>We are attempting to identify best practices and successful experiences in
>two areas:
>
>1) - helping managers, who have risen through the ranks for their
>operational competencies, become strategists,as they keep moving up the
>ladder
>2)- helping strategists being learning to the planning process
We are developing and testing tools for just this purpose, specifically in
the area of developing strategies for manufacturing organisations and it
is generally operational, manufacturing managers who collaborate with us.
Key is to start where people are - operational managers often believe
'strategy' is an 'airy-fairy' notion, lacking substance or simply a PLAN
for achieving a set of OBJECTIVES. Our first tool for assisting a
widening of strategic perspective is called 'strategy charting' which
managers use to track their organisation's actions back through time to
establish its implemented strategy. This enables them to view strategy as
patterns of actions (or not!) over time, partly planned and partly
emergent. The charts produced are then used to help make strategy, along
with other tools.
The views charting encourages are:
- strategy is little without actions to implement the strategy - your
strategy today is what you did in the past and what you intend to do in the
future. This seems particularly attractive to operational managers used to
doing / implementing. Any difference between 'strategy' and 'tactics' is
blurred.
- strategy is also about objectives, identifying and exploring options and
deciding what to do. These aspects are also contained in the chart and are
the more usual focus of strategy at corporate level and in the strategy
literature.
- strategy evolves over time - it is partly a plan but not entirely a plan
The technique owes much to Mintzberg and the cognitive mapping literature.
On the one occasion we used the technique with corporate staff their
voiced view was that the chart gave a more holistic perspective of their
strategy than they had seen before. I guessed the chart had shown them
some things that they weren't going to discuss with us and that we had
insufficient context to interpret (learning is rarely entirely explicit
even when the explicit objective is to learn ).
If in your second question you meant 'bring' (rt being) then I suggest the
same kind of technique could be useful but the elicitation methods would
have to be amended from our present scheme. This would be especially
important when learning about the socio-cultural-political processes that
generated past and current strategies - an important area for learning how
and from where future strategies might be generated. I look forward to
your summary and hearing about any techniques you've been using.
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--John Mills, jfm@eng.cam.ac.uk
Dept of Engineering TEL 01223 338075
University of Cambridge, FAX 01223 338076
Mill Lane,
Cambridge CB2 1RX
England
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