Strategy development: shaping an uncertain future

The everyday work of many managers is shaped by operational tasks and challenges. There is often a lack of time, freedom and energy for fundamental business questions that go beyond the day. Yet it is precisely these questions that are part of management’s task: dealing with more far-reaching issues and leading the company into the future.

The challenge is to make decisions about the future and derive measures from them, even though the future is and remains uncertain and the company operates in a highly dynamic, opaque environment. Actively shaping the future therefore requires far-reaching decisions under considerable uncertainty.

Again and again, risky decisions have to be made that selectively draw on certain lines of justification so that a logically stringent foundation of rationality is created. At the same time, everyone is aware that it would probably also be possible in a quite different way and that things will probably turn out differently. According to Wimmer and Nagel, this constant establishment of certainty by appeal to rationality, combined with the knowledge that uncertainty is unavoidable, is the core of leadership.

Strategy, understood as making decisions about the future, is a special process within this tension between knowledge and non-knowledge. It brings about decisions that serve as the basis for further decisions in day-to-day business.

Management’s task is to “invent” the company’s own future itself, guided by the opportunities of the future and not exclusively by the successes of the past. Without deliberately shaping the future and coping with uncertainty, a company tends to transfer the success patterns of the past into the future, that is, to “steer into the future through the rear-view mirror”. In view of increasing dynamics and complexity and the disruptions in the environment, such as raw material shortages, financial crises or economic slumps, this can endanger viability.

Under these conditions, past successes are no guarantee of future corporate success. On the contrary: the greater the success was, the more difficult it becomes to overcome its “immunising power” and to allow oneself to be “irritated” by trends and events in the relevant environments. Only this irritation makes it possible to take advantage of developments or to prepare the company for them in good time.

So it is about the company’s capacity for strategic change. This means observing the relevant environment, reviewing existing assumptions and readjusting the strategic points of orientation. This keeps a company on course even when surprising events and unforeseen developments have fundamentally changed the general conditions.

According to this understanding, companies are living social systems. They can neither be calculated through linear cause-and-effect relationships nor steered trivially from outside or by a manager. Strategy development and strategy implementation, however, have to influence precisely these highly complex systems.

This first requires a restructuring of mental models: of ideas about how companies are to be thought of as social systems, how they shape their relationship with their relevant environments, how they break open their fixedness from the past, and how they make themselves leadable from a self-chosen future.

Conventional management instruments derive much of their appeal from the promise of producing strategically desired behaviour in organisations with relatively simple steering instruments. This way of thinking assumes that organisations can be built in such a way that their many parts are strictly coupled to one another via chains of command and can thus be subjected to a single will.

Such a “trivial machine” works according to a simple cause-and-effect principle. Anyone who chooses the right levers, which stand in a causal solution relationship to the presumed cause of a problem, steers the corporate machine in the strategically desired direction.

The perspective changes completely if one assumes that companies are operationally closed, self-referential, complex social systems that ultimately do not bow to an instrumental understanding of organisation.

The concept of a system can be summarised as follows: systems are composite units of elements between which there is a context of relationship and effect, the relation. By defining the elements and relations, a system can be distinguished from its environment, that is, from elements that are not part of the system.

The central basic assumption of modern systems theory is “system and environment”. A system comes into being when a distinction is made between the elements inside and the environments outside. This difference creates a system boundary that separates the system from its environment.

According to Niklas Luhmann, social systems are communication systems. They consist of communications as elements and their relationships to one another. The basic element of the social system that is a company is the decision as a specific communication event. For a moment, it transforms an uncertain situation into certainty, so that further follow-up decisions can be made.

Organisations, as a special type of social system, are embedded in multi-layered, complex and highly dynamic environments. Operational closure means that a system distinguishes itself from its environments. Since the environments as a whole are more complex than the organisation itself, it has to select its relevant environments and thus reduce complexity in order to remain capable of action and stable. No system would be capable of action if it had to react to every environmental event and adapt its internal structures and processes accordingly.

