Managers should think constantly about how to apply and refine strategy, rather than see it as something to be planned in advance and implemented inflexibly. This, argues Morgen Witzel, is what the great strategic thinkers have always done
To many people, strategy means plans, formal statements of goals and the laying out of the route by which those goals will be reached. This is sometimes called the planning approach to strategy. The principles were outlined in the 1960s and 1970s by writers such as Igor Ansoff and Kenneth Andrews, and the planning approach is still widely taught and practised today.
But does it work? The danger is that by using this approach, strategy becomes a little like a video game. If the right moves are made in the right order, the end goal will be reached and the business will succeed. But life, and especially life in business, is not like a video game. Many things happen, usually at once, that cannot be predicted and there are no pre-set or pre-determined solutions.
Critics of the planning approach argue that it robs us of our ability to think creatively. We become slaves to the plan and very often we carry on with it even when events happening around us indicate we should be doing something else. In other cases, people simply ignore the plan if they cannot understand it or make it fit with the circumstances in which they find themselves. Instead, they do what they think is best. But sometimes what they think is best is not what the organisation as a whole wants or needs.
Henry Mintzberg, the Canadian writer on strategy, argued that planning is something foreign to what most managers actually do. In his book Mintzberg on Management, he stated that planning is something that is done using the left side of the brain, which processes information sequentially and in logical order. Most managerial work, however, uses the creative, intuitive right side of the brain. He went on to argue that most planning in fact confuses managers and makes it more difficult for them to deal with the challenges they must face. Another writer, the Japanese guru Kenichi Ohmae, commented that managers who rely heavily on planning are often unable to react quickly to threats. Hidebound by the plan, they stand like deer trapped in the headlights of an oncoming car, unable to move or avoid the danger coming towards them.
The alternative approach advocated by both is a more creative approach to strategy in which strategy making and the implementation of strategy become a continuous process. Ohmae referred to this as strategic thinking, arguing that the primary task of the strategist was to think about strategy constantly, making strategic decisions as and when they were needed rather than sticking to a pre-set plan. He did not invent this concept, and indeed it has a long history in the literature on strategy.
This is an extract from the Finance & Management Magazine, Issue 196, February 2012.
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