Concept-Driven Strategy as a Management Paradigm: Theoretical Foundations and Implications for Strategic Leadership

This paper examines concept driven strategy as an emerging management paradigm that redefines how organizations formulate and enact strategy in conditions of uncertainty, complexity and rapid change.Moving past traditional analytically driven models with a focus on prediction, optimisation, and positioning structures, the work places concept driven strategy in a cognitively and socially grounded universe with a focus of strategic concepts, sense making, and interpretive framing.Drawing on theoretical foundations from strategic management, organisational cognition, and constructivist theory, the paper argues that strategic concepts perform a generative function together with generating attention to participate in decision making and enabling coordinated action across stakeholders (Weick, 1995;Walsh, 1995).The analysis calls out the role of concept driven strategy in enabling leaders to deal with ambiguity by making sense of environmental signals, organisation identity and long term aspirations by creating coherent narratives (Mintzberg, 1994).Rather than viewing strategy as a plan, this paradigm views strategy as a dynamic system of meaning (which evolves over time via learning and reinterpretation) (Sarasvathy, 2001).The implications of this shift for strategic leadership are further discussed in the paper with a strong emphasis on the role of leaders as sense-makers, frame setters and architects of shared understanding instead of being merely an analytical decision maker (Eisenhardt & Sull, 2001).By using a synthesis of insights from across disciplines, this study brings a contribution to the scientific field of strategic management by elucidating the conceptual basis for using concepts in formulating strategy as well as establishing its practical relevance for leadership in the context of volatile environments.The paper concludes with some important challenges involved, such as risks of abstraction and limitations of measurement and possible avenues for future empirical study to measure the performance and organisational outcomes associated with concept-driven strategic approaches.