Business Strategy 14: Summary & Review of the Strategic Change Cycle

This continues our series applying John M. Bryson’s strategic change cycle to your business

Bryson summarizes the Strategic Change Cycle in Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations “These ten steps should lead to actions, results, evaluations, and learning. It must be emphasized that actions, results, evaluative judgments, and learning should emerge at each step in the process. In other words, implementation and evaluation should not wait until the ‘end’ of the process but should be an integral and ongoing part of the process.” (p34)

Recombining the 10 Steps

The 10 steps outlined in Bryson’s book and my last several posts include:

• “Initiate and agree on a strategic planning process
• Identify organizational mandates
• Clarify organizational mission and values
• Assess the external and internal environments to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
• Identify the strategic issues facing the organization
• Formulate strategies to manage the issues
• Review and adopt the strategies or strategic plan
• Establish an effective organizational vision
• Develop an effective implementation process
• Reassess the strategies and the strategic planning process” (p33)

Strategic Management Process

“The Strategy Change Cycle becomes a strategic management process—and not just a strategic planning process—to the extent that is is used to link planning and implementation and to manage an organization in a strategic way on an ongoing basis.” (p31)

Does Not Follow the Numerical Order

We outlined the ten steps of the process in numerical order. Bryson reminds us, however, that the process does not necessarily flow smoothly in numerical order. Bryson continues

• “In addition, the process often does not start with step 1 but instead starts with some other step and then cycles back to step 1.
• The steps are not steps precisely but rather occasions for deliberation, decisions, and actions within a continuous flow of strategic thinking, acting, and learning; knowledge exploration and exploitation, and strategy formulation and implementation.
• Mintzberg asserts that ‘all real strategic behavior has to combine deliberate control with emergent learning’.
• The Strategy Change Cycle is designed to promote just his kind of strategic behavior.” (p 61)

Saturday concludes series on strategy plan cycle reviewing a few of Bryson’s cautions