Given that this blog started off being about Kanban, before pivoting to Strategy Deployment, its mabe surprising that I haven’t written much about Deming beyond the occasional passing reference. Partly inspired by John Willis’ Profound Podcast, I’ve finally got round to do something about that. Some readers will know W. Edwards Deming and his System of Profound Knowledge well. Others may only half-recognise the name.

Deming was an American statistician and management thinker who, in the years after the Second World War, was invited to Japan to help with its industrial recovery. What he taught there, including statistical methods and a whole way of thinking about quality, systems, and the work of management, took root far more deeply than it ever had at home. Japanese industry embraced it, the Deming Prize was named in his honour, and his thinking became part of the foundation of the Toyota Production System. In time, it became what the West would relabel as Lean.

He arrived at the System of Profound Knowledge late in his life, distilling decades of work into a single framework. It is not a method or a set of practices. It is a theory. Four interrelated lenses through which to understand and transform an organisation: appreciation of a system, knowledge of variation, theory of knowledge, and psychology.

The Theory of Profound Knowledge and Strategy Deployment

All of this brings me to Strategy Deployment. It would be tempting to treat Deming’s theory as simply a useful lens to hold up against it. In other words, an analogy and an outside perspective. But the relationship runs deeper than that. Strategy Deployment is my preferred name for Hoshin Kanri, the practice of policy deployment. It grew up in 1960s Japan, with Toyota among its practitioners, as part of the wave of quality thinking that Deming had helped set in motion. At its heart, it is the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle applied at the scale of a whole enterprise.

The X-Matrix I use to support it is not from Toyota. It is a later Western codification. But the practice it serves carries that Lean lineage. So, setting Strategy Deployment beside the System of Profound Knowledge is not introducing two strangers who happen to agree. There is a family resemblance, and there is a reason for it.

That changes the nature of the exercise from the usual posts on Strategy Deployment and other approaches. Most of those posts, such as the ones on Flight Levels and Team Topologies, are about practices that sit alongside Strategy Deployment and complement it. The System of Profound Knowledge doesn’t sit alongside anything. It sits underneath. It is less a partner than a foundation, which is exactly what we should expect of a theory that the practice descends from.

The interesting question, then, is not whether they cohere, but how deeply. And what reading Strategy Deployment through Deming’s four lenses tells us about deploying it well. Each lens, it turns out, also names a way that a deployment can drift from its own roots.

Appreciation for a System

The first lens of the System of Profound Knowledge is appreciation for a system. A system, in Deming’s definition, is a network of interdependent components that work together towards a shared aim; without an aim, there is no system. What follows is less obvious than it first sounds. The performance of any one component should be judged by its contribution to the aim of the whole, never in isolation. In fact, a component may sometimes need to run at a loss to itself so that the system as a whole can win.

Deming pressed this point hard because most management does the opposite. It manages the parts separately, sets them competing through targets and rankings, and calls the sum of those local optimisations a strategy. The result, he argued, is reliable sub-optimisation: improve the parts in isolation, and you will almost always degrade the whole.

This is where Strategy Deployment, and specifically the X-Matrix, starts. True North and Aspirations describe an aim for the whole organisation, not a stack of departmental targets. Catchball connects the parts up, down, and across so that the strategy is shaped by the whole rather than imposed on it. And the X-Matrix also makes the system visible. It isn’t a list of goals. It is a set of elements held together by correlations. Coherence lives in the relationships, not in cells.

So the warning for deployment is to resist letting the X-Matrix decay into a scorecard. Each team should not own its own column and chase its own number. The moment that happens, you have rebuilt exactly the sub-optimisation Deming cautioned against. The discipline is to keep attention on the correlations. That is how the parts contribute to one another, rather than on the parts alone.

Knowledge about Variation

The second lens of the System of Profound Knowledge is knowledge about variation. Everything varies. Every process, every measure, every result. Deming, building on the work of Walter Shewhart, taught that the central skill is telling two kinds of variation apart. Common-cause variation is the ordinary fluctuation of a stable system, and the noise it produces simply by running. Special-cause variation is something specific and assignable, a genuine signal that something has changed. The danger lies in confusing the two. React to common-cause noise as though it were a signal, or what Deming called tampering, and you will reliably make a stable system worse rather than better.

Deming thought this mattered enormously because managers who cannot read variation end up blaming people for the behaviour of the system. They chase every wobble in the numbers and set targets the data could never have supported. Most of what goes wrong, he reckoned, belongs to the system rather than to the people working within it.

Strategy Deployment has a place for this in the Evidence dimension. Evidence is how we learn whether our strategies are doing anything. But evidence varies, and a single reading moving up or down is not necessarily telling us anything at all. I’ve written before that X-Matrix correlations describe association, not causation. Variation adds the other half of the caution. Even a real association can be buried under noise, and a number that twitches is not the same as a number that has changed.

So the implementation lesson is not to tamper. When the Evidence wobbles, the question is whether the system is talking or a special cause has appeared. This should be asked before abandoning a strategy or doubling down on it. This is another argument for Continuous Strategy. A regular cadence lets you watch the trend rather than chase the point, which is the difference between reading variation and being read by it.

Theory of Knowledge

The third lens of the System of Profound Knowledge is the theory of knowledge. Deming insisted that we be clear about how we know what we think we know. He held that there is no knowledge without theory, and that, in his words, “management is prediction”: any plan worth the name is a prediction about what we think will happen if we act in a certain way. And we only learn when we compare what actually happens against what we predicted. Experience on its own teaches nothing. It is the comparison of outcome to expectation that turns it into knowledge, which is the real work of the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle.

