Where has the strategic thinking gone? : South America in organizational shadows

Once an activity is muddled with a function, the consequences into the organizational realm are calamitous. A function responds a need, desire, or obligation, asked by someone (a customer, citizen, or organization), and an activity is the way how the function is achieved. Organizations exist due to the user´s need must be satisfied under specific requirements. Certainly, there are essential activities than cannot set aside, but never, such activities are functions by themselves. In short, a function is an array of activities, and these are not exempted of economic, political, technological, social, or working environment conditions.

The State is an organization created by the human being. Every organizational theory or practice affects the State. As any other organization, the State has a function that supposes fulfilling a need, the need of citizens ruled by a government. When the functions of a State are clearly defined, every organization that is part of the State apparatus also defines its own functions in clear alignment with those of the State. Because activities are always at stake, the higher the State goal, the greater need to clear uncertainty. If within any organization, the managing of the uncertainty is an essential task; in State affairs, this is a survival matter.

Due to strategy defines goals, ways, and means; strategic thinking is highly required for clearing uncertainty. Scenarios are built, and they are confronted against each possibility of obstructing or enabling goals previously set. States have only two ways of interacting: cooperation or confrontation. The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, the Plurinational Republic of Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Brazil, and Argentina, all of them have goals, as Peru, Chile, Mexico, and Colombia as well. National goals are shaped under the elite´s direction linked to internal and global forces. Ignore such forces means a national self-destruction and an act suicide.

Activities are overwhelming the South American States. Functions are gone to secondary background. Although regional think-tanks, strategy´s institutions, practitioners, pundits, and the academia speaks up on disruption, change´s drivers, and forces come from the strategic environment, more or less, no State in South America has foreseen the real dimension of the social urgency. Then, where has the strategic thinking gone? Experts in geopolitical, strategy, and national security, have preached but the preaching has not been put into practice. The complacency to ones, and the power obsession to others, has dictated the management of their political power with tragic consequences. South America is on fire.

It is no longer just the fight between Atlantic and Pacific, UNASUR versus the Pacific Alliance Group, ALBA versus CAN, or socialism against neoliberals. Diverse facts have been hidden either by political populism or macroeconomics figures, and now, like political geysers all these compressed movements have been released with unpredictable consequences. Predicting is a hard task, even more upon social and political matters. Historical data is inappropriate to determine or foresee future events accurately. In a short time, consensus or at least understanding among the parties seems utopic. In such terrible circumstances, the strategic thinking must surface up, because some States have distorted the notion of security and begun to cede almost in everything, getting time but loosing political power.

Finally, much more important that man, who advices or implements a public policy, it is the man who decides. Many States in South America are sitting on social TNT, and activities related to economics, propaganda, and personal interests, do not permit them to see the evident danger. To those who must do the necessary actions to foresee the uncertain future, one advice: the State is an organization, and an organization exists for accomplishing a specific mission based on a need. To go back into the Function Analysis System Technique could help to understand the priority of a function over activities, and the main function of the State is delivering security and welfare to its citizens, otherwise South America will continue on fire.