23/3/2025 ☼ strategy ☼ affect ☼ emotion ☼ cognition ☼ discomfort ☼ uncertainty
This is #3 in a series on seven tensions that lead to common misunderstandings about strategy.
Good strategy understands affect, not just cognition.
When doing strategy work, what most often gets emphasised is the highly cognitive stuff: Developing analytical frameworks, collecting data, testing hypotheses. The thinking, cognitive side of strategy-making is crucial. But paying so much attention to the cognitive work of strategy leads us to mistake strategy for being only about cognition.
In fact, for strategy to be good, it must also understand affect and how it affects cognition and action.1 (Affect is the experience of feelings in general, which can be quite diffuse. Emotion is part of affect and is more intense and usually directed at something specific.)
Ignoring affect creates real problems for strategy-making and implementation:
Ignoring affect creates problems. But taking affect seriously improves strategy-making by:
Unacknowledged affect in the strategy-making process ends up distorting strategy.
Kodak is a good example. In the 1970s, Kodak dominated the photography industry. In 1975, a Kodak engineer invented the first digital camera — but filmless digital cameras were an uncomfortable product because they were clearly antithetical to the company’s existing business in photographic film. Kodak leadership decided to avoid this uncomfortable potential line of business to continue focusing on the well-understood, comfortable film business. Rivals which didn’t find digital cameras uncomfortable entered the market, transformed the photography industry, and left Kodak behind. It went bankrupt in 2012.
A strategic and existential threat that is uncomfortable is actually one that is more important to account for in strategy-making. Acknowledging affect in strategy-making can take many forms. Here are a few of them:
Acknowledging affect in strategy-making makes it harder for organisations to avoid inconvenient but important truths and also encourages more adaptive, reality-based strategy-making.
Affect and emotion don’t just shape the strategy-making process. They also shape the execution of strategy.
Change is disruptive. Even when a strategy is well-reasoned and necessary, it forces people to abandon familiar ways of working and do new things. Novelty and uncertainty provoke feelings of anxiety, frustration, or outright resistance. People who feel unsettled by change are less likely to support it — and more likely to slow it down or try to block it. Strategy that fails to acknowledge these kinds of responses is much harder to successfully implement.
Some approaches to strategy that acknowledge affect include:
These approaches are part of what I call “sneaky strategies.” Unlike big, top-down strategic plans that look great on boardroom slides but get stuck in execution, sneaky strategies work by avoiding friction and slipping past organizational defenses.
They’re effective because they acknowledge how affect shapes peoples’ actions and reactions. Instead of triggering fear, anger, or resistance, their aim is to make change feel tolerable, natural, or even invisible. They work with, not against, the realities of how people and organizations respond to disruption.
Strategy isn’t just about cognition: The best strategy-making accounts for affect too. Doing this improves strategy in two critical ways:
Strategy that ignores affect struggles to work in practice. Strategy that acknowledges affect is both better and easier to implement.
If this view on strategy resonates with you, let’s talk about making it work in your organisation.
I’ve been working on tools for learning how to turn discomfort into something productive. idk is the first of these tools.
And I’ve spent the last 15 years investigating how organisations can design themselves to be good at working in uncertainty by clearly distinguishing it from risk.
There’s been quite a lot of research on affect and cognition. Especially relevant here are Jenny Yiend’s review of research on how emotion affects memory, and Isabelle Blanchette’s review of research on how affect influences interpretation, judgment, and decision-making — both in Cognition and emotion: Reviews of current research and theories (2010).↩︎