Strategic Lenses

Strategy Lenses: Ways of looking at strategy issues differently in order to generate

many insights.
Also called as ideas lens in previous editions.
Distinct, theoretically informed ways of thinking about strategy.
Looking at problems in different ways will raise new issues and new solutions.

Four Lenses:
1. Design 2. Experience 3. Variety 4. Discourse

1. Strategy as Design
- Design lens views strategy development as a logical process of analysis and
evaluation.
- Evokes an image of the strategist as detached designer, drawing up precise blueprints
distant from the messy realities of action.
- This is the most commonly held view about how strategy is developed and what
managing strategy is about. It encourages objective analysis through the use of formal
concepts and frameworks.
- Design lens encourages a detached approach to planning and analysis, valuing hard
facts and objectivity.
- It tends to exclude improvisation in strategy development and gives little credit to the
unpredictable, conservative or political aspects of human organisations.
- Taking a design lens to a strategic problem means being systematic, analytical and
logical.
- Design lens therefore puts a strong premium on rational analysis and decision-making.
- Rational analysis is what counts, not passion or intuition. However, this commitment
to dry analysis can sometimes work against innovation.
- The design lens makes the following three assumptions about how strategic decisions
are made:

1
 1. Systematic analysis is key: careful analysis can identify most significant
influences.
2. Analysis precedes action: decisions about strategy are separate and
precede implementation.
3. Objectives should be clear: missions and visions should be set in advance
as precisely as possible.
- 02 key views about nature of organizations:
1. Organizations are hierarchies
2. Organizations work mechanically: pulling right lever = predictable results

- Implications:
Worth investing extensive time in formal analysis especially economic
analysis.
Formal strategic planning and financial calculations are crucial parts of
design lens.
The design lens provides a means of talking about complex and uncertain
issues in a rational, logical and structured way.
Strategy is more than guesswork.
Adopting rational procedures is something that important stakeholders
such as banks, financial analysts, investors and employees typically
expect.
Taking a design lens approach is therefore an important means of gaining
the support and confidence of significant internal and external actors.
A narrow design lens tends to underestimate the positive role of intuition
and experience, the scope for unplanned and bottom-up initiatives, and the
power effects of strategy analysis.

2
2. Strategy as Experience
- Experience lens sees strategy as coming from the prior experience of the
organisations managers.

- The outcome of peoples taken-forgranted assumptions and ways of doing things.

- Recognizes that the future strategy of an organisation is often heavily influenced by its
experience and that of its managers.

- Given that strategies are chosen and implemented by people, then their experience is
going to matter.

- Strategy through the experience lens puts people, culture and history centre stage in
strategy development.

- Places less emphasis than the design lens on rationality. It also sets low expectations
in terms of innovation and change. Legitimacy is important, but this is defi ned in
terms of personal experience or organisational routines and culture rather than simple
appeal to analysis and the facts.

- Implications:
It is practically impossible to obtain all the information required for
comprehensive analysis.

It is hard to forecast accurately in an uncertain future.

Cost and time limits to undertaking complete analyses.

Managers settle for adequate solutions rather than the rational optimum.

Internal psychological limitations: managers suffer from bounded

rationality, human limitations on the intellectual ability to process
information and carry out analysis\

3
 Cognitive bias: managers tend to be selective in the attention they give to
issues and often automatically favour some types of solutions rather than
others.

Analysis is typically biased to some extent: It is very hard to analyse a

situation as if from a clean sheet of paper.

Experience is likely to lead to routinized responses, even to new

problems. Tried-and-tested solutions become too legitimate.

Analysis can cost more than its worth: good info hard and expensive to
get, time consuming, beyond a certain point it is sensible to drop the
analysis.

Challenge the consensus: groupthink is a risk, useful to encourage

diversity of views, encourage participation from all employees.

