Ambidextrous Strategic Thinking

"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." F. A. Hayek

In a business world characterized by considerable uncertainty, Hayek’s famous quote can apply just as well to strategic management as to economics. When faced with threats and opportunities as yet unknown, in a fast-changing competitive environment, traditional approaches to strategic management that prioritize analysis and planning over execution are just not good enough.

A recent study, from Prof. Lorenzo Massa of the University of Bologna Business School and Prof. Simone Ferriani of Bayes Business School, City University, considers how traditional strategic management, seen as a science of rational decision making and planning based on analysis—overseen by managers they characterize as ‘commanders’—has been progressively replaced by a view of strategic management as an art. A creative art that involves ongoing reinvention, rethinking pathways, and exploring new alternative visions—directed by managers they characterize as ‘designers’.

A commander view of strategy formulation and management depicts the manager as making rational optimal choices from alternative courses of action. It remains the predominant approach in many industries and still has a place. But on its own it can be too rigid and can even become a way to post-rationalize and justify imperfect managerial decisions.

The authors show how ‘commander’ and ‘designer’ represent two distinct ways of thinking and even feeling, but do not argue that one is better than the other. Rather they recommend business strategists focus on finding a balance between the two—because as they point out: “A design mindset supports the envisioning of alternatives that may lie outside of the boundaries of how we traditionally see the world. But it takes a commander’s mindset to rationally evaluate among those alternatives and make the bold moves that are sometimes needed to pursue them.”

This table illustrates the two different viewpoints:

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This approach chimes with the idea of ‘evolved systems’. Even before the scene was disrupted by geopolitics, Covid-19, AI, and digital ‘barbarians’ upsetting well-established markets, evolved systems—think open-source software development and the British constitution—proved to be more effective than top-down strategic planning.

In the past, the command view of strategic management has been given precedence over the design view. In our times of extreme uncertainty, it is more important than ever that managers develop an ambidextrous approach accepting the two as complementary. To this end the authors introduce the concept of Mental Ambidexterity in Strategic Thinking (MAST), which they define as the ability to hold and use ‘commander’ and ‘designer’ views simultaneously—alternating, flexibly, between rational decision-making among alternatives, and the creation of new alternatives, between what is and what could be.

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Read a draft version of the study paper here: ‘MAST: The Mental Ambidexterity in Strategic Thinking’,  Prof. Lorenzo Massa and Prof. Simone Ferriani, 2022.