Lecture notes for the course Organization & Environment (MAN-MOR003)

ORGANIZATION AND
ENVIRONMENT LECTURE NOTES
STEPHANIE DE KONING


WEBLECTURE 2 – 17/4/2020
DESIGN SCHOOL & PLANNING SCHOOL


INTRODUCTION

Learning objectives

- To internalize the idea op perspectivism
- To reason according to different perspectives and schools of thoughts – premises, assumptions,
contributions, strengths and weaknesses
- To identify practice according to theory (theory to action)
- To analyse how practice can lead to theory development (action to theory)
- To explain the development of the major schools of organizational theory and their dependencies as
they developed over time

When looking at the organization:

- Competitive advantage
- Strategists
- Vision and mission statements
- External opportunities and threats
- Internal strengths and weaknesses
- Long term objectives
- Strategies
- Annual objectives
- Policies

With for instance:

o Geographical expansion
o Diversification
o Acquisition
o Product development
o Market penetration
o Divestiture
o Liquidation
o Joint venture

What we think about strategy, is based on:

 Perspectivism
= the philosophical view that all indentations take place from particular perspectives. There
are many possible conceptual schemes or judgement or truths.

,Some premises on strategy:

- Strategy sets direction
- Strategy defines the organization
- Strategy focuses effort

All 3 have up and down sides, so what is strategy?

 “Strategy is the art of working out how you will win in business and life”
 “.. the determination of the basic long-term goals and objectives of an enterprise, and the adoption of
courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary for carrying out these goals”

Or in 5 p’s:




CATEGORIZING THE SCHOOLS

- Prescriptivism
o Concerned with how strategies should be formulated rather than with how they necessarily
do form
o Strategy formation as:
 A process of informal design, essentially one of conception
 A more detached and systematic process of formal planning
 Less concerned with the process of strategy formation than with the actual content
of strategies, focusing on the selection of strategic positions in the economic
marketplace
- Descriptivism
o Not concerned with ideal behaviour, but describing how strategies do actually get made
o Strategy formation as:
 Cognitive psychology to enter the strategist’s mind
 Emergent in small steps, as an organization adapts, or learns
 A process of internal/external negotiation
 Collective and cooperative
 Reactive, with the initiative with the external context
 Entrepreneurial
- Configurative
o Configuration: adapt to the situation, combine
o Strategy formation as:
 A combination of ‘the best of both worlds’

, Four basic approaches to strategy formation

Visioning  planning = prescriptive, deliberate top
down

Planning  venturing = descriptive, emergent, can be
top down to




How to adapt to a shock how does the functionality of the system respond?

- Fragile
- Resilient
- Antifragile


Strategies under state of shock: not all shocks are negative,
some are golden opportunities:

 Resilience:
o The capacity of a system to absorb to
disturbance and still retain its basic function,
structure and feedback systems
 Agility:
o The ability to move quickly and easily
o Embracing the positive, adapting to
opportunity

DESIGN SCHOOL

Characteristics and premises

1. Strategy formation as a deliberate process of conscious thought
2. Strategy to attain, match, or fit, between internal capabilities and external possibilities
3. Responsibility for strategy rests with the CEO
4. The process of strategy formation must be kept simple and informal
5. Strategies should be unique
6. Strategies should be clear, simple and specific
7. Separation of formulation from implementation
8. A strategy has first to be fully formulated and can then be implemented

Strategists in this school: gather information, analyse information, organize information and the analytics are:
Top down and & prescriptive.

Strategy is a plan, explicit, a grand strategy, unique, grand conception (no copy catting), we talk about a plan
and pattern, no emergence here!

Design school follows:

1. Analysis
2. Creation

, 3. Evaluation and choice
4. And only then…. Implementation
 Structure follows strategy
o “until we know the (new/revised) strategy we cannot begin to re-specify the appropriate
structure”
- Strategy and the determination of long-term goals and objectives, the adoption of courses of action
and allocation of resources to achieve goals
- Structure as the design of the organization through which the strategy is administered
- Changes in an organization’s strategy lead to new administrative problems which require a new or
refashioned structure for the successful implementation of the new strategy




SWOT Analysis = design school thinking

And the environment is taken into consideration as well: such as changes: societal, governmental, economic,
competitive, supplier, market

Critique to this: “Structure may be somewhat malleable, but it cannot be altered at will just because a leader
has conceived a new strategy”

Summarizing the design school:

- The CEO has complete information and is absolutely informed
- The CEO has the capacity to process all information
- The environment can always be understood
- Situations and environments are predictable
- All information is documented and available
- Strategy is centrally formulated

Critique on the school:

- Structure follows strategy  but can the wipe the slate clean???
- Structure scarcely malleable
- Assumption of universality
- Learning ignored by only analytically assessing environment
- Making strategy hierarchical, centralized and explicit = promoting inflexibility
- Separation of formulation from implementation = detaching thinking from acting

But  Contributions of the design school:

- Vocabulary and tools