organisation’s identity, form, and relationships are already shaping the game, rather than comforting themselves with the idea that the next round of clarity will finally put them “in control.”
Control is the wrong frame. The question is not whether you control the environment. The question is whether you can stay coupled to reality as it moves, updating orientation, shifting disposition, and renegotiating couplings while preserving enough coherence that people can still act in line with intent.
That is what execution actually is. Not the enforcement of a plan. The ongoing management of freedom of action in a world that refuses to hold still.
The organisations that thrive in complexity are not the ones with the most detailed strategies. They are the ones that can sense, orient, decide, and act faster than the environment shifts while remaining honest about the structural disposition they carry and the couplings that already shape what is possible.
That requires one thing above all: the willingness to start with what is, rather than what you wish were true.