Organisations depend in many ways on the environments that surround them. They therefore seek highly selective points of contact outside their own system, the structural couplings. Through them, they couple with their relevant environments and open up selectively to the outside.

Environmental events do not act as direct input that produces a corresponding causal output. They are initially perceived as “noise”, which can lead to irritations but need not. The system picks up and processes some stimuli highly selectively, and others not. How and which signals are processed depends on the internal structures and processes. In this selection process, compatibility with internal structures and routines always takes precedence.

Seen in this way, operational closure is the mechanism that enables the organisation to achieve, in the face of the dynamics and complexity of its environment, the degree of stabilisation required for constant, efficient performance.

The downside: organisations stabilise themselves internally, develop their own routines, largely decouple themselves from their environments and draw on themselves and their past in their development. This increases the risk that, over time, they become blind to the demands of their environments and that the gap between their “own world” and the environment in which they operate becomes alarmingly large.

A corporate crisis can therefore be explained as follows: because of strong self-referentiality, demands from the relevant environments have for a long time failed to produce the necessary resonance in the system’s own operations. The necessary changes to structures and routines have therefore not taken place.

Operational closure and self-reference thus mean that organisations draw on existing structures and routines in all their operations. This logic can only be changed if irritations arise in the system via structural couplings that the system regards as relevant and that prompt changes to routines and structures.

Social systems are complex and embedded in complex environments. Complexity refers to the wealth of relationships within the system, within the environments and between the system and its environments. In social systems, it shows above all in the intensity and number of communication relationships.

Trivial, simple and even complicated systems can be understood and steered by a sufficiently competent observer, provided all information is available. Complex systems cannot be fully grasped, and their behaviour cannot be predicted. In complex social systems, there are no clear, isolatable cause-and-effect relationships.

Social systems operate on the basis of meaning. They construct meaning and purpose, thereby form their identity and create the background for differentiating themselves from the environment. The survival of the system is the highest criterion by which objectives and actions are oriented. The self-created identity determines all processes of perception and interpretation: the self-understanding of objectives and purpose defines the patterns with which environmental information is taken in, interpreted and evaluated.

The starting point is the assumption that every company has developed its own method of dealing with questions about the future. Accordingly, every company that has operated successfully in a market over a certain period and proven its viability has a “strategy”.

Differences arise from two fundamental questions. The first: is the decision-making process of strategy development communicated as such in the company, that is, is it an implicit or an explicit form? The second: where and by whom are fundamental decisions about the future made, outside the organisation as a requirement for the management process, or as an achievement within the system, in particular within the management process?

If the two distinctions are related to each other, then according to Nagel and Wimmer four varieties of strategy development result: intuitive decisions, evolutionary or random strategies, expert-oriented strategy development, and strategy development as a joint leadership achievement.

The intuitive form is shaped by the “entrepreneurial instinct” of one or a few key people. Far-reaching course-setting often arises from an intuitive knowledge of the business’s own logic and from close contact with customers and the market. Outsiders are often amazed at the accuracy and foresight of such seemingly solitary decisions.

In this variety, there is no explicit strategic dialogue. The top of the company, which usually also has an ownership function, has, as it were, monopolised responsibility for the future. The subordinate management levels primarily implement the strategic commitments. This form is often found in pioneering companies and family businesses.

The leadership resources of middle management remain unused. In addition, making the pioneer’s and founder’s mortality a taboo can block a viable succession arrangement to such an extent that the company falls into an existential crisis after the person at the top leaves.

Responsible entrepreneurs protect their company from this in good time by staging strategy discussions with their senior staff. This requires a lot of patience. The inner circle around the pioneer has usually become accustomed over years to strategic questions being “a matter for the boss” and adopts a technical, operational implementation perspective. If this learning process succeeds, the intuitive form gradually turns into strategy development in the management team as a joint leadership achievement.

