You are doing strategy wrong and why it's not what you think.

At work, our managers tend refer ambiguously to strategy, strategy workshop, lengthy powerpoint on ‘Our organisational strategy is...’, but fail to show continuity in how their ‘the strategy’ to decision making or actions.

The lack of awareness of what strategy is and the inability to articulate it seems counter to aligning the actions and behaviours of an organisation towards an objective.

Roger Martin’s defines strategy as:

As a definition of strategy, the integrative set of choices can be derived from Michael E. Porter’s framework of the Five Competitive Forces that describes the rivalries, power, and threats by competitors, consumers and supplies. Porter’s Five Forces describe the perturbations experienced as your position shifts relative to your competitors in a playing field where you are trying to win.

Those perturbations are unpredicable and cannot be planned for.

Henry Mintzberg has argued that strategic planning is an oxymoron because strategy are not defined from a formal process but instead “emerge”. Born from Mintzberg salient work on management was the concept of emergent strategy. And he defines the process of strategy making:

Mintzberg refers to the strategy making as a learning process and highlights what this means:

I think Donald Rumsfeld’s famous quote simplifies what Mintzberg is trying to say about strategy:

Mintzberg’s emergent strategy does not displace Porter’s five forces but defines the market signals, think perturbations and Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns, that influence Martin’s integrative set of choices as the competition unpredictably changes shifting positions in the playing field.

Bringing together Martin, Porter, and Mintzberg’s ensemble of definitions are analogous to a football match. The playing field is the football field and the teams are the competition. The players have different skills and abilities that impose and exert ‘plays’ that are hard to predict but capabilities during offensive and defensive plays. If the two football teams are competing to win, at any given time the defense does not know what the offense next move will be. The defense’s response emerges as the offense plays the ball. As the match goes on, each team learn new information about their competitors that integrates new knowledge into their playing tactics.

This is a cheap analogy but soccer teams can try to undertake a formal planning process in order to prepare for the match but they have no idea what will emerge from kick-off.

Strategy is not something we can plan but is a learning process of the organisation across an continuum shifting behaviours to align with a new position as we uncover new findings about the competitive environment.