Strategy Careers

At the end of last year I taught a Chartered Management Institute Level 3 Leadership and Management course. It was great fun as it allowed me to play with various leadership and management theories and apply them to practical situations.

During the course, we touched on strategic planning and I came across an interesting model/theory about different approaches to strategy used by organisations. It occurred to me that this could be applicable to individuals thinking about their own career development strategy.

In her article Ellen Chaffee (1985) identifies three distinct models of strategy:

1. Linear strategy. This consists of making decisions and formulating plans of action that will set and achieve viable goals. This tends to predominate in top-down organisations and assumes that future conditions will be fairly stable or predictable.
2. Adaptive strategy. This consists of evaluating the opportunities and risks present in one’s surroundings. Strategy in this case means developing capabilities and resources that enable you to exploit the opportunities and insure against the risks. This involves a constant process of monitoring and adjustment which assumes that the environment is constantly changing and one must evolve to match it.
3. Interpretive strategy. This approach views strategy as something which emerges from a constant dialogue between the various perspectives within and outside an organisation. As such it is a symbolic expression of the culture of an organisation which is dependent on internal and external relationships. Adaptive strategy is about changing what you do, but interpretive strategy is about changing how you think and how you see yourself (and in so doing changing how others see you). In this way, an interpretive strategy is as much about attitudes as it is about actions. It is also about developing and improving interactions and relationships.

These models are not mutually exclusive; each subsequent model contains within it the previous models.