The Chronic Problems with Strategy — and how the Emergent Approach aims to fix them

Mark Blackwell
4 min readDec 6, 2021

Mark Blackwell & Pete Compo

Despite how much is written about strategy, and money spent on it, reports of chronic failures persist. Have you experienced any of the following problems with strategy?

Preparation

  • A yearly exercise of budgeting, goal setting, and market forecasts, mostly to satisfy the boss.
  • Confusion among colleagues and “experts” in the consulting-corporate-academia complex around what is actual strategy is.
  • False promises of easy “transformations” and aspirational strategies that are no more than wishful thinking.

Process

  • Strategy designed by “ivory towers,” often marginalizing — and sometimes alienating — those who best know the business or the function.
  • Linear sequential strategy recipes that lead to huge slide decks sitting on the electronic shelf collecting electronic dust.
  • Easy and quick strategy development (because execution is all that matters).
  • Collection of the “usual suspects” of strategy processes — market share data, financial data, growth rates, SWOT, PESTEL — before it is even understood what information is truly needed for diagnosis…

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Mark Blackwell

Founder of Arkaro (www.arkaro.com) supporting B2B and B2B2C organisations in strategy, innovation, commercial excellence and integrated business management.