In the evolutionary form, it is not the top of the company alone that makes the strategic decisions. They arise more or less randomly in a free play of forces at a wide variety of levels and in a wide variety of areas. Wimmer and Nagel describe it roughly as follows: autonomous subsystems take up market opportunities that arise by chance, without any explicit strategic focus. Top management at most supports the impulses of individual units and bundles the success patterns of the subsystems that prevail through evolution.

Not infrequently, these success patterns are interpreted and reinterpreted in hindsight as an intended strategy. Advocates of this variety consider neither sensible nor necessary an explicit strategic debate or the opening up of a strategic difference between the current state and a future identity.

The expert-oriented form follows the conviction that the opacity of the corporate environment and the unpredictability and dynamics of the market and competition can be countered with rational methods of analysis. If figures, data and facts are collected as comprehensively as possible and analysed objectively, then in theory rationally sound strategic decisions can be made.

The approach assumes that the company’s future can be assessed reasonably reliably. Business analyses accordingly form the basis for rationally justified objectives that can be pursued in a planned way. A characteristic feature is the explicit delegation of strategy work to external consultants. The result is sophisticated, usually strictly confidential strategy papers intended to help top management decide between precisely worked-out options.

According to Wimmer and Nagel, this form rests on three problematic basic assumptions. The first is plannability: anyone who proceeds “correctly” can fully mobilise the knowledge and information needed for strategic decisions. The second is calculability: the market and competition follow identifiable laws, from knowledge of which reliable success strategies can be derived.

The third assumption is the trivialisation of the organisation: it functions merely as an instrument for implementing purposes and objectives that are usually set from outside. All three assumptions suggest certainty. In doing so, they miss the fundamental problem that companies have to solve in dealing with the future.

One of the main weaknesses lies in the inadequate implementation that can be observed in practice. A major cause is the separation of the phases of a strategy process: first comes thinking, then implementation, often by different groups of people or hierarchical levels.

Many strategies developed by well-known expert-oriented consultancies remain ineffective, even though in terms of content they are neither bad nor unusable. The organisation, as an operationally closed, autopoietic system, cannot or will not take them up and process them. The strategies are simply not compatible with the social system that is the company and therefore do not gain relevance.

Expert-oriented strategy development also reinforces a tendency already present in the management team: to concentrate on the demands of day-to-day business and to forgo its own intensive engagement with the company’s future. This raises the question of which understanding of strategy should be taken as the basis so that strategy work becomes effective in social systems.

Strategy development as a joint leadership achievement is a modern form of shaping the future and coping with uncertainty. It uses and integrates the first three basic patterns in order to meet the high complexity of the corporate environment and the rapid changes in the market at a new level.

In different phases of strategy development, three sources are combined: the know-how of a company’s key players, as in the evolutionary variety, the application of expert-oriented models and concepts, and the potential of entrepreneurial intuition.

Strategy development accordingly comprises a regular process of reflection and decision-making for shaping the future and coping with uncertainty. It is a joint leadership achievement within the management system in which key players from the organisation are involved.

In this understanding, strategy development is not a special process carried out at great expense, which a company undertakes for a specific reason, as is the case with expert-oriented strategy-making. It is an integral part of leadership. Its primary aim is to keep the company’s own identity commitments open to review and correction when environmental conditions change unexpectedly. The decision-makers pursue it jointly and in addition to their operational responsibility.

Wimmer and Nagel describe strategy development as a leadership achievement that produces shared ideas of the company’s own future in a changing environment and develops them further on a regular basis. These designs of identity are linked to the company’s own capabilities and their necessary further development.

Accordingly, strategy development is the leadership function that constantly forces a company to scan the environment: which future opportunities and threats can be identified for securing its own existence? At the same time, it gives the company reason to constantly put itself to the test.

