Release date: September 30, 2020
Speaker: Roger Martin
Description: The work of strategy consultants is often dismissed with the adage that consultants “borrow your watch to tell you the time.” Or that the analysis was thorough but didn’t provide any new insights. Strategists, whether in a consulting firm or an internal strategy group, can quibble over the extent to which these critiques are fair, but there is no question they are out there in the ether. Roger Martin—writer, strategy advisor, and 2017’s #1 management thinker according to Thinkers50— asserts that these concerns are responsible for the rise in prominence of the design firms, who are increasingly seen as more creative substitutes for mainstream strategy firms. That is, if one wants thorough analysis, one should hire a strategy firm and if one wants creativity, hire a design firm.
That trade-off doesn’t need to be forced on clients (whether internal or external). The process for making strategy choices can feature both rigor and creativity. In this Strategy Imagination Forum session, Roger Martin will lay out an end-to-end process for creating strategy that infuses it with insights from both design thinking and integrative thinking.