Deming cared about this because so much of management substitutes imitation and assertion for it. Copying another organisation’s practices without understanding the theory of why they worked. Or declaring success after the fact by quietly rewriting what had been expected.

Strategy Deployment treats strategy as a set of hypotheses rather than a set of certainties. As I put it when measuring the X-Matrix, we believe the Aspirations are achievable, we believe the Strategies will help, and we believe the Evidence will show progress. And then we test those beliefs. The order of the X-Matrix is the same instinct made structural: working through Aspirations, Strategies, and Evidence before settling on Tactics, so that the Tactics are tested against what we expect to see rather than justified after the fact. Deming would recognise the avoidance of retrospective coherence as a defence against fooling ourselves.

So when deploying, write Strategies and Tactics as predictions you could be wrong about, and decide in advance what Evidence would change your mind. A strategy that can’t be wrong isn’t empirical. It’s a belief in fancy dress. It is also worth remembering, as I argued in The Experiment Trap, that prediction is not the only way to learn. Sometimes the honest move is to probe rather than to hypothesise, precisely because a theory of knowledge includes knowing the limits of what we currently know, or can know.

Psychology

The fourth lens of the System of Profound Knowledge is psychology. An understanding of people, of what motivates them, and of how they respond to the way they are managed. Deming drew a sharp line between intrinsic motivation (the pride, curiosity, and joy in work that people are born with) and extrinsic motivation (the rewards and punishments applied from outside). His claim, which unsettled many managers, was that the standard apparatus of motivation through incentive pay, ranking, grading, or management by the numbers, does not add to intrinsic motivation but crushes it, and breeds fear in its place.

Deming put “drive out fear” among his famous fourteen points for a reason: fear makes people hide problems and feed their managers comfortable figures, and stop cooperating, which quietly corrodes every other part of the system.

Strategy Deployment’s whole stance of alignment with autonomy is psychological at root. Catchball only works if people feel able to disagree. Under fear, it collapses into compliance dressed as consent. Engaging the people closest to the problem, or closest to the context, treats strategic contribution as everyone’s work. It should be a source of pride, rather than an overhead handed down from above.

Which makes catchball a canary. If catchball produces nothing but agreement, the psychology is wrong. Fear or extrinsic pressure is in the room, and the deployment will be hollow, however elegant the X-Matrix looks. The thing to watch for is not whether people nod, but whether they feel safe enough to push back.

A System of Lenses

Deming was insistent that the four parts of the System of Profound Knowledge cannot be taken in isolation. You can’t appreciate a system without understanding its variation. And you can’t have a theory of knowledge that ignores the psychology of the people doing the knowing. The four are themselves a system.

I find that rather pleasing, because it is precisely how the X-Matrix works. The X-Matrix is not a list of goals. Its meaning lives in the correlations between its elements rather than in any element on its own. What I have described using the term messy coherence. Deming’s theory has the same character: a way of seeing systems that is itself a system, its parts making sense only in relation to one another. The tool we deploy strategy with, and the theory that underwrites it, are built on the same idea.

So the System of Profound Knowledge isn’t a rival to Strategy Deployment, and it isn’t quite a complement either. It is closer to the theory in Strategy Deployment’s ancestry. The thinking the practice grew out of, carried forward, and made into a way of working. That is why the coherence runs so deep: it is inheritance, not coincidence. And reading Strategy Deployment through the four lenses does more than confirm it. It hands us a short list of the ways a deployment drifts from its lineage: sub-optimising the system, tampering with variation, mistaking conviction for empiricism, and neglecting the psychology that makes any of it possible. The coherence is reassuring. The warnings are arguably more useful.

Team Topologies, by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, has become one of the more referenced books on my (virtual) shelf. Its four team types and three interaction modes give organisations a precise and practical vocabulary for thinking about structure. It treats team structure as a deliberate act of design rather than something that requires no thought. Too often, teams are an accident of the org chart, or they default to a simplistic and generic structure.

The book defines its own purpose this way:

A model for organizational design that provides a key technology-agnostic mechanism for modern software-intensive enterprises to sense when a change in strategy is required (either from a business or technology point of view).

That definition is worth examining. It reveals Team Topologies, in its authors’ own words, as primarily a sensing mechanism. As such, the responding half of the dynamic has less prominence. It is there, but the book’s structural vocabulary makes it easy to miss.

The Responding Half

This is where Strategy Deployment and Continuous Strategy come in. If Team Topologies emphasises sensing (noticing when a change in strategy is required), then Strategy Deployment emphasises responding (working out the adjacent possible, allowing it to emerge, and integrating it into the business). And because the sensing is itself ongoing, the responding needs to be too. Strategy Deployment meets that need. Not strategy as an annual exercise, but continuously, reflecting the ten qualities that suggest what good responding looks like in practice.

However, the split between sensing and responding obviously isn’t absolute. Team Topologies includes some response in its evolutionary team design. After all, part three of the book is all about “Evolving Team Interactions for Innovation and Rapid Delivery”. Similarly, Strategy Deployment includes some sensing, such as in the Evidence dimension of the X-Matrix. But I do think they have different emphases, and that is what makes them complementary.

Together they cover the dynamic more completely than either does alone. It’s an idea that came up in conversations I have had with Philippe Guenet, and that dynamic between them is what this post is about. What each emphasises, what each leaves to others, and how the two together cover what neither covers alone. It may lead to more collaboration between the two of us!

Fast Flow As A Strategy

Team Topologies is not strategy-agnostic. Its stated intent, a fast flow of change, is itself a strategic stance. I’ve written before that flow could be one of three agile strategies worth pursuing in its own right.

