Chapter 8
Insight-Driven Strategy in Perspective
There are those who make things happen;...there are those who watch things happen;...and then there are those who wonder what happened.
—Anonymous
In this chapter, we:
- examine strategic thinking and insight-driven strategy from two practice perspectives:
- a perspective set against the backdrop of complexity, uncertainty and multiple possible futures,
- an organizational learning perspective;
- explore the implications of these perspectives in the context of how strategy is formulated and enacted in practice;
- examine strategy as a pretext for action and the creation of meaning in organizations;
- revisit the notion of organizational configuration introduced in the previous chapter and examine the implications of an organization's predisposition for how its strategy plays out in practice;
- conclude with a reflection on the purpose and implications of strategic thinking for strategy in practice.
So far we have examined how strategic thinking evolves from the formulation of a compelling strategic question and a subsequent deconstruction of reality pertaining to that question through an appropriate issues analysis. We have argued that the need to revisit the firm's strategy at all is prompted by changes to its unique competing space and, in particular, perturbations at the boundaries of that domain. We saw how insights are derived on the basis of analysis and intuition in response to the issues, and how these collectively contribute ...
