Moments of Impact

“Messy, Open-Ended and Ill-Defined”

The fact-based film Moneyball stars Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, the general manager of the major league Oakland Athletics baseball team. The team is in big trouble because its top three stars have moved on to wealthier teams. Frustrated, Beane sits in a conference room with his talent scouts who are all old-school practitioners and conventional thinkers. They rehash traditional ideas about how to find new talent.

Beane didn’t want to have a conventional meeting. He wanted to engage in an energetic, strategic conversation. On the surface, Beane and his scouts seemed to focus on the same issue: figuring out how to put together a talented team. But in reality, they did not. Beane understood that to win, the team had to pursue a new tactical course. He recognized that it confronted an “adaptive challenge” – a messy, open-ended and ill-defined situation calling for imaginative, original problem solving.

No single strategic conversation can solve an adaptive challenge, but that’s the right tactic. Ertel and Solomon provide a power tour of examples of strategic conversations that accelerate leadership teams’ ability to generate...