Learning More About the Issues of Strategic Drift
Discussions about the underlying notion of 'strategic drift' recognise that it is not so much an issue of 'drift' in the sense of a lack of direction but more the effect of organizational momentum. This momentum effect can be seen in the general notions of path dependency and certain key issues in innovation such as Clayton Christensen's 'Innovators Dilemma' (The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, Harvard Business School Press, 1997). In a number of ways the overall issue can be seen as a reframing of the oft-repeated concern to establish an appropriate balance between continuity and change. At AIM we have been particularly interested in researching two aspects of this general issue:
Recursive Processes and Levels of Adaptation Within Routines
Various authors including Martha Feldman have commented on the degree to which significant change actually occurs even within what are seen as fixed and standardised organisational routines: the move from the ostensive to the performative (Martha S. Feldman, 'Organizational Routines as a Source of Continuous Change', Organization Science, Vol. 11, No. 6 (Nov. - Dec., 2000), pp. 611-629). In a number of research projects this observation has informed our analysis and interpretation.
Long Term 'Traditions'
The Successful Strategic Transformers (SST) project, has been a substantial research project using a large dataset of business performance to identify those firms which have succeeded in undergoing major transformation whilst continuing to deliver high quality short term performance. Through in-depth historical analysis these firms are then compared with other identified good performers in their sector. Tentatively it appears that the key firms seem to be able to sustain four what we have called traditions (see M. Hensmans and G Johnson, How Much Does History Matter? Traditions as Imprinted Dynamic Capabilities of Transformation, Paper presented at the Academy of Management Annual Conference, Philadelphia, August 2007):
- Traditions of continuity, particularly in terms of a dominant coalition within an organization,
- Traditions of anticipation, particularly in terms of an alternative coalition within the organization,
- Traditions of contestability that might take the form of the merging of different cultures, personal rivalry, and culturally embedded tensions,
- Traditions of mobility with regard to different 'champions of different logics' coming to the fore).
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