Strategy Deployment enters the picture by helping decide what to flow. Organisations almost always have more candidate flows than they have capacity to pursue. The TASTE X-Matrix offers a way to work through that choice using True North, Aspirations, Strategies, Tactics, Evidence, and their correlations. It gives an organisation a shared, visual account of which flows currently matter most, and why. And that’s not just the flow of each separate team, but also the flow of teams of teams, where multiple teams must coordinate and collaborate on some larger deliverable.

Fast flow is the goal, and Strategy Deployment helps to choose and evolve where to channel that flow.

Fracture Planes as Strategic Choices

One of the more interesting ideas in the book is the fracture plane. In Team Topologies, this is the natural seam along which to draw the lines between stream-aligned teams. Team Topologies offers several useful answers: business domain, regulatory compliance, change cadence, team location, and more.

The book doesn’t put it quite this way, but I’d argue that the choice of fracture plane is itself a strategic act. Aligning around one domain rather than another, for example, could be considered a bet about what matters most for the organisation right now. The decision shapes what teams focus on, what they leave to others, and what is deprioritised. Those are strategic choices, even if the fracture plane is described in structural terms. Wardley Mapping is one technique for doing this by visually assessing the current landscape, revealing strategic options and surfacing hidden assumptions, dependencies, or disagreements.

This is where Strategy Deployment also offers a complementary approach. The X-Matrix is a way to make the underlying elements of strategy and their relationships visible and coherent. Catchball engages a broad and diverse group in exploring and contributing a wide range of experiences and ideas. Continuous Strategy keeps it all under review as evidence accumulates for or against.

Fracture-plane thinking is a highly relevant and useful concept. What wraps around it is a way of clarifying the context and rationale behind the strategic choices transparently and collaboratively, and of regularly revisiting those choices as conditions change and new information comes to light.

Strategic Cognitive Load

Team Topologies’ use of cognitive load is one of its most compelling (and maybe controversial) contributions. The idea that a team’s effectiveness depends on whether it can hold its problem in mind might feel obvious, but it is rarely treated that way in practice.

I think something analogous matters at the organisational level, although I’ll acknowledge this is borrowing the term very loosely rather than applying it strictly. Organisations also have finite attention. They can only hold so many strategic bets in mind at once. Strategic focus, pursued well, manages that attention, and as I explored in an earlier post, Strategic Insouciance also keeps it from becoming too narrow.

Thus, Strategy Deployment creates both time and space for the strategic cognitive load. Not just for management, but also for those “closest to the problem” or “closest to the context“. It recognises strategic work as important for everyone rather than as an overhead, inconvenience, or irrelevance.

A Wrapper, and a Layer

I’m in two minds about whether to describe Strategy Deployment as a “wrapper” or as a “layer above” Team Topologies. Wrapping suggests practices that sit alongside Team Topologies and surround its team design work, rather than supervising it from a height. That feels closer to the spirit of the thing.

That said, “layer above” still works in one specific sense. As I’ve written previously about Strategy Deployment and Flight Levels, Flight Level 3 is the strategic level, above the coordination and operational levels. Strategy Deployment fits well at that level, looking across the team topology that operates beneath it. Level here is in the sense of a different scope rather than a different seniority. So I think “layer above” is fair, when used the way Flight Levels means it: a level of view, not a level of hierarchy.

A Continuous Dynamic

Hopefully I’ve been clear that none of this displaces Team Topologies. The book remains an excellent guide to how teams should be shaped and how they should interact, and it’s an approach to sensing, not strategy, that the model primarily provides.

What Strategy Deployment offers, then, is the emphasis the book leaves to one side. The response that complements continuous sensing has to be continuous itself. An organisation that senses constantly but responds only at annual planning won’t keep up. Thus, Continuous Strategy brings the regular rhythm and cadence to the response to match the sensing. And the sensing and responding combine to create an ongoing empirical strategic capability.

Team Topologies senses where change is needed. Strategy Deployment responds, continuously, with the necessary adaptation. Like two individual skilled dancers performing together, the combined dynamic can be greater than the sum of the parts.

I’ve noticed a shift in my own practice recently. With one organisation at the team level, I’ve tended to prefer micro-nudges more often than formal experiments. In other words, using small probes accompanied by signals to watch for, rather than formal hypotheses with success criteria. However, with the same organisation on more strategic business challenges, the formal experiment has felt more useful.

That’s worth examining. Generally, I have defaulted to “experiment” almost reflexively, though Backbriefing and Experiment A3s. State a hypothesis. Define what I would expect to see. Run it. Inspect the result. A clean PDSA loop that has served many people well. However, not everything needs that loop.

What a probe actually is

In Cynefin terms, a probe is the first move in the Complex domain. You can’t analyse your way to a useful next action because cause and effect aren’t visible until after the fact. So you do something safe-to-fail, watch what happens, and let the system’s response tell you what to do next. That is Probe – Sense – Respond.

A probe doesn’t have to be naive, though. It can be grounded in experience, informed by what’s worked in similar systems and what’s recognised as good practice elsewhere. But it doesn’t try to install that practice wholesale. Good practice from elsewhere is at most a hypothesis about a different system. The probe asks which element might land here, or what shift in context might move things closer to where a recognised good practice could take hold.

A probe doesn’t carry a hypothesis. It carries an intent and a set of signals, which are the things you’ll watch for that show whether the system is moving in a direction you find beneficial. Not “did X cause Y?” but “what shifts when we do this?” This sits naturally with the Vector Theory of Change. Rather than aiming at a defined end state, you describe where you are, and the direction you’d like to travel, and the probes nudge the system along. Signals tell you whether you’re moving along the right vector. And, more interestingly, what new possibilities have become possible from where you’ve ended up.

