Creative Strategy: Reconnecting Business and Innovation

CHAPTER 4

A More Creative View of Strategy

Strategic management and theories of strategy have evolved, and the conventions that were criticized in relation to creativity in Chapter 3 have been, and are being, challenged. We can begin to address some of the limitations highlighted in the previous chapter by building on emerging perspectives on strategy. In this way Chapter 4 presents a broader view of strategy, based on three levels of definition:

1. the content of strategy, or what strategy is about;
2. the processes by which this broader notion of strategy is formed;
3. a focus on what strategy is aiming toward (or its outcomes, to borrow the language used to define creativity in Chapter 2).

Using a definitional model similar to the content-process-outcome framework of creativity in Chapter 2 will allow us to develop an integrative and bisociative view of strategy. It will also help us to explore the relationship between creativity and strategy, as we build toward a working definition of ‘creative strategy’ in the next chapter.

Strategy's Content: Plans, Patterns, Positions, Ploys, Perspectives

Our view of what strategy can be has been expanded in many ways over the past two decades. Perhaps the best framework for thinking beyond strategy as being just about planning is also the earliest: Henry Mintzberg's ‘Five P's for strategy’. Here strategy can contain the following five elements (or, indeed, a combination of them):

Plans – consciously intended guidelines or sets of guidelines determined ...