مدیریت استراتژیک به عنوان یادگیری سازمانی: توسعه مناسب و تراز از طریق یک فرآیند منظم

To operate effectively, organizations need to ‘fit’ or align themselves with their environment, strategies, capabilities and leadership skills. To compete successfully in a highly competitive and constantly changing business environment, however, organizations also need to attain ‘fitness’ – the capacity to learn and change to fit new circumstances. The concepts of fit and alignment are not new in business literature, yet the record of change – the many failed initiatives most organizations embark on in an attempt to improve their performance – suggests that many managers do not know how to lead systemic and fundamental change. By employing quick, superficial change programs leaders skillfully avoid learning the truth about poor coordination across vital activities in the value chain and the fundamental organization design, cultural and leadership issues that are blocking organizational effectiveness. The result is cynicism, low commitment to change and ultimate failure to align the organization with strategy. In response to these problems, the Strategic Fitness Process (SFP) was developed as an integrated, disciplined, leadership platform that a senior management team can utilize to create an open conversation about their organization's fit with the strategy and environment as well as their own leadership. SFP enables truth to speak to power, making it possible for the senior teams to conduct a systemic diagnosis of the organization's problems based on valid data, and to identify organizational and leadership barriers that prevent change. Research in 23 organizations has shown that, when fully embraced by senior teams, SFP facilitates dramatic and rapid changes in strategic understanding, organizational design, leadership and the capacity for ongoing learning. This article discusses the theory and premises underlying SFP, describes the step-by-step process and illustrates its effects on the design, culture, leadership and performance of a Hewlett Packard business unit that utilized SFP to solve strategic and organizational problems that were undermining its performance. We propose that honest conversations about the organization and its leadership produced by SFP enable fit as well as fitness - the capacity for continuous learning organizations require to maintain fit as the environment changes.

What allows organizations to survive and thrive in a highly competitive environment? To compete successfully an organization's strategy must be aligned with that of its environment and at the same time the organization must have the capabilities that fit its strategy. This is to say that ‘fit’ must be achieved within the organization as well as with the business environment. To accomplish this alignment, leaders have to be open to learning about how their decisions and behaviors fit the environment, strategy and organization. This suggests that effective leaders enable their organizations to confront the tensions that prevent alignment and, through a collaborative process, reshape alignment at several levels: between environment and strategy, strategy and organization, organization and the leadership team, and between key people. Many organizations deploy the latest approaches to organizational efficiency in hopes of achieving fit, but too often find that they are unable to reap the full benefits from such activities.1 One of the main reasons for this is the lack of an integrated approach that changes multiple dimensions of the organizational system, particularly key organizational capabilities and leadership behavior. Organizations that reflect the continuous change in the environment by being able to adapt their design and behavior to changes in strategy, and do this rapidly and effectively, exhibit a second order organizational capability that Beer and Eisenstat have called ‘organizational fitness’. To adapt successfully demands senior management with the courage and skill to lead a systemic organizational learning process that will ‘rejuvenate’ the organization by fundamentally reshaping its design, culture and political landscape.2 This article reviews the organizational research and theory underlying these ideas, describes an integrated and systemic organizational learning process called the Strategic Fitness Process (SFP) intended to overcome the difficulties inherent in a systemic change and learning process, and reports on an illustrative application of this process in one organization. We propose that a disciplined process like SFP is essential if organizations are to realign their design and behavior to fit their strategy (and thus their environment), and thereby avoid long periods of underperformance. And since the competitive environment is continually evolving, achieving fit should be seen as requiring constant monitoring and regular updating, rather than intermittent interventions. We also propose, based on our preliminary findings, that linking SFP to the strategic planning process can enable an organization to adapt and learn continuously.

An ever-challenging competitive environment demands that business organizations continually adapt their organizations to new strategic circumstances. While we have known for years that fit must exist between strategy, the environment, the organization's design, leadership behavior and culture, there is considerable evidence that leaders and organizational members are slow to make these adaptations. Realignment may involve considerable losses in power, relationships, identity, sense of competence, status and rewards, security and ultimately self-esteem. This is what causes many senior managers to avoid confronting difficult strategy alignment issues. And when they try to engage these issues, change is likely to be piecemeal, halting and slow, resulting in failure of ‘fitness’ in its environment. This article describes a method – the Strategic Fitness Process (SFP) - and its underlying theory by which organizations can effectively realign to fit strategy and capabilities, in a way that also builds their fitness, i.e. their capacity to learn, change and adapt quickly and in advance of a crisis. The value of SFP is in the detailed step-by-step specification of a strategic learning process and boundary conditions for effective implementation, all based on theory and research in various corporate environments. A specified leadership platform for strategic learning can be useful to managers and corporate leaders interested in institutionalizing a strategic management and organizational learning process in their multi-unit enterprise.