Strategy and Strategy Lenses

University of South Wales (USW)

Strategy lenses, as discussed by Johnson, et al (2008), explore different, practical perspectives. There are four strategy lenses. The four lenses can be used to approach strategic problems without relying on a single perspective. A brief description of each of the four lenses are:

 Strategy as design. Strategy development can be a logical process in which the forces and constraints on the organisation are weighed carefully through analytic and evaluative techniques to establish clear strategic direction. This creates conditions in which carefully planned strategy implementation should occur. The design lens usually grants top management the leadership role in strategy, with middle and lower management given supporting roles in implementation. This view is perhaps the most commonly held one about how strategy should be developed and what managing strategy is about. It is the traditional ‘textbook’ view.

 Strategy as experience. Here the view is that future strategies of organisations are heavily

influenced by the experience of managers and others in the organization based on their previous strategies. Strategies are driven not so much by clear-cut analysis as by the taken- for-granted assumptions and ways of doing things embedded in the culture of organisations. Insofar as different views and expectations within the organisation exist, they will be resolved not just through rational processes, as in the design lens, but through processes of bargaining and negotiation. Here, then, the view is that there is a tendency for the strategy to build on and continue what has gone on before.

 Strategy as ideas. Neither of the above lenses is especially helpful in explaining innovation.

Design approaches risk being too rigid and top down; experience builds too much on the past. How then do new ideas come about? The ideas lens emphasises the importance of promoting diversity in and around organisations, which can potentially generate genuinely new ideas. Here strategy is seen as not so much planned from the top as emergent from within and around organisations as people respond to an uncertain and changing environment with a variety of initiatives. New ideas will emerge, but they are likely to have to battle for survival against other ideas and against the forces for conformity to past strategies (as the experience lens explains).

 Strategy as discourse. This lens sees strategy in terms of language. Managers spend most of

their time communicating. Therefore command of strategy language becomes a resource for managers by which to shape ‘objective’ strategic analyses to their personal views and to gain influence, power and legitimacy. Approaching strategy as a discourse makes managers very attentive to the language in which they frame strategic problems, make strategy proposals, debate issues and then finally communicate strategic decisions. The language of strategy, and the concepts that underpin that language, can shape the strategy agenda in terms of what is discussed and how. Strategy ‘talk’ matters. (Johnson, et al, 2008: pp. 19-22)

Johnson, G., Scholes, K. and Whittington, R. (2008) Exploring Corporate Strategy, Eighth Ed. Harlow: Prentice Hall.