# Concept-driven strategy
## Introduction

A concept-driven strategy is a methodology for formulating business strategies that prioritizes the creation, refinement, and execution of concepts. The goal is to establish distinctive value propositions and competitive advantages. This framework encourages organizations to transcend conventional market limits, question established norms, and find new ideas and possibilities.
The essential elements of a Concept-Driven Strategy encompass:
* Priority on Understanding Concepts
Focusing on concepts rather than isolated facts allows for deeper comprehension and application of knowledge. This approach emphasizes grasping underlying principles and frameworks, enabling learners and professionals to adapt ideas to varied contexts instead of merely memorizing information.
* Cultivating Analytical Thinking
Encouraging critical thinking involves fostering the ability to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize information. It helps individuals question assumptions, identify biases, and make informed decisions, enhancing problem-solving skills across diverse scenarios.
* Integration Across Disciplines
Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective promotes the blending of insights from multiple fields to address complex problems. This method encourages creativity, broadens understanding, and leads to innovative solutions that draw from diverse areas of expertise.
By concentrating on these elements, organizations can promote innovation, differentiation, adaptability, and employee involvement, ultimately resulting in enduring competitive advantages. In conclusion, a Concept-Driven Strategy highlights the importance of generating, developing, and implementing innovative concepts to forge unique value propositions and competitive advantages. This methodology encourages organizations to look beyond traditional market confines, and pursue new ideas and opportunities, thereby fostering innovation, differentiation, adaptability, and employee engagement.

## Background

Much of the strategic management literature builds upon Peter Drucker's call for corporations to start the strategic management process by producing a statement of purpose, mission, and objectives. This has been transformed into a call to start with a vision, mission, and objectives statement. An alternative approach focuses on the statement of purpose or intent. Drucker's example of such a statement for a commercial corporation was to state that the corporation's purpose was to create customers. That is, it was going to use the concept of 'customer creation' to coordinate and organise the cognition or mindset of those that worked for the organisation. This was why the corporation existed. Having one concept is now thought to be insufficient. George Armitage Miller's modified The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two and dialectic suggests a handful of concepts under tension would be preferable.
The statement of purpose, statement of intent, or concept-driven approach to strategy formulation, therefore, focuses on setting and enacting a set of strategic concepts. If a participatory approach is being used, these concepts will be acquired through a process of collaboration with stakeholders. Once agreed, the strategic concepts can be used to coordinate activities and act as a set of decision making criteria. The set of concepts that make up the Statement of Intent is then used to make sense of an unpredictable future across an organisation in a coordinated manner.

## Underlying philosophy

Linguistic pragmatism argues that our prior conceptions interpret our perception (sensory inputs). These conceptions are represented by concepts like running, smiling, justice, reasoning, and agility. They are patterns of activity, experienced in our past and remembered. They can be named by those with language and so shared.
Baggini explains pragmatic concepts using the classic example of whether the Earth is flat or round.
   "...if we treat the world as if these concepts do exist then we find we can manipulate the world and make things work much better. The point about this is that you cannot just choose any concept. What is useful is not just on our whim to choose. [A concept is] a better concept for looking at the world because it works much better than others. You don't have to worry, as some British philosophers have thought that if you go down the pragmatic route that you might believe the world is flat because [that fits best with our sensory input]. Ultimately it isn't useful to believe that the world is flat. All sorts of things won't work if you construct your view in that way. These concepts are tools for helping us manipulate the world and some work better than others."

## Method

The steps to formulating a participatory concept-driven strategy are:
* Select who the strategy is for exactly, and what exactly is their problem.
* Reflect on significant events in the past that have impacted on the organization (past experience matters)
* Identify all stakeholders including suppliers, competitors, staff, alliances, government, environmentalist, industry experts, etc.
* Ask them what concerns they have for the future relevant to your organization. Use their experiences and expertise from being involved in the industry.
* Use idea networking to cluster these stakeholder concern statements into about five clusters
* Name these clusters as strategic concepts (priorities, organizing principles). For example, one cluster of statements might be about innovation, another about becoming more international.
* Reflect on the possible paradoxical consequences of enacting these strategic concepts
* Draft a one-page 'Statement of Intent' which says the organization intends to become more like the five or so strategic concepts.
* Draft implementation action plans for each strategic concept. These should be both organizational change actions and investment projects, with goals and milestones.
* Communicate the 'Statement of Intent' and 'Action Plans' to stakeholders as appropriate.
* Get senior staffs' comments, performance measures, selection criteria, and decision criteria to reflect the 'Statement of Intent'.
* In the longer term, reflect on the strategic concepts in the Statement of Intent.

## Other terminology

Concept-driven strategy is the name given to a number of similar strategic thinking approaches.
Generally, the term 'concept-driven' is used to encourage a focus on the 'concepts' being used. See Concept learning or Management Concepts.
Some organizations produce a 'statement of intent' with little thought as to the concepts it contains. However, if it is a short list of concepts, high-level objectives, principles, priorities, or frames, then concept-driven strategy offers a philosophical basis for these statements.
Some organizations produce a 'strategic principles' statement which again is similar to a statement of intent, and the same applies about the concepts approach offering a philosophical basis. The terms 'strategic priorities' or 'strategic values' are often used in the same way as strategic principles.
The literature about 'corporate purpose' is also similar to that of strategic intent. Sometimes, purpose refers to present actions and intent to future ones. If purpose is expressed as a set of concepts, then the concepts approach again provides some philosophical basis.
There is a connection between 'systems thinking' and concept-driven strategy. The Churchman/Ackoff stream of systems thinking was interested in developing a generic system of concepts for thinking about problems. Rather than a generic set of concepts, the concept-driven approach uses whatever concepts stakeholders think work best for the future of their organization.
There is a military planning approach called 'concept-led'. There seems to be very little difference otherwise.
In turbulent environments, concepts are thought to be 'more flexible than objectives' (goals, targets) as they provide why certain actions are preferable. The purpose and intent literature likes to distinguish itself from the objectives literature by saying purpose and intent provide the reasons for (why change), the driver for change. Objectives are where you end up. In complex dynamic situations, there may be many acceptable end points, many of which cannot be anticipated by planners. Arguably the only objective is to survive. How is explained in the statement of intent.
There is a connection between 'metaphor', metaphoric criticism, or conceptual metaphor and concept-driven strategy. Pragmatic concepts are not images but most concepts relate to metaphors. For example, to say an organization is like a machine, with cogs, or like an adaptive organism, is to use the concepts of machine and organism to reflect on organizations. Much of what has been written about the usefulness of metaphors in planning applies to concepts.
The term 'strategic frames' is not common given the extensive literature on frame analysis but frames and pragmatic concepts seem to be very similar. Amos Tversky defines a frame as a conception of outcomes.
The system of strategic concepts listed in a statement of intent, purpose, principles, frames, or conceptual metaphor are organizing principle(s).
Also, as Karl Weick explains sensemaking as the process of conceptualising problems, concept-driven strategy might be thought of as a pragmatic means of sensemaking a strategy.