Planned strategy, emergent strategy and scenario planning

Nowadays, strategy is the focal point of all business ventures. It is essential to any successful business. In a nutshell, a strategy means the actions that manager's take to attain the goals of the firm (Mintzberg, Quinn and Voyer, 1995). In addition, strategic is a term that virtually every businessperson believes they know and understand. Strategy planning is the process of developing and implementing plans to reach goals and objectives. Strategic planning, more than anything else, is what gives direction to an organization and actions necessary to improve its performance (O'Regan, N & Ghobadian, A, 2002).

This paper sets out to determine the importance of strategy, fundamentally the differences between 3 forms of strategy, namely the planned strategy, emergent strategy and scenario planning. In accordance with this, the advantages and disadvantages of these strategic thought in relation to the development of primary/core strategy. It also attempts to look at the differences between the proponents and opponents of strategy, in that a discussion is based on why planning is much maligned by its opponents.

Firstly it is important to outline the main three forms of strategy.

Strategic management has commonly been portrayed as revolving around the discrete phases of formulation, implementation, and control, carried out in almost cascading steps (Mintzberg, Ahlstrand and Lampel, 1998). These are three steps of the planned approach to strategy involves a formal process to strategy formation: problem awareness, the development of solutions and the selection of a solution (Forbes and Fletcher, 2000). In the same context, Marlo (2000) denoted a planned strategy comprising of a declaration of specific and expressed intentions, supported with formal controls.

Jauch and Osborn (1991) commented with his realization that towards a successful outcome of the strategy, a firm structure is necessary for an organization. Hence all decisions made from the top management can be

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