The school also relies heavily on predicting future trends by extrapolating the present trends, using hard data and in over formalizing the strategy–making performance. All of these things may have detrimental effects to strategies formulated using this school. If present and past trends are used the only source used to predict future trends strategies are at risk from failing. Trends can change significantly very quickly for a variety of reasons. Many of these are external to organisations and therefore are difficult to predict at the best of times, least of all when only past and present data is being considered. For example, if an airline flying purely between America and the UK formulated their strategy based upon the positioning school they would incur many unforeseen problems after 9/11. They would have predicted flight sales in October 2001 to have been similar to those in October 2001, however, the events which occurred on 9/11/01, which were completely out of their control would have meant that flight sales plummeted and their strategy put into jeopardy.
There are also concerns in regard to the focus of the school. It is much too narrow in that it is only interested in the data that is either economic or quantifiable. It shows no concern over any other data, for example social or political, or even any non-quantifiable economic data. This narrow range then leads to the risk that strategies that are developed may be biased, a point that the BCG matrix highlights. This model places an obsessive emphasis on market share which is an example of a quantifiable piece of data.
The context is also of concern. Once again the main worry is the fact that positioning school only has a narrow context. Within this school there is a great bias towards the big businesses where “market power is greatest, competition least effective, and the potential for political manipulation most pronounced.” (Mintzberg et al, Strategy Safari 1998)
The third concern is one which relates to the process of the school. Strategists are usually expected to be detached from the tangible world, such as being concerned with making products and selling clothing. Instead they are supposed to deal with the “abstractions on paper”. This is in line with the message of the positioning school, i.e. that it is not as important to “get out there and learn” as it is to “stay at home and calculate.” The resulting problem associated with this is that calculation “can impede not only the learning and creativity but also personal commitment. With the planners sequestered in the central offices feeding reports to the top managers, everyone else gets slighted as a mere implementer.” (Ideas and quotations from Mintzberg et al, Strategy Safari 1998)
Finally, when looking at strategy itself, it too tends to have only a narrow focus within this particular school. “It is seen as generic position, not unique perspective. At the limit, the process can reduce to a formula, whereby such a position is selected from a restricted list of conditions. … The positioning school focuses its attention on strategies that are generic, on industries that are established, on groups that have formed, and on data that has hardened. Studying the established categories discourages the creation of new ones.” (Minzberg et al, Strategy Safari 1998)
The Learning School, an emergent process
Those in favour of this school believe that strategists can be found throughout organisations rather than just at the management level. Instead of a strategy having to be created by the Managing Director or the CEO this school gives anybody within the organisation the ability to develop organisational strategies.
The followers of this school also believe that learning occurs over a period of time with collective learning being used. They understand that there is always the possibility that some strategies will fail whilst others succeed. The role of the leader in such cases is to manage the process as a whole in order to allow the emergence of novel strategies. Strategies under this school are developed through looking at the past, developing this into plans for the future and then considering perspectives that will guide the overall behaviour of the organisation. The formulation and implementation processes involved are very closely intertwined and often become indistinguishable. This is because it is usually the people who are implementing the strategy that can see the future of the company and are therefore involved in formulation. In other schools this is not the case, formulation will occur first and will be separate from the implementation of the strategy. (Ideas from lecture notes)
The school developed on the ideas of the political scientist Lindblom, and James Brian Quinn. Lindblom developed the idea that each small decision that is made represents the small steps that are made in strategic decisions, incrementalism. Quinn added to Lindblom’s theory which was mainly of a ‘disjointed incremental’ strategy and took it forward into ‘logical incrementalism’. “The real strategy tends to evolve as internal decisions and external events flow together to create a new, widely shared consensus for action among key members of the top management team. In well-run organizations, managers pro-actively guide these streams of actions and events incrementally towards conscious strategies.” (Quinn, J.B. Managing Strategic Change.)
As with any of the schools there are several critiques of it. The critiques of the learning school can be looked at in terms of there being no strategy, a lost strategy and of there being the wrong strategy. If there is no strategy organisations can suffer. “Organizations do not always need clear strategies… But it is also true that a great many organizations suffer from the lack of clearly articulated strategy.” “There are conditions under which patient learning cannot be relied upon, crisis being the most obvious. Here the organization may require a forceful leader who already has a strategic vision to sae it. Even under more stable conditions, some organizations need the strong strategic visions that come from centralized entrepreneurship more than decentralized learning. An organization can have loads of venturing and thousands of flowers blooming all over the place, yet have no coherence at all – no strategy.”
(Mintzberg et al, Strategy Safari, 1998)
An example of this is the July 2005 bombings in Central London. Due to the fact of it being a crisis situation which was highly unexpected no specific strategy had been developed of how to deal with not only the initial problems of rescuing people and finding the people responsible, but also of how to deal with the general public and the racism issues that it highlighted. Instead the armed forces were unsure of their responsibilities. They had to wait and see if they were required by the police force or government on a day to day basis.
“An overemphasis on learning can also work to undermine a coherent and perfectly viable strategy. People run around leaning away form what works, championing initiative simply because they are new or more interesting. … The learning school should not be about learning as some kind of Holy Grail. Mostly it should be about learning as a discipline for elaborating a valued sense of direction – an established strategic perspective - and occasionally about changing that sense of direction, when necessary.” (Mintzberg et al, Strategy Safari, 1998) The lost strategy critique therefore highlights the facts that there is always the risk of too much learning resulting in strategic drift which cannot be avoided by concentrating on the core activities. Instead there needs to be a balance between changes for the sake of it and changes that will improve and consolidate the organisation’s competitive advantage. (Ideas from lecture notes)
The third critique of learning is if the wrong strategy is developed. This is because if learning occurs incrementally it can sometimes lead to the development of ‘bad’ strategies which no-one wanted in the first place. This is as well as the fact that often small decisions can be made very quickly and with little thought but it is quite common for them to result in a major commitment from the organisation, whether this be financial commitment or time etc. This is the case even if it is not the intention. (Ideas from lecture notes)
The Environmental School, a reactive process
This school, unlike the others does not only look at “the chief, the planner, the brain and the organization” (Mintzberg et al, Strategy Safari, 1998) as the actors at the centre stage of the school. Instead it views the environment as such, which it describes as “the set of forces outside the organization. … The other schools see this as a factor; the environmental school sees this as an actor – indeed the actor.” (Mintzberg et al, Strategy Safari, 1998) This is one of the school’s main premises and as well as viewing the environment in this way it must also respond to these environmental forces. “This school helps to bring the overall view of strategy formation into balance by positioning environment as one of the three central forces in the process, alongside leadership and organization…. This school itself has helped to describe different dimensions of the environments facing strategists, and to suggest their possible effects on strategy formation. (Mintzberg et al, Strategy Safari, 1998) The other premises for the environmental school are that “leadership becomes a passive element for purposes of reading the environment and ensuring proper adaptation by the organization and that organizations end up clustering together in distinct ecological-type niches, positions where they remain until resources become scarce or conditions to hostile. Then they die.” (Mintzberg et al, Strategy Safari, 1998)
“The environmental school throws light on the demands of the environment. Among its most noticeable theories is the "contingency theory", that considers what responses are expected of organizations that face particular environmental conditions, and "population ecology", writings that claim severe limits to strategic choice”. (www.1000ventures.com) It was developed to “oppose assertions of classical management that there is ‘one beast way’ to run an organisation. To contingency theorists, ‘it all depends’: on the size of the organization, its technology, the stability of its context, external hostility, and so on.” (Mintzberg et al, Strategy Safari, 1998)
“The environmental school finds the strongest expression in the work of researchers who label their approach population ecology…who express their ‘doubt that the major features of the world of organizations arise through learning or adaptation.” (Mintzberg et al, Strategy Safari, 1998) These population ecologists then argue that most of the changes we commonly observe in organizations are superficial because the basic structure and character of an organization is fixed shortly after birth any actions that are then taken make the organization more rigid and less able to make decisions that are actually strategic. (Ideas taken from Mintzberg et al, Strategy Safari, 1998)
There have been numerous critiques of this school. Van de Ven was concerned with the issue of where population variations arose and whether this was due to the role of entrepreneurs and inventors. Astley later critiqued it due to the fact that “environments are often quite open and receptive to whatever variations are imposed on them.” (Mintzberg et al, Strategy Safari, 1998)
There is also the problem of using contingency theory for the purposes of strategic management which is associated with this school. This is because it can use very abstract, vague and aggregated dimensions of the environment. Strategies need to be specific to the case and the environment within which they are in operation therefore this vagueness can be detrimental to the overall results of the strategy.
The most important critique however is concerned with the ‘strategic choices’ set out by the population ecologists. The idea that “organizations have no real strategic choice – that there is some sort of ‘environmental imperative’ out there has been criticized on a number of grounds.” (Mintzberg et al, Strategy Safari, 1998) These include who is it in fact that chooses the environment? Are organizations really completely separate from the environment within which they operate? And more importantly, some may say, “do environments ‘exist’ at all, or are these just the perceptions of people – social constructions themselves?” (Mintzberg et al, Strategy Safari, 1998)
Conclusion
After looking at the Positioning, Learning and Environmental schools, it can be concluded that each school does not have unique ideas. There are very often aspects of the schools used to develop the ideas of the others. For example, the positioning school is developed upon ideas of the design and planning schools. This idea can be illustrated by the following diagram (taken from www.1000ventures.com) which shows the correlation between each of the different strategies.
There is no perfect, ideal strategy. Therefore it is down to the individual managers of the individual organisations to develop a strategy which works best for them and the rest of their organisation, whether this be by adopting a complete school set out by Mintzberg et al, or by taking key elements of several of the schools and tailoring these to meet their specific needs and requirements.
Bibliography
Mintzberg H., Ahlstrand B., Lampel J., Strategy Safari, The complete guide through the wilds of strategic management, Financial Times, Prentice Hall, 1998
http://www.1000ventures.com/business_guide/mgmt_inex_stategy_10schools.html
(accessed on 21/02/06)
Quinn, J. B. “Managing Strategic Change” Sloan Management Review, (Summer 1980b: 3-20)
Lecture notes.