This understanding rests on three paradigms. The environment of companies cannot be fully understood. The future is and remains uncertain. The company, as a complex social structure, is not a trivial machine. While the basic understanding of expert-oriented strategy development ignores the peculiarities of a social structure, this form explicitly commits itself to a non-trivial understanding of steering.

What can decision-makers rely on if they consistently abandon the assumptions of plannability and calculability? Successful entrepreneurs discover gaps, needs and problems in their environment for which the market has not yet found adequate answers, and offer surprising solutions and innovations for them.

Here, uncertainty is regarded as an opportunity to break out of existing patterns and as the source of all entrepreneurial activity. Anyone who approaches shaping the future with this reinterpretation also changes the way a company defines its relationship with its relevant environments.

In the past, people followed the paradigm “structure follows strategy” and tried to adapt the company as well as possible to given environmental conditions. In the meantime, the perspective has rather been reversed. Those who survive are those who succeed in gaining a certain unique position in important performance dimensions, that is, who actively create and help shape their own market.

Expert-oriented strategy consulting still largely operates according to the old paradigm. Strategy experts give all companies in an industry similar recommendations, or at least present a similar view of market, competitive and technological development. Otherwise, they would relativise the claim to objectivity of their analysis. As a result, a large proportion of companies in an industry move in a similar direction. Competition intensifies; differentiation does not arise in this way.

Behind the new paradigm lies the insight that strategy development is a circular process of loose couplings and mutual influence. The environment influences the strategy, the strategy influences the environment. The strategy influences the organisation, the organisation influences the strategy.

This form removes the problematic separation between thinking and acting and links strategy development with strategy implementation. The key players involved bring the requirements and logics of operational business into the strategic considerations as a matter of course. The strategy process is thus very closely interlinked with the consequences for operational business. The classic implementation problem no longer arises.

In addition, from the outset, the behavioural level is addressed on an equal footing with the business and strategic questions. Internal power and influence relationships, the interplay of subsystems and the like are no longer ignored. They are observed and shaped in parallel in the strategy process.

Communication and interaction are the prerequisites for a shared picture of the future, that is, for a shared future identity. The task of the strategy process is to initiate and shape this communication. Strategy development must therefore develop into a joint leadership achievement that is aware of the uncertain future and seeks a deliberate way of dealing with it. The course for successful implementation is then already set while the strategy is being developed.

A strategy process based on systemic principles starts from one assumption: the knowledge needed to shape the future is present in the system. What matters is mobilising the organisation’s strategic intelligence for the strategy work. At the outset, therefore, a strategy team of key players is formed, which goes through the individual process steps and shapes their content.

First, it must be clarified who takes an active part. For the management team responsible for the decision, participation is indispensable, and as a team. In addition, it is advisable to involve other key players from other areas of responsibility, either fully or for certain stages.

The aim is a balanced mix of established leadership responsibility and “free elements”. They ensure that unconventional ideas and perspectives also flow into the discussion and that entrenched patterns of argument are broken up. Observation from different points of view reduces the blind spot. A variety of perspectives, competencies and experience forms the basis for dealing with complexity and uncertainty.

Involving the key players and their participation in the entire process creates promoters. They carry the operational consequences of strategy implementation into their own areas of responsibility and drive them forward there.

The strategy team as a whole should meet several criteria. All business and functional areas are represented, and the overall system is appropriately reflected by the people involved. The most important holders of know-how represent the knowledge distributed throughout the organisation. People with great formal or informal power are also involved.

The members bring the subject-matter expertise to assess the business questions that arise competently, and the social skills to cope with difficult and conflict-laden situations. They are willing to devote enough time and personal commitment alongside their day-to-day work. Up-and-coming managers and high-potential employees are involved so that the strategy process serves deliberately as a development measure. To keep the process manageable, the team should comprise no more than twelve people.

Experience shows that strategy workshops bring together and mobilise the knowledge distributed throughout the company outside normal meeting routines. In these “communication vessels”, connections are observed differently than under the constraints of everyday work, and new approaches and perspectives often emerge as a result. Strategy work creates a valuable distance from operational business and makes it possible to observe one’s own situation from a more fundamental perspective.

