At DuPont, I was fortunate to work with Pete Compo as the ideas forming the Emergent Approach to Strategy were developed. In recent years I has been involved in the preparation of the Emergent Approach to Strategy and am the first affiliated partner to deliver to help…
The most common leadership failure is treating adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems. This failure is particularly true in strategy design and implementation as the discipline of strategy has not yet caught up to the needs of adaptive challenges.
Would you organise a dinner party with friends without checking on food preferences that might have changed, or competing events that might impact scheduling? Of course not, yet businesses do initiate innovation programmes without making similar checks, or as Rumelt suggested “What’s really going on here?”, or perhaps even Marvin Gaye’s shorter “What’s Going On”
The Emergent Approach is a new theory and practice of strategy built on an adaptive view of change and innovation in contrast to “planning” the future. Why is a book on strategy needed?
As a young boy mesmerised by murmurations of starlings with my grandad in Norfolk I was filled with curiosity. How could the birds be organised to perform such complex dynamic manoeuvres? Little did I realise then how these summer evening displays would influence my business thinking in years to come..
The business press is seemingly clear – we are now living in volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous VUCA world (as if it was not before!) Even if this really were a new paradigm as some claim it to be, have we adapted our approach to business strategy to reflect this VUCA environment?
“Strategic marketing”, “Strategic accounts”, “Strategic initiatives”. The business world is littered with the term “strategic”. What does “strategic” mean and are your value propositions strategic?
Quantitative decision matrices hide richness needed to develop and select winning strategies. The Strategy Alternatives Matrix (SAM) addresses this critical flaw, where possible choices are allowed to evolve over time enabling the emergence of a favoured strategy – hence “The Emergent Approach to Strategy™ ”. The SAM can be thought of as an ecosystem where strategy alternatives are species competing for survival.