Strategic planning plays roles in communicating and controlling strategy, rather than formulating it. Strategy often emerges informally based on experience within an organization's culture. Planning draws together emerging strategy and provides structure, but does not direct its development. Intended strategy results from formal planning, but emergent strategy develops through everyday activities. Both routes influence realized strategy.

1. Understanding
Strategic Development

2. Strategic Planning
• On the face of it, planning is most obviously
explained through the design lens; it can certainly
take the form and appearance of a logical system
of objective setting, analysis and evaluation
leading to clearly articulated intentions from the
top management in an organization.
However, the research by Rob Grant makes it
clear that strategic planning is likely to perform
the roles of communicating, controlling and
communicating strategy rather than formulating
the strategy itself. The other lenses also help
explain the roles planning may play in
organizations.

3. • The experience lens suggests strategy actually
develops on the basis of more informal sensing of
the environment on the basis of people’s
experience or through the cultural systems of the
organization. Here planning is not seen as
directing the development of strategy so much as
drawing together the threads of a strategy which
emerges on the basis of that experience. So the
strategy comes to look as though it has been
planned. In so doing the exercise of planning may
help make sense of such emerging strategy, may
provide a more coherent form to it, or indeed
may help challenge some of the assumptions or
biases on which it is based. So even if the role of
planning is seen through this lens, it can be
argued it performs and important role.

4. • The ideas lens also emphasizes the emergence
of strategy from within the organization rather
than from the top; so again planning may be
seen here as making sense of that emergent
strategy. Planning systems can also be seen as
one of the mechanisms by which ideas that
emerge from within an organization are
selected and retained. Such ideas have to
compete for their survival, or prove their
worth against other ideas.

5. Definitions
• INTENDED STRATEGY is an expression of
desired strategic direction deliberately
formulated or planned by managers.
• EMERGENT STRATEGY comes about through
everyday routines, activities and processes in
organizations
• REALIZED STRATEGY: the strategy actually
being followed by an organization in practice

6. Strategy Development Routes
Emergent
Strategy
Intended
Strategy Realized
Strategy
Unrealized
Strategy

7. A Strategic Planning Cycle
Planning
guidelines, Forecasts, scenarios, assumptions, Draft business plans Discussion with corporate Revised business plans
Strategy targets and directives
Annual Capital and Operating Budgets Corporate plan
Approval by Board
Performance appraisal Annual Performance targets

8. ADVANTAGES
Identifies risks
Forces managers to think
Forces decision making
Formal targets enable control
Enforces organizational coherence and coordination
DISADVANTAGES
Not proven to bring advantage
May become over formal and reduce initiative
Assumes internal politics do not exist
Assumes managers know everything
Divorces planning from doing
Cannot cope with shocks and discontinuities

9. Key Points
• It is important to distinguish between
intended strategy – the desired strategic
direction deliberately planned by managers –
and emergent strategy which may develop in a
less deliberate way from the behaviors and
activities inherent within an organization.

10. Key Points
• Most often the process of strategy development
is described in terms of intended strategy as a
result of management design through planning
systems carried out by top management
objectively and dispassionately. There are
benefits and dis-benefits of formal strategic
planning systems. However, there is evidence to
show that such formal systems are not an
adequate explanation of what occurs in practice.
There is a need for other explanations of strategy
development.

11. Key Points
• Intended strategy may also come about on the
basis of strategy workshops, project
groups, the intervention of strategy
consultants and the imposition of strategies
by external stakeholders

12. Key Points
• Strategies may emerge from within organizations.
This may be explained in terms of:
 How organizations may proactively cope through
processes of logical incrementalism
 The resource allocation routines currently
employed in the organization which may favor
certain strategy development projects over
others
 The taken for granted elements of organizational
culture favoring certain strategies
 The outcome of the bargaining associated with
political activity resulting in a negotiated strategy

13. Strategic Development in
environmental contexts
Environmental
Conditions Simple Complex
Static Historical
Analysis Decentralizati
Forecasting on of
organizations
Experience
Scenario and learning
planning
Dynamic