When hypotheses get in the way

At the team level, the moment I commit to a hypothesis, I risk narrowing what I’m willing to notice. The hypothesis becomes a flashlight pointed at one corner of the room, and the rest goes dark. Most of what’s interesting at this level is dispositional. Small shifts in how people work together, where attention falls, and what conversations become possible. Those things rarely show up where a hypothesis is pointing. They show up in your peripheral vision, and micro-nudges with signals leave that peripheral vision intact.

This connects to something I touched on in the recent SOAP notes post. Confirmation bias is a constant danger, and a formal hypothesis can quietly enforce the very bias the discipline of experimentation is meant to guard against if it excludes what counts as a relevant signal too early.

Where the experiment earns its keep

But the experiment isn’t wrong. It’s just not always right. At the organisational or business-unit level, the hypothesis may work better. It coordinates and rationalises by enabling a conversation about what we believe, what we’ll do to check assumptions, what we’ll see if we’re right, and what we’ll do next either way. In doing so, it forces clarity on what success looks like and makes the cost of the intervention transparent.

That formality also earns its keep when solving wicked problems and collaboratively building a portfolio of possible things to spend time on. When comparing potential bets and deciding what’s worth pursuing, the discipline of stating hypotheses and outcomes makes those conversations productive, because everyone is considering the same form of information. More broadly, strategic-level interventions usually involve too many stakeholders and too many entangled commitments to be run as undirected probes.

For very small, quick, cheap changes, though, that overhead is rarely worth paying. A probe with signals lets you act with much less ceremony, and you often learn just as much. In addition, the probes can then inform subsequent experiments.

Probes across teams (such as adjustments to work definition and workflow, WIP limits, entry and exit policies, cadences, and meetings) can be a form of distributed sensemaking. Each team explores locally, picking up signals (such as flow metrics, team health surveys, retrospective narratives, and conversations). Aggregate across enough teams and patterns surface that no single team could have seen alone. Those patterns inform the larger hypotheses and experiments at the strategic level (such as governance, team structures, and technology adoption). And it’s rarely a single experiment at that level: a strategic hypothesis often has several safe-to-fail experiments under it, each testing a different facet of the same bet.

Matching the approach to the context

So it’s not a case of probes versus experiments. It’s a question of matching the approach to the context. Probes work well for small, local, dispositional changes, where the cost of a single move is low, signals come back quickly, and peripheral vision matters more than a defined target. Experiments work well for the larger, more committed, more positional changes, where you need to coordinate, justify, and focus, and where the hypothesis is doing useful work for the organisation as well as for you.

Those size markers are useful shorthand, but they’re not really what’s doing the work. The experiment is still meant to be safe-to-fail. That is, not so large or expensive that being wrong creates real risk. What it requires more of than a probe is coordination and alignment: several people, possibly across functions, sharing an understanding of what’s being tested and what would count as a result. A small intervention that spans several teams or requires sponsor agreement might still call for an experiment; a large intervention in genuinely complex territory, contained within one team’s autonomy, might be better treated as a probe.

Through a Cynefin Lens

There’s another Cynefin framing too. Probes operate in the Complex domain, discovering what’s possible through action. Experiments can be more liminal, stabilising what the probes have surfaced and moving the system toward Complicated, where what was emergent can settle as recognised good practice. That direction isn’t always what you want, though: some parts of a system need to stay in Complex, and over-stabilising what should remain emergent is its own failure mode. Equally, something that has stabilised may no longer be appropriate and may need to shift back into being treated as Complex.

The mistake I was probably making before was defaulting to the experiment too readily. Some of those experiments might have been better as probes. I might have learned more, sooner, and with more variety, by treating them that way.

I have written before about the messy coherence of X-Matrix correlations and how the corner matrices represent correlation rather than causation. It is a point worth restating, because it is easy to forget once we start filling in the cells.

Spurious Correlations

Some of the most memorable lessons in statistics come from plainly absurd correlations. Tyler Vigen’s Spurious Correlations project has built a small comedic empire from them. Between 1999 and 2009, the number of Nicolas Cage films released each year tracks the number of people who drowned by falling into a swimming pool with uncanny accuracy. From the same article, per capita cheese consumption rises and falls with deaths by entanglement in bedsheets. As far as I know, no one has yet suggested that Leaving Las Vegas causes drownings, or that cheddar provokes a fatal struggle with one’s duvet. The correlations are real. The causations are not.

These examples are funny precisely because the connection is so obviously non-existent. But there is a more useful version of the same lesson, and that version is the one that matters when we look at an X-Matrix.

Associated, Not Causal

The classic example here is the correlation between ice cream sales and shark attacks. Both rise at the same time of year. Buying an ice cream does not cause anyone to be bitten by a shark. But the two are not unrelated either. They are bound up with each other, like the entwined threads in the above picture, indirectly connected by warmer weather, more swimming, and more people in the sea. The connection is real, even though it is not direct.

The useful consequence of that association is that one variable can serve as a signal of the other. If ice cream sales were rising sharply, you would have some reason to expect a busier season for the coastguard, even though selling fewer cones would do nothing to prevent the shark bites. The ice cream is not a cause. It is an early indicator that something connected to it is also changing.

This is the version that matters when we look at X-Matrix correlations.

