1965 to 1990: Five discoveries at Shell - Three competing paradigms in strategic management - Evolutionary paradigm

Question

What did Charles Lindblom observed during his study in the '50?

Answer 1

He observed that, rather than goal-seeking, ills-avoiding better characterises what is happening, aiming at strategies for avoiding pain, harm or constraints.

Answer 2

He suggests that nature evolves away from constraints, not towards goals.

Answer 3

Different people are moving away from different constraints, depending on where they are in the organisation. The organisational decision-making process is polycentric. Mutual adjustments and bargaining between these centres is required before the organisation can do anything coherent at all.

Answer 4

As a consequece policy decisions are created in a serial process. There is no grand strategy, only "just one thing after another".

Answer 5

Executives prefer verbal over numeric information
Executives prefer conervsation to reading
Executives gather information on an ancedotal basis
Executives are highly mistrustful of others'general theories
Executives avoid the "grand design" of sort of decisions
Executives prefer to make smaller incremental decisions
Let the overall strategy emerge.

Answer 6

This is a strategy that indicates that when people talk about their strategy they will normally talk about something that comes to them from the past, a series of events that have retroactively been interpreted as a pattern, recognised as "our strategy.

Answer 7

Emergence is defined as the appearance of unpredictable or incalculable behaviour resulting from the interaction of many simple components that cannot be derived from knowledge of what each component of the system does in isolation.