Learning School (Strategy) - Explained
What is the Learning School of Strategy?
Written by Jason Gordon
Updated at April 7th, 2022
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Table of Contents
What is the learning School of Strategy? What are the Premises of the Learning School of Strategy?What is the learning School of Strategy?
The Learning School of strategy sees strategy creation as an evolving, emergent process that is driven by learning. Specifically, individuals within an organization develop strategy as they experience situations, learn form them, and employ resources in those situations.
The patterns of successful actions and behaviors that result leads to common practice and learning. This is the source of strategy, rather than formal planning.
As such, informed individuals throughout the firm contribute to the formation of strategy - which is an evolving process.
Back to: STRATEGY & PLANNING
What are the Premises of the Learning School of Strategy?
The premises of the school can be summarized as follow:
- The complex and unpredictable nature of the organization‘s environment and of knowledge diffusion is an impediment to purposeful control.
- The organization should learn collectively, and not only through a set of selected individuals (managers), in order to not miss the appearance of any potential strategist.
- Learning does not follow a pre-established path since it can arise in totally unexpected ways. In spite of this unpredictable behavior, successful initiatives always create streams of experiences that can converge into patterns that become emergent strategies that once recognized, should be purposefully formalized.
- Therefore, the role of leadership in this context is not to deliberately create strategies but to manage the process of strategic learning from which new strategies can arise.
The learning organization, evolutionary theorizing, knowledge creation, the dynamic capability approach and the chaos theory are some examples of emergent fields associated with the new direction of strategic learning.
Related Topics
- How Strategies Arise
- Intended, Deliberate, Realized, and Emergent Strategies
- Management and Strategic Planning
- Mintzberg's Schools of Strategic Development
- Design School
- Planning School
- Positioning School
- Entrepreneurial School
- Cognitive School
- Learning School
- Power School
- Culture School
- Environmental School
- Configuration School
- Mintzberg's 5Ps of Strategy