What great minds see clearly about the whole business

Begin with a rough design

Leonardo da Vinci's approach to painting, where he'd start with a rough sketch and build layers to create depth, can be applied to business problem-solving and strategy development.

Here's the analogy: start with the core idea. That may be how one can create an innovative product that solves a pressing customer problem in a way no one has thought of before. Leonardo’s notebooks are filled with a wealth of initial sketches. That was his way of defining what he wanted to achieve. Today, we would call this visualisation.

Gradually, Leonardo would build layers. Adding layers of paint is like developing small test pilots and approaches to address the problem. Then he would continually blend and refine.

Leonardo’s sfumato technique is like continually testing and refining your strategy based on feedback and results. Sfumato is Italian for smoke. The technique, perfected by Leonardo, involves applying numerous microscopically thin, translucent oil paint layers to create hazy, smoky transitions between colors and tones, eliminating harsh outlines. The result is a dreamlike, three-dimensional, and mysterious effect, seen in his paintings such as the Mona Lisa and Virgin of the Rocks.

Leonardo would always refine his approach in stages. Sometimes over days, weeks and often over years. He was always looking at the big picture, considering multiple layers and perspectives. The essence of his method was based on curiosity, constant creativity and experimentation.

Learning from history

Surprises are a constant. What is certain is a climate of uncertainty. Now we have the US-Israeli war against Iran, which risks escalating into a regional conflict, with consequences extending far beyond the Middle East.

Impact on the systems of businesses in Kenya and East Africa will not be subtle. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," advised the philosopher George Santayana.

“On May 10, 1940, the German army began an offensive that in 10 days saw it move through Belgium and Holland to the French Coast. Soon France fell and Britain was alone. Yet Britain continued to fight when its position appeared hopeless,” writes Lawrence Freedman in Strategy: A History.

Did Winston Churchill, the wartime prime minister, have some brilliant, detailed, step-by-step master plan when it looked like Britain was soon to face invasion and possible defeat—one that could have changed the course of Western civilisation? Or did Churchill, being a keen painter himself, have an image of what had to be achieved, working out the tentative details as he went along?

“Churchill could have no idea at the time about likely course of the war. Churchill did not think of strategy as blue print for victory. He knew that the course of a war could not be predicted and the steps to victory might not be discerned until they were about to be taken. He distrusted ‘cut and dried calculations’ on how wars would be won. For him, strategy was very much an art and not a science – indeed so art-like as to be close to painting,” writes Freedman.

Working from inside out

Being like Leonardo, and observing what happens on the Kenyan business scene one sees that small decisions taken throughout the organisation, often move it to an unanticipated place, to the surprise of senior management.

In practice, there was a world of difference between a fanciful five-year master plan strategy based on top-down direction and control, and one based on learning and adaptation, much like Leonardo painting in layers.

Leonardo painted from the inside out. In his mind, as shown in his notebooks, he was always dissecting, looking at the smallest details. When you look at a page in a book, you don’t read the page; what you consume are words, one by one.

One of Leonardo’s most famous works is a painting of a silk merchant’s young wife named Mona. Thanks to his layering sfumato technique, the Mona Lisa displays an enigmatic smile that has captured imaginations over five centuries. But how was the artist able to produce such a work of art?

“At the time he was perfecting Lisa’s smile, Leonardo spent his nights in the morgue beneath the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, peeling flesh from cadavers and studying the muscles and nerves underneath.

He became fascinated about how a smile begins to form and instructed himself to analyse every possible movement of each part of the face and determine the origin of every nerve that controls each facial muscle.

Tracing which of those nerves are cranial and which are spinal may not have been necessary for painting a smile, but Leonardo needed to know,” explains Walter Isaacson in his captivating biography of Leonardo da Vinci.

In business we are often addicted to all sorts of measures of efficiency, aiming to extract ‘maximum productivity’ from staff. But perhaps our notions of productivity need to have more nuanced perspective – if one is to create the business equivalent of a work of art. In 1503 Leonardo began working on the Mona Lisa, and 1519 he was still fine tuning the details.

As Isaacson explains: “He never delivered the painting and, judging from his banks records, never collected any money for it. Instead, he kept it with him in Florence, Milan, Rome, and France until he died, sixteen years after he began. Over that period, he added thin layer after layer of little glaze strokes as he perfected it, retouched it, and imbued it with new depths of understanding about humans and nature. Some new insight, new appreciation, new inspiration would strike him and the brush would alight gently on the poplar panel yet again.”

The writer is a director at aCatalyst Consulting.

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