Anatomy and physiology of great strategy
Strategy as Choice, Attention and Practice
Let’s talk about three strong paradigms about the discipline, some of their main authors and how they could be related.
Strategy as an integrated set of choices – Roger Martin, an outstanding thinker and one of the most vocal contemporary defenders of the art of strategy.
Strategy as practice (SAP) – Richard Whittington, who was one of my professors at Saïd Business School, Oxford, and probably the name most closely associated with SAP.
And the Attention Based View (ABV) of strategy that I have just come into contact with, after reading an interesting paper by John Joseph and William Ocasio (https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/epdf/10.1287/stsc.2017.0042)
For those who are not completely familiar with all these three groups, let’s have a short summary of each before we try to bring their contributions together.
For Roger Martin, strategy is an integrated set of choices about how to win. Strategy is therefore not a goal, an aspiration or a collection of initiatives. It is a coherent system of choices whose elements reinforce one another. The question is not simply what an organisation wants to achieve, but what it will choose to do, and, equally important, what it will choose not to do.
For now, let’s highlight the term INTEGRATED and keep it in mind. Hence, strategy, or better, great strategy, is not only to decide, but a certain coherence underlying your decisions through a certain cascade of choices. It’s already famous, but if you are new to the field, look here:
Richard Whittington and the whole movement of SAP ask how strategy is actually enacted. They have a nice framework – Practitioners > Practices > Praxis – which I recommend exploring further. (In my case, I have studied the Oxford Handbook of Strategy as Practice).
Strategy happens through the everyday practices of strategists: conversations, meetings, analyses, negotiations, planning processes, performance reviews, strategic tools and decisions. A great strategy emerges from people's cognition and behaviour, through specific “language games” (Wittgenstein) and all the complexity behind human dynamics. What I like most here is to give back the STRATEGIST to the centre of the discipline.
The ABV adds an organisational dimension. Ocasio and Joseph argue that strategy is also a pattern of attention along the life of a company and the everyday management: the distinctive allocation of time, effort and cognitive resources to particular problems, opportunities, threats and activities.
For Joseph and Ocasio, great strategies do not necessarily originate in uniquely brilliant ideas. What matters is the organisation’s ability to transform a good idea into a focused and sustained pattern of attention. I love the possibilities that open up from this point of view: strategy is an AGENDA. Moreover, we can easily notice how dangerous it is to split formulation from execution.
In the paper I have read and mentioned before, their comparison of Apple and Motorola illustrates the point: both had ideas related to seamless integration and mobility, but Apple succeeded in making the idea a coherent organisational agenda while Motorola’s attention remained fragmented across business units.
A strategic choice becomes meaningful only when the organisation sustains attention around it and develops it into a coherent managerial agenda. And, of course, all of this works out with and within people (strategists) - exploring ideas, engaging in dialogue, deliberating initiatives etc.
These perspectives can therefore be synthesised into a system: strategy begins with choices about how to win; those choices require sustained organisational attention; attention is enacted through the everyday practices of strategists and distributed through communication, structures, metrics and routines.
That said, there are other elements worth adding - culture and organisational identity, for instance. Culture influences what the organisation naturally notices and values. Another aspect is the very identity of the organisation - its DNA, purpose, future vision - that guides the ‘Why’ and the ‘What for’ of the strategic portfolio of a company. And by the way, Joseph and Ocasio point out Identity as one of the four pillars of ABV.
Also, I would include the importance of learning. Shifting the old-fashioned view of strategy as planning (which is for some of us an oxymoron) to strategy as learning, we could put it all under the umbrella of continuously enhancing the quality of your choices, the level of your attention and the synergistic interaction of strategists across the company. The resulting actions generate outcomes and feedback, which can in turn redirect attention and reshape future choices.
From this perspective, strategy is neither merely a plan nor an isolated moment of decision. It is a living process through which an organisation chooses what matters, directs collective attention towards it, and repeatedly enacts those choices in practice.
This also explains why a great strategy is so difficult to imitate. Competitors may copy a product, a positioning statement or even a strategic choice. But they cannot easily reproduce the integrated system of choices, patterns of attention, organisational practices, identity and culture through which the strategy is continuously enacted.
Ultimately, then, strategy can be seen as the coordination of attention around an integrated set of choices, emerging from strategists throughout the life of the business. Martin gives us the logic of choice; ABV gives us the logic of attention; Strategy-as-Practice gives us the logic of enactment; culture and identity help explain the shared meanings that sustain or constrain or guide all three.
Great strategy is therefore not simply something an organisation has. It is something an organisation chooses, attends to, practises and becomes. Great strategies depend, ultimately, on great strategists working together across the whole organisation, in a continuous journey.