Alvin Toffler's Strategic Development Strategies

According to Alvin Toffler “If you don’t have a strategy…you will be part of somebody else’s strategy”. Lenses help you to see the complexity in strategic development. Strategic development is a structured plan implemented to achieve organizational goals. A great strategy doesn’t necessarily emerge from an innovative idea but rather a well-developed plan will emerge as a result from commitment to a strategy development process. A fit strategic development process will produce valuable information for good decision making, which is the corner stone of a great strategy. Strategies are established by a variety of sources and techniques called “Strategic lenses”. Strategic lenses are used to help identify strategic development and different ways

If there is a problem manager normally look back at experience and the solution to the problem. This is a way organization form strategy decision. The existing culture of the organization is a major impact. If it is an organization that is reluctant to change and doesn’t embrace innovation, then they are going to make decisions and approach strategy based on something already existed or their experience. The problem with this is it stifle innovation and can prevent innovative change. The experience lens seeks to preserve the status culture of the company. In terms of a saturated market, an organization may look back at what actions they took before when they wanted to launch into the current market that is now saturated. This would help the organization because having experience would give a better understanding of how to approach the problem and furthermore have a routine solution to problems based off knowledge. The problem with this strategy is that it might be 10 years ago, and the environment can be completely changed. Therefore, organizations need to be careful not to make strategic decisions base of old practices. Managers however, settle for sufficient solutions rather than the rational optimal. Moreover, experience leads to routinized reactions, even to new problems. Tried and tested solutions become too

It is more about risk and challenging the organization. It is all about change and innovation. Managers may not know everything about their organization and market hence the emerging of employees’ ideas to achieve organizational goals. It’s important that ideas come from periphery and bottom of the organization to promote diversity. A major downfall of the idea lens is adaptive tension. High level of control is likely to reduce ideas from employees. The more intensive the top down control is the less probability of innovation. Innovation emerges when there are adequate orders to make things happen but not when there is rigidity of control as to prevent such innovation. Additionally, ideas formulated are not of fully formed, but rather imperfect and prone to errors.

It is concluded that strategic lenses are essential in strategic development. Managers may choose a suitable lens to approach problems faced in an organization. The design lens is a more rational and logical approach rather than intuitive. The experience lens is view base on a collective of experience in an organization and strongly maintain organizational culture. In comparison to experience lens, the idea lens is the collective of innovative ideas from managers, periphery and top down of the organization. However, this lens is risky because of imperfect new