Leading Strategic Decision-Making - Overview, Topics, and Concepts

Overview of the module

1. Overview of the module

Leading strategic decision-making covers a range of topics that address and explore contemporary approaches to leadership, innovation, and strategic decision making processes, in business organisations. You will have the opportunity to learn and explore the role of leaders in encouraging and inspiring creativity in organisations. As corporations seek to increase and stimulate creativity and innovation across all their hierarchical levels, this module focuses on factors and processes that enable leadership and strategic thinking to generate transformational change.

You will learn how organisations can efficiently and effectively harness the resources and the variety of creative talents available within their structures and systems to attain their goals. This module will also give you the opportunity to expand your knowledge and deepen your understanding of the role and importance of strategy, decision making and leadership processes in supporting creativity and innovation.

This module includes relevant theoretical models to examine more closely the role that leaders play in setting the strategic directions of their organisations. You will explore leadership processes and critically analyse how leadership fosters creativity and innovation. Both the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ aspects of leadership are explored in this module, which also gives you the opportunity to critically consider how leaders interact with their followers and promote a culture of innovation in organisations.

This section provides a brief description of the topics that will be covered throughout this module.

Topic 1: Organisation Strategy and Strategic Leadership

This topic defines what strategy is and identifies the characteristics of strategic decisions. To understand the strategic leadership/management within organisations, we examine strategic decisions taken at different levels in the organisation – corporate, business unit, and operational levels. The global process of strategic decision making in organisations is explained by means of a framework called the Strategic Management Process. Having attained an understanding of the strategic management of organisations, Topic 1 concludes with an examination of the key actions taken by effective strategic leaders.

Topic 2: Determining the Strategic Direction: Vision, Mission, Values, & CSR

Topic 2 starts with an examination of the chief purpose of business organisations and compares the shareholder vs. stakeholder perspectives. After showing that business organisations have the complex and challenging task to satisfy a range of stakeholder objectives, we move on to explore an organisation’s goals and distinguish between vision, mission and strategic objectives. We examine how the Ashridge Sense of Mission Model and the concepts of Collins and Porras can enable organisations to establish their long-term strategic direction. Topic 2 also highlights the increasing importance of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Creating Shared Value (CSV).

Topic 3: Strategic Decision Making in Practice

This topic addresses how strategic leaders can approach strategic decision making, either from a planning or learning paradigm. While formal and rational planning can offer organisations several advantages, empirical evidence suggests that in contextswhere the business environment  is changing, the intended strategies are rarely realised, and strategies are the outcome of emergent processes in the organisation. Following an assessment of these alternative approaches to strategic decision making, we emphasise the importance for leaders to adopt an optimal approach congruent with the situational factors that influence their organisation’s context. Finally, we reflect on individual decision makers and how cognitive biases should be addressed to improve the quality of strategic decision making.

Topic 4: Strategic Decision-making in Innovation Contexts

This topic examines the key issues an organisation must consider when formulating its innovation strategy. We highlight different forms of innovation (e.g., product or process innovation and radical and incremental innovation) and when they may bedeployed at different stages  throughout the industry life cycle. In the formulation of innovative strategies, we also explore how organisations can protect their share of thereturns. We also consider the strategic decisions on whether to ‘lead or to follow’ or pursue an open or closed system of innovation.