Correlations On The X-Matrix

Applying this to X-Matrix correlations, take the lower, right corner where Evidence meets Aspirations. In a Lean Agile transformation, we might have an Aspiration to reduce time-to-market by 50%, and identify Evidence such as average lead time, the percentage of work completed within WIP limits, or the number of teams practising continuous delivery. Reading the X-Matrix clockwise, it is tempting to assume the Evidence will cause the Aspiration to be met. Drive down the lead time, and the time-to-market follows.

But the relationship is correlational, not causal. Reducing lead time does not cause faster time-to-market. Like ice-cream sales and shark bites, the two are bound up with each other. They are connected through the same underlying system: the way work is structured, how dependencies are managed, the technical practices in use, and the organisation’s willingness to release more often. Because of that association, a falling lead time becomes a useful early signal that time-to-market is likely to follow.

This is why Evidence and Aspirations are often described as leading and lagging indicators. The Evidence is what you can see early; the Aspiration is what you can see later. They move together because they are bound up with each other, not because one drives the other. Just like ice cream and the sharks.

Why This Distinction Matters

Treating the X-Matrix correlations as causations risks two failure modes.

The first is gaming, the leading measure. If you believe lead time directly causes time-to-market, then driving down lead time becomes the goal in itself. Teams find ways to shorten lead time without changing the underlying system. They might split tickets smaller, redefine what counts as done, or start the clock later. The leading measure improves. The lagging measure does not. The association has broken down, and the signal becomes meaningless.

The second is mistaking a coincidence for an association. Not every measure that moves alongside the Aspiration is genuinely bound up with it. Some leading indicators look like ice cream sales but are closer to Nicolas Cage films. In other words, they share a trend with the Aspiration without any real underlying connection. Treating them as signals of progress is reading meaning into noise.

Looking For Coherence, Not Cause

What X-Matrix correlations are really doing, then, is not laying out a chain of causes but exploring a web of associations. We are saying we believe these things hang together. And we are saying if we see this Evidence, we will have reason to think we are making progress towards that Aspiration. What we are not saying is that one makes the other happen.

This is why messy coherence matters more than a tidy causal story. A clean cause-and-effect explanation is reassuring, but in a complex organisation, it tends to be wrong. A coherent set of associations is more honest. It treats the visible measures as signals of deeper structural and behavioural shifts, and keeps inviting us to look for them.

Nicolas Cage and the swimming pools are funny because the connection is plainly nothing. The ice cream and the sharks are useful because, although neither causes the other, the two are genuinely bound up with each other. Enough that one can serve as a signal of the other. The X-Matrix correlations sit closer to the second example. The correlations are real, the associations are real, and the system we are trying to change is what holds them all together.

In an earlier post, I explored strategy as a form of enabling constraint, with enough boundary to create alignment, and enough width to allow creative and adaptive action. More recently, I’ve been thinking about the five Flight Levels Activities as a form of enabling constraint. Each one (Visualize the Situation, Create Focus, Establish Agile Interactions, Measure Progress, and Operate and Improve) describes a space within which teams have the freedom to perform.

Thus, the Flight Levels Activities work the same way. And like ski slopes, each one can be set too tight or too loose. That connection to ski slopes isn’t accidental. A while back, I wrote about process safeguards and ski slopes, exploring how different processes have different levels of safeguard built in, and how the right level depends on the skill, trust, and maturity of the team involved. A nursery slope has wide, forgiving boundaries with lots of room to make mistakes without consequence. A black run is tight and demanding, with little margin for error, and high precision is required. Off-piste has almost no boundaries at all, and rewards only those capable of navigating without them.

The metaphor works because ski slopes don’t just restrict movement. They also create the conditions for skilful performance within a defined space. The same is true of the Flight Levels Activities. Let’s explore each of them from this perspective.

Visualise the Situation

Making the current situation visible, such as workflows, priorities, metrics, and plans, is the foundation of everything else. As a constraint, it defines what information people have access to when they make decisions. Too tight and visibility is restricted; too loose and there’s so much visible that nothing stands out.

Create Focus

WIP limits, time boxes, sequencing, and start policies help concentrate effort on what matters most. As a constraint, this activity defines the scope of what people are expected to be working on at any one time. But focus isn’t just about limiting what’s started. It’s about driving work through to Done, where Done means realising value and meeting user needs, or learning about how to do that better. Too tight and focus becomes control; too loose and everything is in progress simultaneously, with little actually finishing.

Establish Agile Interactions

Standups, planning sessions, demos, retrospectives, and decisions about asynchronous communication all fall here. As a constraint, this activity defines the cadence and structure of connections across the system. Too tight and interactions become ritual; too loose and coordination breaks down.

Measure Progress

Tracking progress against goals, and being willing to update both the goals and the measures as learning accumulates, is what closes the loop between intention and reality. As a constraint, it defines what counts as evidence that things are working. Too tight and teams optimise for the measure; too loose and there’s no way to tell whether anything is improving.

Operate and Improve

This activity is about actually using what the system produces, and not just generating data, but letting learning flow back into the work. As a constraint, it defines the expectation that people will act on what they learn within the scope of their work. Too tight and the loop is visible but broken; too loose and learning stays local.

Adjusting the Constraints

As I noted in the enabling constraints post, neither too tight nor too loose is inherently wrong. Instead, the question is always whether the current constraints are appropriate for the current context. The right balance depends on the experience and maturity of the people involved, the volatility of the environment, and which of the Flight Levels you’re working with.

