Overview

The importance of strategic thinking in a business context has been well established for a very long time. More recently, however, studies in chaos and complexity theories have started to challenge the conventional wisdom surrounding strategy: arguing that in totally unpredictable and rather chaotic times the need for, and ability to formulate, a well-defined strategy is now possibly less appropriate and actually may even be impossible.

Add to this the conundrum of the chicken and the egg what comes first, strategy or structure? and maybe organizational leaders could be forgiven for not wanting to get too deeply mired. It could be an intellectually challenging but possibly fruitless endeavour.

But surely that is precisely the purpose of strategy? First, to sort out the complex from the complicated, and then to produce a simple plan. If a business can accurately predict the future, it can produce a plan; but a plan is not a strategy.

If Tesco knew exactly what its customers would buy every week it would not need a strategy. A strategy is a guess, a speculation. It is an attempt to deal with the unknown and the unknowable. Tesco does not know what its customers are going to want next year. It plans to provide them with the goods they want but their tastes can change, as with organic or GM-free (genetically modified) foods. A strategy tries to anticipate change as well as plan for the future. It is this uncertainty that is at its core;