3. Strategy as Variety
- Emphasizes innovation and change.
- Bubbling up of new ideas from the variety of people in and around organisations.
- Variety lens sees strategy not so much as planned from the top as emergent from
within and around organisations as people respond to an uncertain and changing
environment with a variety of initiatives.
- Seen as emerging from the different ideas that bubble up from the variety in and
around organisations.
- Organisations and their environments potentially offer a rich ecology for the
generation of different ideas and initiatives.
- Top managers cannot know everything about their organisations and markets.
According to the variety lens, therefore, strategy can emerge not just from the top, but
also from the periphery and bottom of the organisation.
- Emphasises the importance of promoting diversity in and around organisations, in
order to allow the seeding of as many genuinely new ideas as possible.

4
- Implications:
Allow for emergence: rather than being deliberately designed, strategies
often emerge from the bottom and the periphery of organisations,
accumulating coherence over time.
Encourage interaction, experiment and change: Google encourages
experiments by giving staff 20 per cent of their time to pursue their own
projects.
Attend to the Rules: attend to the selection and retention rules by which
strategies are allowed to emerge.

4. Strategy as Discourse
- Discourse lens views language as important both for understanding and changing
strategy and for managerial power and identity
- Focuses attention on the ways managers use language to frame strategic problems,
make strategy proposals, debate issues and then finally communicate strategic
decisions.
- Managers are always using language to pursue their objectives. Through this lens,
unpicking managers discourse can uncover hidden meanings and political interests.
- A tool for managers to shape objective strategic analyses in their favour and to gain
influence, power and legitimacy.
- For believers in the discourse lens, strategy talk matters.
- The ability to write inspiring vision and mission statements can help motivate a whole
organization.
- Influences the identity and legitimacy of managers as strategists.
- Discourse lens tries to look under the surface of strategy to uncover the personal
interests and politicking in organisations. Taking a discourse lens encourages a
skeptical view.
- Implications:

5
 Through the discourse lens, strategies need to be legitimate, not simply
correct.
Use strategy discourse skillfully: using the right language matters both for
justifying and imposing strategies and for participating in strategy
discussions.
Treat strategy discourse skeptically: to see through the surface language
of strategy to uncover the deeper interests and motives behind it.
5. The point of the lenses is to encourage the exploration of different perspectives: to
look at the situation first from one point of view (perhaps design) and then from
another.
6. Lenses help in recognising how otherwise logical strategic initiatives might be held
back by cultural experience; in checking for unexpected ideas from the bottom or the
periphery of the organisation; and in seeing through the formal strategy discourse to
ask whose interests are really being served.
7. Taking just one view can lead to a partial and perhaps biased understanding. Looking
at an issue another way can give a much fuller picture, generating new and different
insights.
8. Three Key Dimensions of Managing Strategy
1. Rationality: the extent to which the development of strategy is rationally
managed. The design lens assumes high rationality, but the other lenses question
this.
2. Innovation: the extent to which strategy is likely to develop innovative, change-
oriented organisations, or alternatively consolidate past experience and existing
power structures.
3. Legitimacy: the extent to which strategy analysis and discourse fits with the
expectations of key stakeholders, thereby reinforcing managers power and
identities in organisations.

6
 Recommendations Strategic Choices
Design Lens Experience Lens Variety Lens Discourse Lens
- Consider all options - Challenge standard - Look beyond top - Watch your
responses management language

- Ensure fit between - Respect cultural - Learn from - Distrust others

choice and purpose differences acquisitions and language
partners
- Maximize returns - Adjust competitor - Look out for
analysis - Expect surprises managerial interests.

Recommendations Strategy Formulations and Implementation

Design Lens Experience Lens Variety Lens Discourse Lens
- Make the business - Challenge biases - Favor inclusiveness - Words matter
case: logical
analysis and
evidence

- Exercise tight - Pick your teams - Check the rules - Organizations are
change management carefully political

- Reinforce coherent - Recognize the - Be ready to go - Language is an

action challenge of change off-plan entry ticket