Strategy Deployment, at its heart, is the practice of setting and adjusting these kinds of constraints across the organisation to create alignment without removing the thinking. The five Flight Levels Activities offer a useful map of where the constraints could sit. However, the question worth asking regularly isn’t “are we doing these Flight Levels Activities?” It’s “are the constraints we’ve set here creating the right space?” A team that has a board but never acts on what it shows is technically visualising their work. But if the constraint is too tight or too loose, the activity won’t do the work it’s meant to do.

What if too much focus is counter-productive? I’ve been thinking about the tension between Strategic Focus and what I’m calling Strategic Insouciance. Strategic Focus is the deliberate concentration of effort on the critical few things that matter. However, Strategic Insouciance is the willingness to keep peripheral attention alive, leave some slack in the system, and resist the pressure to drive every initiative to completion before starting something new. The right balance between the two isn’t fixed. It shifts with context. And getting it wrong in either direction can kill emergent strategy.

The Man Who Frittered Away His Genius

I was listening to an episode of Tim Harford’s Cautionary Tales recently, about the mathematician and “father of information theory” Claude Shannon. Shannon is perhaps the most important scientist most people have never heard of. He essentially invented the theoretical foundations of the digital age.

And then he spent much of the rest of his career juggling, riding a unicycle around Bell Labs, building a robot mouse, designing a flame-throwing trumpet, and, when a young mathematician called Ed Thorpe came to him with a plan to beat roulette, spending months building the world’s first wearable computer and taking it to Las Vegas.

One reaction to this story is that Shannon lost focus. Surely someone of his genius should have pressed on and made more great discoveries.

Harford describes a different view. Shannon wasn’t frittering. He was doing what many highly creative people do: holding multiple threads simultaneously, following curiosity wherever it led, and declaring victory at whatever point suited him, without regret and without completion bias. Harford calls this quality insouciance. Shannon wasn’t worried about unfinished work. He could move on whenever he liked.

The Case for WIP Limits

The tension with Focus is obvious. Focus is one of the 10 qualities of continuous strategy I described in the Scrum Guide Expansion Pack strategy appendix, and it is important. Concentrated effort helps create a breakthrough, whereas scattered effort barely makes a dent. In Lean and Agile terms, the logic is straightforward: limit work in process and you create focus, reduce context switching, and stop priorities getting lost in the noise.

But the guide is also careful not to frame Focus (or any of the qualities) as a virtue to maximise. It’s a diagnostic. And it includes a specific caution: “balance deep focus with peripheral awareness: create mechanisms for scanning weak signals, emerging threats, and unexpected opportunities through exploration time and diverse sensing networks. Too narrow a focus risks disruption; too broad an attention dilutes effectiveness.”

That’s the tension in a sentence, and that’s why Strategic Insouciance is also needed.

WIP-Limiting Emergence

Emergence (another of the ten qualities) describes how strategy adapts through learning: probing the environment, sensing patterns, and responding to what actually works rather than what was originally planned. However, if your WIP limit at the strategy level is so tight that there’s no slack, no peripheral awareness, and no room for the unexpected, then you’ve also WIP-limited your capability for emergence. You’ve optimised for executing the strategy you already have, at the expense of discovering the strategy you might actually need.

Shannon’s robot mouse might have been a genuine step toward artificial intelligence if he’d persisted. His early genetic algebra might have advanced that field by decades. He dropped both. But the same insouciance that let him drop those threads is probably also what let him pick up information theory with the energy and freshness he gave it.

Getting the Balance Right

The right balance between Strategic Focus and Strategic Insouciance isn’t formulaic and fixed. It shifts with context. Early in a strategic cycle, when direction is still forming and the environment is being explored, more insouciance makes sense. This involves keeping options open, sensing weak signals, and letting patterns emerge. Later, when a promising direction has been identified and coherence matters, a sharper focus is called for. And then, when disruption threatens, a shift back to insouciance is required. And so on. The TASTE X-Matrix can help make that balance visible: the Evidence section in particular invites us to ask what we’re learning, not just what we’re delivering. And further, whether what we’re learning should be shifting where our focus sits.

The cautionary tale Tim Harford draws from Shannon isn’t a warning to lose focus. It’s a warning not to focus so completely that you lose the freedom to change course. The goal isn’t maximum focus. It’s enough focus, but with enough space to allow something better to still get in.

Some of the most useful insights come from making connections across apparently unrelated disciplines. I first heard Jeff Patton mention medical SOAP notes many years ago, and he reminded me of them again in a recent conversation. What strikes me the most is how much they have in common with Strategy Deployment and the TASTE X-Matrix.

What Is A SOAP Note?

SOAP is a structured format that clinicians use to document patient care. Developed in the 1960s, it remains a widely used clinical note-taking framework. The acronym stands for:

• Subjective – the patient’s complaint and context in their own words
• Objective – the clinician’s observations, examinations, and measurable data
• Assessment – the diagnosis that connects the subjective and objective evidence
• Plan – the immediate next steps for treatment

The purpose of SOAP Notes is to create a cognitive framework for clinical reasoning that links the treatment plan back to the reason for seeking care. Anyone reading the notes should be able to understand the rationale and relevance of the care provided.

The Structural Parallel With TASTE

What interests me is how the elements of SOAP Notes map onto the elements of TASTE and the X-Matrix.

• Subjective and Objective are Evidence. In a SOAP note, the Subjective section captures qualitative data – the patient’s own experience, their description of symptoms, and their history. The Objective section captures quantitative data – vital signs, test results, clinical findings. Together, they represent two complementary kinds of evidence. In the TASTE X-Matrix, Evidence is the outcomes that indicate progress. The SOAP format reminds us that good evidence has both a subjective and an objective dimension. We need the qualitative narrative of how things are experienced as well as the quantitative measures of what is observed.