The strategy wheel can be used to illustrate the ideal-typical process architecture of a strategy process. The specific way of working is developed together with those responsible for the process and tailored to the requirements of the respective organisation. The wheel is based on Wimmer and Nagel and leads from the general conditions, via core competencies, strategic challenges, options and the vision of the future, to objectives, strategy map, monitoring, organisation and implementation.

In the first step, the strategy team takes a differentiated look at the company’s relevant environments. It checks or determines facts, trends and conclusions and reviews existing assumptions. Since all information is never available and the future remains uncertain, strategy development is based on assumptions.

In the strategy team it is therefore important to make assumptions about future developments explicit and to share them, so that decisions can be made on that basis. It must remain clear that these are only ever assumptions, which may prove right or wrong in the future.

Three core questions are worked through in a structured way. What are the decisive influencing factors from the environment on the company? What development trends are to be expected for these factors? What opportunities and threats arise from them? The wider corporate environment and the specific competitive environment are considered. The aim is to recognise developments in the multi-layered and dynamic environments, to assess their significance for one’s own company and to derive opportunities and risks.

The second step concerns core capabilities. Since, according to the systemic approach, organisations develop from within themselves, this analysis is a key point in the strategy process. The organisation’s core competencies are analysed, among other things on the basis of customer projects and internal projects.

According to Hamel and Prahalad, core capabilities are the roots of competitiveness. They are to be understood as an overarching potential of capabilities that makes it possible to build competitive advantages in different business segments. A core capability is therefore not a single product, licence or patent that the competition can copy or that can be bought in.

The aim of this step is to identify the core capabilities and describe them explicitly. The discussion while working them out creates a new awareness of the company’s own capabilities. Like the reflection on the starting situation, it forms the basis for the later development of options.

Once the assumptions about the general conditions and the core capabilities have been clearly described, the central strategic challenges are derived in the third step. These are the subject areas that will decide the company’s viability and success in future dealings with markets, competitors and customers. It may be about coping with threats as well as about making use of opportunities.

On the basis of the organisational core capabilities and the identified opportunities and threats, and oriented towards the strategic challenges, strategic options are developed. These are possible visions of the future that differ significantly from the status quo. Trends and important known influencing factors form the basis. A framework is created that makes creative potential usable, so that visions of the future outside existing patterns of thinking become possible.

The designs for the future are then made concrete, examined from a business perspective and assessed in terms of feasibility, prospects of success and risks. At this point, in consultation with those responsible for the process in the company, the consultants critically examine whether the existing methods and capabilities are sufficient to assess the options soundly and comparably. These include, for example, the collection and evaluation of market data and controlling instruments for business assessment. Where necessary, methods and expertise from outside are fed into the process at specific points.

The concrete and assessed designs form the basis for the vision of the future. In a joint assessment and discussion process, they are weighed against each other and refined into an attractive vision of the future. Either aspects of individual options are brought together, or one of the options is selected as the desired construction of the future. Key descriptive features are the business policy identity, the corporate purpose, the market horizons, the target groups and customer management.

Anyone who does not want to run a company with a focus on the past aligns the entire strategy process with the self-created perspective on the future. The company then orients itself towards a future, attractive identity and no longer looks primarily at its past and previous identity. As a rule, the future identity differs significantly from the current stage of development. Strategies therefore deliberately create differences. The end result is a vision of the future constructed by the strategy team as the basis for objectives and strategic measures.

Concrete, quantitative targets are derived from the vision of the future, and a business plan is drawn up. The strategy wheel names sales, profitability, productivity, market share, employer image, innovation and customer satisfaction as fields for formulating objectives. The key measures for implementing the strategy are summarised in a master plan.

