Strategy in Practice: A Practitioner's Guide to Strategic Thinking, 3rd Edition

Chapter 9Insight-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 in this book we have examined how strategic thinking evolves from the articulation of a strategic challenge, the formulation of compelling strategic questions, and a subsequent deconstruction of the reality prompted by the questions. This is followed by a reconstruction of the competitive context relevant to the strategic challenge on the basis of insights generated through sense making based on analysis and intuition (Figure 9.1). Strategic thinking, we have argued all along, serves ultimately to help us identify a viable strategy ...