To Dorothy Martin,
I am a recent subscriber to this e-mail mailing list and I have found the
dialogue quite enlightening and entertaining over the past week. I look
forward to engaging in some dialogue when I have the time, but, for the
moment I will continue to acclimate myself to the style of dialogue.
However, with respect to your questions regarding strategic planning,
i.e., a male game and just another management and leadership game. First,
I would recommend you to Henry Mintzberg's The Rise and Fall of Strategic
Planning. Mintzberg suggests that "Planning by its very nature defines
and preserves categories. Creativity, by its very nature, creates
categories, or rearranges established ones. That is why formal planning
can neither provide creativity nor deal with it when it emerges by other
means."
I am also reminded of a definition of strategic as signifying an endeavor
of long term to which the organization commits a large amount of resources
and a course of action that is difficult if not impossible to reverse.
Take that in conjunction with Karl Weick's notion that planning is an
effort to anticipate how the environment will respond to our actions.
Weick says you cannot anticipate until you act, thus enacting the
environment. Also, consider the propositions of chaos theory (that you
can only predict in the short run because of the sensitivity to initial
conditions) and complexity theory (that you cannot predict at all because
of randomness). Weick also suggests that strategy is retrospective in
nature. Since we cannot predict and therefore not plan in a strategic
fashion, we then look back on our course of events and retrospectively
ascertain what our strategy was.
Considering all of that I think your question legitimate as to it being a game
to be put back up on the shelf. I, myself, prefer the notions of strategic
visioning or strategic decision-making.
Alonzo Villarreal, Jr.
[Host's Note: Welcome Alonzo! ..Rick]
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