The strategy map describes the strategy with its objectives and measures from the four perspectives of customers, finance, processes, and learning and development, and depicts the cause-and-effect relationships between these perspectives. From this, key performance indicators are derived and a KPI system is developed for measuring and steering strategy implementation. This includes routines for measuring the effectiveness of the measures derived. In structure and functioning, the KPI system resembles a balanced scorecard.

Alongside strategy development, implementation places the highest demands on the organisation, because it usually has to take place “with the corporate engine running”. Organisational restructuring affects organisational structure and processes, decision-making routines, job profiles and staffing.

The strategy wheel counts communication, people development, alliances, cooperations and acquisitions, internationalisation and competence building as part of implementation. Added to this is change management: creating awareness, taking up personal concerns, steering implementation, making decisions, working together on implementation, and developing and realigning the strategy.

How can consulting become effective in a system that is operationally closed, self-referential and cannot be steered directly from outside? The answer starts with a particular feature of social systems: the way they generate their knowledge about themselves and their environments.

The basis of all knowledge production is observations, and these necessarily operate with distinctions. Something is going well or badly. Employees are committed and motivated or not. Market developments are expected or unexpected. Costs are too high or within limits.

With such distinctions, and the explanations and assessments they make possible, organisations generate information about themselves and about their relevant environments. On this basis, they produce decisions, which in turn form the basis for further information gathering and decision-making.

The patterns of observation and assessment established in everyday work are the result of the organisation’s previous history of survival and learning. If certain distinctions have given the organisation’s actions a successful orientation, the effects of these actions confirm the distinctions used and stimulate their further use.

According to Wimmer, this process of observations being confirmed by their own results leads to the build-up of stable meanings within the organisation. Situational assessments condense into fixed patterns of explanation and interpretation, into basic convictions that even deviating experiences no longer easily shake. This is the core of what is meant by the self-referentiality of organisations. The principle according to Luhmann is: a system sees what it sees, and as a rule it does not see that it does not see what it does not see.

This relationship determines that certain environmental events are processed into information relevant to action and decisions, and that organisations can otherwise behave indifferently towards the rest of the world. Given the complexity and dynamics of the environments, there is a risk that blind spots will form in the observation grids and that relevant changes will not be taken up and processed. In the worst case, the company slides unnoticed into a crisis that threatens its existence.

According to Wimmer, systemic organisational consulting positions its work precisely here: in the production of knowledge and the establishment of assessments of reality about oneself and one’s own environment. This offers the opportunity to break through system-specific blindness and supply the organisation with important irritations. The consultants’ task is to deliberately irritate the organisation via the structural couplings that arise in the strategy process, and thus to interrupt self-referentiality and self-confirmation.

The fundamental limitation of perception applies without restriction to consulting organisations too. Because of their background of experience and the context of reflection and discussion in which they are embedded, however, consultants are subject to different limitations than their client systems. They can make use of this difference.

According to Wimmer, they can specialise in observing which dominant patterns a client system has built up to construct its reality, which schemes of difference it primarily operates with, what it gets to see with them and what it does not, what specific blindness characterises it and what consequences arise for its relationship with the environment. The consultants must therefore recognise how the organisation distinguishes and assesses, and confront it with this skilfully. This sets in motion a process of reflection that opens up new possibilities.

It may become necessary for the consultants, as those responsible for the process, to involve further external expertise in the process at specific points as an “irritation amplifier”. This may include specific industry expertise, experts on particular markets, countries or regions, and experts on particular technological developments.

In this case, the consultants ensure that the information fed in is evaluated through communication in the strategy team. Insights and conclusions are drawn from the difference between self-reference and external reference and are shared.

The initial question can thus be answered. The way in which observing systems create their own reality in interaction with others brings characteristic limitations with it. According to Wimmer, working on these limitations and on the resulting commitments to very specific options for action forms the core of systemic consulting.

The task is to deliberately irritate the organisation’s established patterns of observation and explanation. If this does not succeed, the actors simply keep playing the “old tune”, confirm each other’s perspectives and patterns of explanation and entrench them.

