In his St. Gallen Topic Brief, Prof. Simon Grand outlines two ways in which management relates to freedom and invites decision-makers to reflect on how they may promote free thought and action within and outside their organisation.

Connecting the St. Gallen Symposium’s discussion on “freedom” to “management” invites us to reflect on management from an unconventional perspective. It provides the opportunity for managers and management researchers to rethink taken-for-granted expectations and ideas on management practice, on managerial impact and performance, or on the relevance of management from a societal perspective.

In this essay, I distinguish two dimensions in which management relates to freedom: (1) managing in freedom and (2) managing for freedom.

The first relates to processes and practices within an organisation, strengthening freedom of thought and action of employees and executives. The second focuses on how management engages for organisational value creation which protects and promotes the freedom of external stakeholders. In both dimensions, we identify ways in which leaders and executives, managers and entrepreneurs, can contribute.

Managing in Freedom: Creating and Protecting Spaces for Reflection and Action

We start with an important puzzle: We often assume that leaders have the freedom to decide and to act. Otherwise we would not talk about the “powerful” who meet to discuss how to solve important problems or change the course of today’s world. And we would not address people “at the top” of organisations and institutions as those having real impact and equivalent responsibility.

At the same time, economic, technological, political and societal developments are portrayed and experienced as a “force of nature” and as inevitable. We thus both over-estimate and under-estimate the impact, freedom and capacity of managers to decide, to act and to make a difference in a complex world.

How can managers, executives and leaders foster and protect freedom within their organisations and institutions, including their own freedom to think, to decide and to act?

Strengthening and sustaining the premises of managerial engagement

Creating, developing, governing and changing organisations and institutions and their course of action require space for free managerial engagement – as well as the establishment and protection of the premises for such engagement.

Often, important strategic decisions are not taken because it’s not possible to mobilise the community of executives and managers necessary to realise the strategy. Many important topics and opportunities are not addressed because they do not gain the attention and enter the agenda of an organisation. Furthermore, management sometimes lacks the necessary practices and platforms to appropriately reflect, discuss and sharpen an issue or option. And sometimes, the language is lacking to formulate, address and discuss an opportunity or an issue in a way that it can consistently be explored.

Managing in freedom requires to mobilise the relevant executive communities, shape the agenda, and establish the practices, platforms and language necessary to critically reflect, collectively decide and systemically enact the entrepreneurial advancement of an organisation.

Experimenting with alternative futures in the face of uncertainty

Leaders, executives and managers face multiple uncertainties and ambiguities concerning both the present and the future: How, for example, do we have to re-think the co-evolution of economy, society and nature? How will digitalisation transform value creation? How do we collectively judge the attractiveness and desirability of possible futures?

We can distinguish multiple uncertainties: concerning the future; concerning the capability of an organisation to move in new directions; concerning the resources necessary to realise a specific course of action; as well as concerning how competitors or partners see these uncertainties. To enable robust interpretations, decisions and actions in light of uncertainties, it is important to experiment with alternative possibilities.

Specific hypotheses, concrete action and fast feedback can help us to better cope with uncertainty. For this purpose, it’s important to create and establish protected spaces to systematically experiment with and explore alternative possibilities. Attractive alternatives emerging from such experimentation and exploration enlarge and enrich management’s entrepreneurial freedom to think and to act.

In this context, a fundamental, but also challenging insight for management practice is to accept that not everything can be proactively designed, defined and guided, but requires indirect action, careful curation and mindful orchestration.

Allocating resources and developing capabilities as preconditions for the freedom to act

To experiment under uncertainty, enact attractive alternatives and open new action spaces, we need the resources and capabilities necessary to realise and scale promising new opportunities.

Managing in freedom requires access to relevant financial and non-financial resources to invest in and scale experiments and alternatives within and beyond the organisation. This also includes precise information and relevant knowledge to understand challenges and opportunities, with implications for our consideration of digitalisation, access to data and talent, as well as recurrent learning opportunities. And it requires institutions which enable an appropriate representation of heterogeneous interests.

Ultimately, access to resources and capabilities shapes the power of individuals, collectives and organisations to freely decide and to act: how do we ensure a fair distribution of information, resources, capabilities and thus power to realising freedom to think, to decide and to act? We cannot address questions of freedom in this respect without relating them to a careful balance of power and knowledge, which shapes the competition for resources.

This implies the systematic invitation to reflect, question and change the established, un-questioned order of things, including the distribution of resources and capabilities, as well as the taken-for-granted processes of resource mobilisation and resource allocation.

Managing for Freedom: Creating and Sustaining Action Spaces for Stakeholders

As executives, managers and entrepreneurs, we can ask a fundamental question: does the current and future value creation of our private organisation or public institution increase the freedom of our customers, investors and other stakeholders? Or does it rather limit, reduce or close their capacity for free thought, decision and action?

