Creative Strategy: Reconnecting Business and Innovation

CHAPTER 3

Uncreative Strategy

Before considering the possibilities for making strategy more creative in the future, we should explore why strategic management may have failed to employ greater creativity in the past. In this chapter, we outline ten reasons why the dominant logic of strategic management (a set of assumptions and practices which have come to dominate thinking about strategy in businesses and business schools) may have got in the way of more creative approaches to strategy.

1. Creativity Can't be Planned Directly …

… and strategic management has generally been associated with planning.

Early definitions of strategic management associated strategy with the plans that were made concerning the whole organization, for the longer term. But translating this plan into implementation further down the organization typically followed a predictive path of step by step planning – ‘first we do A, then we do B…’. Such an approach undermines an integrative model of strategy and certainly does not fit with accounts of creativity. Paul Feyerabend's study of the nature of scientific creativity clearly outlined that because scientific success could not be explained in a simple way, to the point that it would be wrong and misleading to say, for example, that: ‘the structure of the atomic nucleus was found because people did A, B, C…’ (where A, B and C are procedures which can be understood independently of their use in nuclear psychics), all we can do is give an historical account of ...