The most widely used (and taught) protocols for strategic analysis — SWOT and Porter’s (1980) Five Force Framework for industry analysis — have been found wanting as stimuli to strategy creation or even as a basis for further strategy development. We approach this problem from a neurocognitive perspective. We find profound incompatibilities between the mental image representations evoked by these strategic analysis frameworks and the neural processes going on within the brain that comprise “thinking.” The analytical structure (or “propositional representation”) of these tool results in a mental dead end, the phenomenon known in psychology as “functional fixedness.” The difficulty lies with the inability of the brain to make out meaningful (i.e., strategy provoking) stimuli from the mental images (or “depictive representations”) generated by strategic analysis results. We propose decreasing dependence on these tools and further research employing brain-imaging technology to explore strategy protocols with richer mental representation potential for strategy creation. [Courtesy of Rob Millard]
Authors: Harold E. Klein, Mark D’Esposito
Sources: Adventure of Strategy, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
Subject: Strategy
Click to Add the First »