Lean

Strategy Deployment and the Strategy Safari

I blogged recently about the Revolutionary Six Strategy Deployment Steps for Effective Change. That post resulted from learning about “Why Change Programs Don’t Produce Change” by Russell Eisenstat, Bert Spector, and Michael Beer in the book Strategy Safari by Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel. Subsequently, after finishing that book, I want to reflect on how it relates to Strategy Deployment. Therefore, this is another post in the series on Strategy Deployment and other ideas.

A safari scene showing the silhouette of a tree with zebra and giraffes underneath it, and the sun appearing over the horizon in the background. Representing the metaphor of a strategy safari.
Safari Day by Yenni Fang

The Schools

To quickly recap, the Strategi Safari describes the following 10 schools of strategy:

  1. The Design School: strategy formation as a process of competition
  2. The Planning School: strategy formation as a formal process
  3. The Positioning School: strategy formation as an analytical process
  4. The Entrepreneurial School: strategy formation as a visionary process
  5. The Cognitive School: strategy formation as a mental process
  6. The Learning School: strategy formation as an emergent process
  7. The Power School: strategy formation as a process of negotiation
  8. The Cultural School: strategy formation as a collective process
  9. The Environmental School: strategy formation as a reactive process
  10. The Configuration School: strategy formation as a process of transformation

I have to confess that my initial intent in reading Strategy Safari was to confirm a hypothesis that Strategy Deployment would fit firmly into the Learning School. However, what I discovered was that it’s not that simple!

The Issues

Strategy Safari’s 10 schools describe extreme perspectives on different aspects of strategy. Rather than taking extreme positions, the authors suggest asking how they might address different issues, and that some form of every school might be appropriate, depending on context. On reflection, I found it more useful to consider how Strategy Deployment might address each of these issues, rather than try and pigeonhole it into a specific school. These are the issues identified, posed as questions:

  • Complexity – how complex should a good strategy be?
  • Integration – how tightly integrated should a good strategy be?
  • Generic – how unique or novel should a good strategy be?
  • Control – how deliberate or emergent should an effective strategy formation process be?
  • Collective – who is the strategist?
  • Change – how do strategists reconcile the conflicting forces for change and stability?
  • Choice – how much strategic choice is there?
  • Thinking – how much strategic thinking should there be?

Strategy Deployment is more relevant in complex situations, and therefore where strategies are more complex. From a Cynefin perspective, the clearer (or more ordered) a situation, the less there is a need “for solutions to emerge for the people closest to the problem“. Similarly, complex situations are less likely to need generic strategies and tend to distribute control with Catchball, giving more collective involvement. In addition, given a complex situation, what the X-Matrix shows with its correlations, is that strategies should be coherently integrated.

Further, Strategy Deployment provides a way to balance change, choice and thinking. Firstly, by providing a True North, Strategy Deployment gives stability of direction while enabling change to get there. Secondly, treating strategies as enabling constraints allows freedom of choice in discovering and designing solutions within the agreed guiding policies. Finally, treating tactics as experiments enables action and learning to test the thinking behind the hypotheses.

Conclusion

To sum up, a couple of quotes from the end of Strategy Safari jumped out at me and resonated strongly.

Every strategy process has to combine various aspects of the different schools.

and

the greatest failings of strategic management have occurred when managers took one point of view too seriously.

These points serve as a reminder to me that Strategy Deployment, and in particular the TASTE X-Matrix, are just frameworks. As such, they should allow the combination of various aspects, and not take one point of view too seriously.