1 Situation — using the Environmental School
The concept behind what Mintzberg, Ahlstrand and Lampel term the “Environmental” School is a simple one. Organisations are squeezed by their environments into a shape which fits. Like small mammals, or large dinosaurs, they evolve to suit the world they are in, or perish. Therefore, from an academic point of view, a good way of charting an organisation’s actual strategy — which may be very different from the one described in their five year plan — is to look at how they have been forced from one market role to another over time.
Although, from an academic perspective, there is something deeply comforting in the notion that managers have actually very little say in the actual strategy of their organisations, taken as bluntly as that, the environmental school does not offer a strategy, but rather the complete opposite of a strategy.
For the ten minute strategist, though, Situation is an essential place to begin.
The Ten Minute method.
Ten Minute Strategy is a way of sketching out a strategy very quickly, so that the weight of the strategy process does not overwhelm the benefits it offers. It can be used as a strategy for a simple or fast-moving situation, or as the first stage of planning a major or complex strategy. On the ten minute model, you have one minute to identify the bones of the situation. If you are used to cumbersome six month strategy processes, this may seem like a cheat. But, in fact, if you cannot set down the key notions in one go, the chances are that you have not really understood the situation to begin with. Remember that you will, at some point, need to explain the strategy to someone else (unless it is a purely personal strategy, in which case you will have to remind yourself of what you are doing).
To help with the exercise, let us consider an example. You are an unimportant villager in an impoverished village. One day you are on a hillside, shortly before the time of the harvest, and you see armed men looking over the fields, and gesturing to each other. As soon as they see you they turn and ride away. You go down to tell your friends in the village, and they say that these are bandits preparing to attack. They will wait until you have gathered the entire harvest in. Then they will come and demand it. If you give it to them, you and the village will starve. If you do not, then they will kill everyone. This has happened to other villages, always with the same outcome.
If this situation seems familiar, you are probably thinking of the opening of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. If you are slightly less erudite, you may be thinking of The Magnificent Seven, an almost word for word remake (with a few important differences) of the film. You may also be thinking of the Science Fiction remake Battle Beyond the Stars, or even the Steve Martin spoof ¡Three Amigos!.
For now, in one minute of thinking time, you might write something like this in your notebook:
