The main role of strategy is to chart the course of an organization in order for it to sail smoothly through its environment. Strategy promotes the coordination of activities. Without strategy to focus effort, chaos can ensue as individuals pull in different directions. Strategy defines the organization, and focuses the common effort.  Strategy provides people with a shorthand way to understand their organization, and to distinguish it from others. Strategy is needed to reduce ambiguity, to simplify and explain the world, and thereby facilitate action.

Strategic direction also has an inherent set of limitations, and it can serve as a set of blinders to hide potential dangers. Blindly setting course in unknown waters is a sure way to sail into an iceberg. While direction is important, sometimes it is better to move slowly, a little bit at a time, looking carefully but not too far ahead so that behavior can be shifted at a moment's notice. If the strategy is inflexible there may be no peripheral vision to open other possibilities. 

A given strategy can become too heavily embedded in the fabric of the organization. To define an organization too sharply may also mean that it is defined too simply.  A simple definition grows sometimes to the point of stereotyping, so that the rich complexity of the system is lost. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds...." Creativity thrives on inconsistency -- by finding new combinations of what were previously separate phenomena. It has to be realized that every strategy is a simplification that represents, yet necessarily distorts reality. This means that every strategy can have a misrepresenting or distorting effect. That is the price of having a strategy.

We function best when we can take some things for granted, at least for a time. And that is a major role of strategy in organizations: to resolve the big issues so that people can get on with the little details -- like targeting and serving customers instead of debating which markets are best. Even team leaders, most of the time, must get on with managing their organizations in a given context; they cannot constantly put that context into question.

Strategy Development and Facilitation is a process that will assist an organization in using the collective wisdom of its employees in the development of a strategy.  This process creates alignment and dedication to the strategy as it is being developed.

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