8 Improvements
One of the long-standing debates in strategic thinking was between Mintzburg and Ansoff, which began in the 1960s. Ansoff was one of the great proponents of the planning school. Mintzburg, although he has evolved since, put forward an alternative known as the Emergent school, although in his 10 schools analysis, Mintzburg now refers to this as the Learning school. The basis of Emergent strategy was a reaction to an over-emphasis on Planning. Emergent thinkers argued that there were so many assumptions involved in long-range planning that all plans were doomed to failure. A more effective strategy theory would be to set off, and make plans as you go along. Most planners would go along with a certain degree of improvisation, but Emergent thinkers were suggesting that you set your goals and aspirations as you go. Most strategists have since concluded that there is truth in both schools — all plans need to have flexibility and learning built into them, and, in order to qualify for the term ‘strategy’ at all, emergent processes need to have some concept of direction.
In sketching out your Gameplan, you have probably already identified areas where it could go wrong. This is not a failure of planning, but an opportunity for learning. However, merely waiting for things to go wrong risks missing out on many other kinds of learning which could rescue your plan at a later stage.
In minute eight, you need to come up with three or four means by which you will evaluate and improve all the elements of your strategy — not just the Gameplan. You might want to consider the following:
Returning to the villagers, in the Seven Samurai, all three plans had to be revised to some extent. The initial search for Samurai proves fruitless, until the fortuitous encounter with Kambai. The villagers than learn that they are better off relying on Kambai to recruit Samurai. Kambai’s recruitment programme is rather more successful, but he too has setbacks. One Samurai wishes only to perfect his art, another is little more than a child, and a third is not a Samurai at all. Kambai manages to recruit the first of these three, is prevailed upon by his friends to accept the second, and allows, rather than encourages, the third to tag along. In fact it is the third, of farming stock, who enables the eventual cooperation of villagers and warriors. In the third part of the film, the initial planned skirmish to the bandits hideout is only partially successful, and the ‘wall of spears’ tactic, of allowing one bandit at a time inside, to be finished off by Samurai, does not succeed quickly enough. The Samurai opt to allow more in, and this results in Samurai deaths, althought the bandits are destroyed.