In transformis’ understanding, the strategy process is an intensive communication process with an organisation’s important key players. In the individual sequences, the consultants make sure to deliberately irritate and break through the existing self-referentiality. Consulting aims to promote the organisation’s ability and potential to change and develop with foresight in line with changing environmental requirements.

This differs considerably from expert-oriented consulting. There, the consultant, on the basis of their expert knowledge, already has a picture of what the solution to the problem or the strategic positioning should look like and sees their task as guiding the group to this result through communication.

Another important task of the consulting team is the simultaneous, that is, immediate, clear documentation, visible to everyone, of the shared work results. At the end of each workshop, a jointly supported documentation is ready.

The clear language of the documentation is particularly important for the regular strategy review, in which assumptions and commitments are put to the test periodically. Only in this way can they be clearly traced and evaluated later, and only in this way can lessons be learned from them.

Further tasks include designing the overall architecture, that is, the sequence and logic of the workshop sequences, as well as planning and designing content and methodology and conducting the individual workshops. In the workshop, the consultants create suitable communication platforms in which existing information, data, hypotheses, observations and explanations are fed in, reflected on and shared. They also help put together the right key players.

In addition, the consultants bring in suitable discussion grids and documentation structures and thus determine which working structure and logic the individual workshops follow. Classic, expert-oriented strategy instruments, such as environmental analysis or Porter’s Five Forces, are certainly also used as “mental maps”.

The main task of systemic organisational consulting in the strategy process, however, remains the targeted irritation of the strategy team when self-referentiality dominates in the workshop. Blind spots become clear, and the organisation’s observation grids are sharpened and broadened. Observations, solutions and options then also become possible outside the previously limiting patterns.

Strategy processes generate the central business policy decision premises that an organisation needs in order to maintain the necessary focus and remain capable of action under uncertain and dynamic conditions. This creates sustainability and continuity in its own development.

At the same time, it is important to put precisely these decision premises to the test at periodic intervals and to keep them open to revision in the light of observable changes in the environments. In a strategy review, the strategy team therefore examines whether the assumptions on which the strategic commitments are based still apply, or whether such relevant changes have occurred in the meantime that an adjustment becomes necessary.

In this way, the vision of the future and the fundamental development objectives remain adaptable. Basically, a company can only be guided by its vision of the future if it is clear that such commitments are not final and can be corrected in a reasoned way as events unfold.

Understood in this sense, strategy development is not an ad hoc event run by experts. It is an organisational capability that has to be developed deliberately. As the shaping of the future and coping with uncertainty, it becomes the lever for the organisation’s ability to learn. Around the company’s existential questions, it repeatedly mobilises the need to decide on the difference between learning and not learning as an organisation.

Two questions are central. At which points does the organisation hold on to what has proven itself so far, even if there are one or two signs that change is needed? And in which dimensions does it seriously want to change in order to develop consistently towards the desired vision of the future? This kind of ability to learn maintains the tension between orientation towards the current conditions for success and those expected for the future.

The aim is to enable the organisation to question and, where necessary, correct its own assumptions and strategic commitments and the way they came about. In the medium term, it should go through such processes independently. In a periodic strategy review, the company should question the identified market opportunities in the light of its knowledge of its own capabilities, become aware of its own vulnerability again and again and, if necessary, be able to correct its course.

This is another important task of the consultants: to support the organisation in defining and establishing appropriate routines, to accompany them at the start of implementation and to help ensure that the new routines are put into practice and maintained in everyday corporate life.

To this end, learning architectures have to be designed and introduced, and key players from the organisation qualified. The structures and routines with which changes in the relevant environments are observed, taken up and processed must therefore be anchored in the organisation.

Experience with strategy development processes shows that in dynamic and uncertain market situations, it is not an organisation’s current way of responding that establishes competitive advantages. What is decisive is the long-term shaping of the capacity to respond and of key resources.