The four types of strategy work you need for the digital revolution

Josef Oehmen – LSE Business Review

The world is probably not crying out for another 2×2 typology of strategy, but nevertheless still they come. This one is interesting less for it cells than for its axes. Degree of uncertainty is fairly standard, but degree of people impact is slightly more surprising. The people in question are those within the organisation being strategised about – is the relevant change marginal to business as usual, are jobs and careers at risk, how much emotional stress can be expected. All those are good questions, of course, and the approach is certainly a good counter to the tendency to see people as machine components in change, and then to be surprised when they turn out not to be. But it risks muddling up two rather different aspects of the people impact of strategy – those who conceive of the strategy and execute its projects on one hand, and those who are affected by it on the other – and raises the bigger question of whether an internal people focus is the best way of understanding strategy in the first place. And the answer to that feels more likely to be situational than universal.

Perhaps though it is the matrix itself which gets slightly in the way of understanding. This is not an argument that organisations choose or discover which cell to be in or by what route to move between them. Instead:

Our impression was that the most successful companies had learned to execute activities in all four quadrants, all the time, and had robust processes for managing the transition of an activity from one quadrant to the other.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.