Strategy Outside Planning

In the last several decades, the term "strategy" has been increasingly associated with planning and management control. Traditional strategy, the science of strategy, is in many ways the opposite of planning, dealing with adaptive responses to the environment and what works in areas where planning and control are impossible. Peter Drucker, the dean of modern management, fought strongly against the idea that "strategic planning" wasn't about making decision today, as we explore in with this article about his work on strategy.

While mastering Sun Tzu's The Art of War helps create inventive plans, linear planning is not the focus of traditional strategy. The world of challenges in our environment is beyond the realm of step-by-step planning. While planning is necessary, the much rarer skill, especially in our own era, is good decision-making under pressure in situations that can not be predicted.

Controlled and Uncontrolled Environments

Planning and linear thinking follows a series of steps to produce a well-defined result. Planning within controlled environments is not only useful but necessary. It would be nice to think that every event can be planned, but in our fast-changing competitive world, many critical events fall outside our control.

Real strategic understanding starts with the humble acceptance that the world is outside our control. In this environment, most of our key decisions are not planned. We have to make decisions that recognize what is changing in our situations and are appropriate to changing conditions.

Where Adaptability is Required

Even 2,500 years ago, Sun Tzu saw that losers clung to their plans like an excuse while winners responded to the dynamics of their situation. Instead of a series of pre-planned steps, studying the science of strategy develops a perspective that allows us to respond to conditions and events as they happen. While These three areas of study are called position awareness, opportunity development, and situation response.

The Competitive and Productive Realms

Good strategy wins the resources needed to be productive, and productivity creates the resources need to be competive. competitive situations. Both productive planning and competitive strategy are necessary. Together, they create the resources and need for each other in a cycle. The control of advanced planning and the adjustments of strategic positioning both require human creativity, but they require different methods to apply that creativity. The problem is that our knowledge of planned production has overshadowed our understanding of competitive strategy.