• Assessment is Diagnosis. The SOAP Assessment is where the clinician connects the dots between the evidence to arrive at a diagnosis. This maps directly to Rumelt’s diagnosis – the understanding of the critical challenge being faced. In Strategy Deployment, I have generally considered diagnosis as a step between Aspirations and Strategy, and more recently have been exploring how the Crux sits at the heart of the X-Matrix. In both SOAP and Strategy Deployment, the assessment or diagnosis is the creative, analytical work of making sense of what the evidence is telling us.

• Plan is Strategies and Tactics. The SOAP Plan describes the immediate next steps for treatment. In TASTE, Strategies are the guiding policies that enable choice, and Tactics are the coherent actions we will take. Together, these describe the approach and the work, which is exactly what a treatment plan does.

The Direction Of Flow

The mapping is interesting, but there is something more insightful going on. In SOAP Notes, the direction of flow is from evidence to action. The clinician begins by gathering evidence – listening to the patient (Subjective) and making observations (Objective) – and this evidence then drives the Assessment and the Plan. A clinician who starts with a Plan and then looks for evidence to support it would be practising dangerously.

This resonates with something I have already been exploring in the Order of the X-Matrix. When populating an X-Matrix in practice, I work through Evidence before Tactics. The reason is to avoid confirmation bias. The risk of discussing Tactics before Evidence is that the Evidence identified becomes biased towards confirming that those Tactics are working. By identifying Evidence first, the conversation becomes about exploring what Tactics might generate the Evidence, rather than what Evidence might validate the Tactics.

The SOAP format reinforces and extends this principle. In SOAP Notes, not only does evidence come before the plan, but the evidence also drives the diagnosis. The Subjective and Objective sections exist to ensure that the clinician has thoroughly understood the situation before jumping to an Assessment or Plan.

This is consistent with the idea that strategy is based on challenge rather than goals. Rumelt is clear that before we decide on goals and actions, we need to understand the situation. The SOAP format embodies this. We should be starting with what we are observing and experiencing – both the qualitative (what people are telling us) and the quantitative (what the data shows) – and allowing that evidence to drive the diagnosis, the strategy, and the tactics.

Implications For Practice

There are three practical takeaways from this comparison.

First, it provides independent validation that the Order of the X-Matrix – working through Evidence before Tactics – is the right instinct. SOAP Notes have been doing this for many years, putting evidence before action. The SOAP distinction between Subjective and Objective is additionally helpful here. Are we listening to what people are telling us (the organisational equivalent of the patient’s own words) as well as looking at the data?

Second, it highlights the importance of the diagnostic step. In SOAP Notes, the Assessment is the critical bridge between evidence and action. In Strategy Deployment, the diagnosis or Crux serves the same function. Skipping this step – going straight from evidence to action, or worse, from aspiration to action – is the equivalent of a clinician prescribing treatment without a diagnosis.

Third, the enduring popularity of SOAP suggests there is something powerful about a simple, structured format that creates coherence. The correlations on the X-Matrix serve a similar purpose, ensuring that every element can be traced back to its rationale. Both SOAP and the X-Matrix are designed so that anyone picking them up can quickly understand what is going on and why.

It is reassuring to find that practitioners in a completely different field have independently arrived at a similar structure. And it is a useful confirmation that the direction of flow matters – starting with the evidence, not the plan.

While the primary value in an X-Matrix comes from the conversations and collaborations that take place while populating it, at some point, there will be a need to communicate and socialise the content. I mentioned this in my post about Three Quick Tips for Better X-Matrix Communication. However, the most powerful way of communication is through strategic storytelling.

I often see the communication of strategy disconnected from the X-Matrix, even after one has been created. The X-Matrix is used as a separate artefact, which results in much of its power being lost. The X-Matrix can actually provide the core structure for strategic storytelling. In other words, it should be at the heart of the communication. That’s not to say that the X-Matrix needs to be presented as a document. Instead, the core elements and language used in any narrative should be consistent and recognisable with those in the X-Matrix.

There are two primary or basic ways to tell the strategic story with the X-Matrix.

Forwards

This approach to Strategic Storytelling starts with what we are doing now, and describes what we hope will happen as a result. The flow is:

• What are the current projects and initiatives we are prioritising? What investments are we making? i.e., the Tactics.
• Why have we chosen those Tactics? What critical challenges do we expect them to solve? i.e., the Strategies.
• How will we know whether the Strategies, and by extension the Tactics, are working? Are we solving our strategic challenges? i.e., the Evidence.
• Why is it important to solve those strategic challenges? What do we hope to achieve, and what direction do we want to progress in? i.e., the Aspirations and True North.

Thus, telling the story forward uses the TASTE framework “top-down”. Tactics – Strategies – Evidence – Aspirations – True North. A slight variation of this style is to swap Strategies and Evidence.

Backwards

The alternative approach to Strategic Storytelling is to start at the end of the story with what success will look like, and work back to how we will get there. This flow is:

• What direction do we want to progress in, and what do we hope to achieve? i.e., the True North and Aspirations.
• What critical challenges do we need to overcome to move forward? What is stopping us? i.e. the Strategies
• How will we know whether our Strategies are working? What will we see if we overcome those strategic challenges? i.e., the Evidence.
• What are we going to do to implement the Strategies and generate the Evidence? What are we prioritising and investing in? i.e. the Tactics

Thus, telling the story backward uses the TASTE framework “bottom-up”. True North – Aspirations – Strategies – Evidence – Tactics.