This question is at the heart of many controversies: about business models which operate through a lock-in into specific technological platforms; about the (in-)transparency of data collection and use by private companies and public institutions; or about the legacies of current decisions for future generations. Many products, services, and business models are framed as enhancing freedom and self-fulfilment, while actually increasing dependence and constraint. New forms of self-employment and project work are presented as enlarging flexibility and self-determination, while in reality they often undermine stability and security. And in many cases, decisions and actions have consequences for people and communities who are not directly addressed, but indirectly concerned.

Creating value which inspires the freedom of customers, owners and other stakeholders

This indicates an important possibility for managers to engage for freedom beyond their own organisation and management practice: to what extent do our value creation and related business models increase the freedom of those directly addressed or indirectly concerned?

It’s essential to enable value creation which advances the freedom to think, to decide and to act of customers, investors and other stakeholders. In this light, recent attempts such as customer-centric service design, ways of developing new products in cooperation with customers, or funding models involving the customers in the actual financing of new solutions can be seen as protecting and enlarging the freedom and impact of customers.

Similar ideas can be developed in relation to owners, partners or suppliers. Increasing their freedom to act of course transforms the mutual dependencies between an organisation and its stakeholders and might decrease one’s own power position in a short-term perspective. However, such ways of managing for freedom can be essential to keep the ecosystem of relevant stakeholders competitive, creative and responsible, strengthening the position of important partners, and making stakeholder relationships more reliable and resilient.

Systematically considering and shaping alternative societal developments

We suggest to explore how organisations and institutions are embedded in broader economic, technological, cultural and societal contexts. On the one hand, organisations and institutions are always already in place and running. Important developments are ongoing, self-organising and beyond management’s influence. Or they are determined by historical path-dependencies and other political, cultural and societal developments.

At the same time, we can claim the possibility for organisations and their management to reflect and criticise, shape and change such developments: they are not just “self-evident” and “natural”. Talking about freedom implies to assume the possibility of shaping how the economic, societal or political context evolves, and to view leadership and management as practices, which can have impact beyond a specific organisation. Exploring technological scenarios, changing how companies are organised, reflecting what “values” are promoted in current and future value creation are entrepreneurial topics with relevance for the broader societal context beyond a single organisation.

Several questions can inspire such a perspective on management practice: How do future action spaces differ with respect to what is impossible, what is not-yet-possible, what is desirable, what is already possible but unrealised, from a societal viewpoint? How do different time horizons affect what is possible and desirable: what we cannot change now might become possible in five years, or in fifteen years? How do we value future possibilities in relation to current investments in terms of increasing the freedom of decision and action?

Sustaining the freedom of choice for future generations

Among the most affected stakeholders of an organisation and its management are future generations. Their freedom to choose and to act is substantially determined by our valuation of current developments, opportunities and possibilities, and shaped by the models, investments and commitments we establish now.

In this context, “future generation” can have different meanings: the younger generation that aspires to be involved in relevant decision-making processes; social movements that search for alternative ways of gaining impact and relevance; not-yet-born generations which will develop their own agendas and ambitions, and will need the necessary preconditions (institutions, resources, competences, …) to do so freely; new types of enterprises which look beyond existing business, investment and financing models; neglected societies and communities, and their young generation.

Two questions for management practice can trigger productive perspectives in this context: Do we see unrealised projects that deserve more attention and investment? What if not(-yet)-possible initiatives are addressed as if they were possible? While these questions are well established in the creative economies for example, they deserve more attention in other industries and contexts as well.

Recurrently asking these questions allows to critically reflect the status quo, to generate valuable, desirable alternatives and to sustain the conditions necessary for future generations to be free in their decisions and actions.

Concluding Remarks

As Judith Walls argues in her St. Gallen Topic Brief, we need to “act now to retain future options”, and thus enable freedom of choice of future generations. Management can play an important role in this perspective. Ultimately, this implies that engaging for freedom always also means to engage for the freedom of others.

At the same time, this requires management practice to engage in freedom, and to strengthen the organisational and institutional premises to protect and develop freedom of thought and action. It requires to engage in relation to different time horizons. And it requires not to take freedom as self-evident, but as something we have to recurrently create, protect, and advance. In the tradition of the St. Gallen Management Model, this requires strong manager communities, dedicated design practices and platforms, and a language of reflection, which allows to articulate and explore the different aspects of freedom discussed.

In all these dimensions, the current interest in entrepreneurial initiatives and the related mindset of “entrepreneuring” come as no surprise. A multitude of entrepreneurial modes – economic entrepreneurship, scientific entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, political entrepreneurship, cultural entrepreneurship, etc. – are currently discussed. This can be seen as an indicator that many individuals, collectives and networks search for alternative businesses, alternative ways of doing business, or alternatives to doing business as a way to advance societies and to realise and protect their freedom to think, to decide and to act.

Prof. Simon Grand