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Category: Business and Industry
Date Submitted: 02/25/2016 09:00 AM
Chapter 1
The Strategic Development Process
Robert G. Dyson, Jim Bryant, John Morecroft and Frances O’Brien
The strategic development process is defined here to embrace the management
processes that inform, shape and support the strategic decisions confronting an
organisation. We have adopted the term ‘strategic development’ for a number of
reasons. Firstly, we see strategy formulation and implementation as inseparable
activities in which every organisation engages on a continuous basis, so the idea
of ongoing development is central to our thinking. Secondly, the widely used term
‘strategic planning’ has become debased by association with the creation of deterministic, one-shot 5- and 10-year plans: for us this suggests an unhelpful rigidity
in thinking about the future. Thirdly, ‘strategic management’ is too loose a term
to describe the emphasis that we wish to place here upon reflective engagement
and analytical questioning that characterises the approaches introduced in this
book: nor does that term suggest the same focus upon the development of the
organisation.
Strategic decisions, the focus of the strategic development process, do not form a
distinct category at one extreme of some imagined spectrum leading from tactical,
through operational to strategic decisions. Rather, there is a set of characteristics that
lead towards a decision being labelled as ‘strategic’. These characteristics include
the following:
• Breadth of scope and therefore of implications right across and beyond the
organisation.
• Complexity and inter-relatedness of decision-making context, demanding integrated treatment.
• Enduring effects, possibly of an irreversible nature, with little or no scope for trial
and error.
• Significant time lag before impact, with widening uncertainty over the timescale
involved.
• Disagreement about the motivation for, and the direction and nature of,
development.
• Challenging the status quo, creating a politicised...