And More

These are just two simple approaches. TASTE is a framework to help understand (and visualise) the relationships and coherence between different elements. Those elements can be used in any order. It’s not a linear process. So you could start at the end with True North and Aspirations, jump to the beginning with Tactics, and then join them together with Strategies and Evidence. Or start with the Strategies if you want to set the scene with the present context and critical challenges.

Thus, the X-Matrix isn’t an add-on to illustrate your strategic story; it’s the core structure behind your strategic storytelling. The A3 format and the order in which you tell the story are less important. What will resonate is making the different elements of TASTE clear, along with the relationships between them.

The Scrum Guide Expansion Pack was first released in June 2025, and I was one of several people to provide feedback. In particular, my suggestion was to improve the way that strategy was defined and described. That led to further conversations and eventually an opportunity to create a separate document that focused solely on Strategy and Strategy Deployment, or Continuous Strategy.

The goal was to provide a high-level summary and overview of what Scrum Teams would find useful to know about Continuous Strategy. Scrum, and the original Scrum Guide, is deliberately incomplete, and the intent is not make strategy part of Scrum. However, by creating the document, we can offer some pointers to relevant topics, tools, and techniques that may help Scrum Teams be more effective.

The team behind the expansion pack (Jeff Sutherland, John Coleman, and Ralph Jocham) published the document last week.

The content was created by brainstorming and then theming the various ideas to be included. The result was 10 qualities of Continuous Strategy, as shown in the image. Note that they are not qualities to always dial up to eleven (“Extreme Strategy”). Instead, they are qualities with which to assess and improve strategy. You may choose to increase or decrease a quality depending on circumstance.

The Ten Qualities

Those qualities are (with the number being for reference, but not linearity):

1. Intent – does the strategy provide direction without dictating solutions?
2. Context – is the strategy unique to specific conditions?
3. Focus – does the strategy focus on how to win?
4. Coherence – does the strategy align work for maximum impact
5. Quantification – can the pursuit of the strategy be visible and measurable?
6. Decisions – does the strategy enable choices of what to do, and what not to do?
7. Learning – does the strategy enable and create new knowledge and insights?
8. Emergence – does the strategy adapt as a result of new learning?
9. Participation – does the strategy mobilise collective intelligence and experience?
10. Durability – will the strategy survive leadership changes?

The SHAPE of Continuous Strategy

If you’re eagle-eyed, you’ll also notice that those qualities are also grouped into pairs to form the acronym SHAPE. This provides a nice way of helping remember the qualities, and I like the idea of SHAPEing strategy as an active exercise, rather than a one-off static event.

• Sense – Intent and Context
• Harmonise – Focus and Coherence
• Assess – Quantification and Decisions
• Pivot – Learning and Emergence
• Empower – Participation and Durability

This document will continue to evolve and improve over time. There are already a number of updates I want to make. If you have any feedback, you can leave a comment here or start a discussion on the main GitHub site

I’m pleased to be able to announce that I will be running a training course in partnership with ProKanban on Aligning Transformation and Strategy. I started this blog with primarily Kanban content, and I’m a big advocate of ProKanban’s approach and content. My Kanban work led me to learn more about Lean, which his how I discovered and started focusing more on Strategy Deployment.

In discussion with the ProKanban team, we agreed that there was a strong synergy between all our content. And that a Strategy Deployment course would sit well alongside the existing ProKanban curriculum. Their existing courses are excellent for delivery, flow and associated metrics; my course covers how to implement that as part of a strategic transformation.

Therefore, if you have already taken a ProKanban class or are even a ProKanban trainer, this will complement and expand on what you have already done. And even if you haven’t, then you’ll still find it valuable!

The course is run over the following 2 days:

• Tue 30th Sep, 14:00-18:00 BST
• Wed 1st Oct, 14:00-18:00 BST

Book tickets now!

Here are some more details about this Aligning Transformation and Strategy class.

Overview

• Are you looking to engage everyone in your strategic transformation more fully?
• Do you want your teams to be focused on the most impactful and strategic work?
• Have you questioned whether your strategic transformation efforts are making a difference?

This workshop is designed for anyone who has considered these critical questions or seeks to empower their organisation to address them effectively.

Through this course, you will gain the skills to visualise the alignment and coherence of your strategy with transformation efforts, ensuring that all team members are engaged and contributing meaningfully.

You will learn how to collaboratively populate an X-Matrix that encapsulates your long-term True North and Aspirations, outlines the Strategies to achieve these goals, details actionable Tactics, and establishes Evidence of progress.

Course Details

Engage your team and invite them to be active participants in your organisational transformation through effective Strategy Deployment. 

Coming Soon: Upon completing the course, you will have the opportunity to validate your understanding of Aligning Transformation with Strategy through an online assessment. This assessment evaluates your knowledge and provides insights into areas for improvement. Upon passing, you will receive the ProKanban “Aligning Transformation with Strategy” (ATS) certification and badge through Credly.

Outcomes

Learn how to lead outcome-oriented, continuous transformations that engage everyone across your organisation, where innovative ideas for improvements can emerge from those closest to the challenges.

Topics

This workshop introduces the TASTE framework for Strategy Deployment, covering the essential elements of True North, Aspirations, Strategies, Tactics, and Evidence. You will utilise the X-Matrix to visualise alignment and coherence, fostering a shared understanding among all stakeholders.

Audience

This course is designed for senior leaders responsible for strategy or transformation, as well as program and portfolio leaders who ensure alignment with strategic objectives. It also caters to roles such as engineering leaders, agile coaches, program managers, and product managers, equipping them with the tools necessary for effective strategy execution.

If you need help aligning transformation and strategy, book tickets now!