One of many great challenges for organizations in the current economy is making strategy under the doubts posed by disruptive environments, intensified competition, emerging technologies, shifting customer preferences and regulatory change. Executives frequently know they must break together with the status quo, however there are few signposts signaling the best way ahead. Executives have long been exhorted to conduct analyses of external and internal environments and construct scenarios of the future.
It assumes that precision may be accomplished through rigorous evaluation and diligent attempts to overcome individual prejudices in comprehension. Additionally, it assumes that the procedure will probably be chiefly analytic and comparatively frictionless. But research has found that most forecasting efforts fail to achieve the desired precision. To examine how supervisors make strategy in states of significant uncertainty, the writers took an in-depth look at five technology strategy endeavors inside the Advanced Technology Strategy Group at a communications technology business that was experiencing a period of high business turbulence. The authors observed managers'struggles to predict the future and found that managers couldn't imagine new futures for the firm without reconsidering current concerns and rethinking the past.
A new future could not shape strategic alternatives unless it was joined in a story that revealed how it relates to yesteryear along with the current. Managers could make picks, when they settled on a specific narrative. Strategy making amid volatility therefore calls for constructing and re-building tactical stories that picture the past and current in ways that permit the organization to investigate multiple potential futures. In comparing strategy jobs, the authors found that the more work supervisors do to create strategic stories that were novel, the much more likely they are to explore options that break with the status quo.
PUBLICATION DATE: October 01, 2014 PRODUCT #: SMR499-HCB-ENG
This is just an excerpt. This case is about STRATEGY & EXECUTION
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