I’ve been working through the books I added to my collection after the strategy course, especially Co-opetition
and (just started) Thinking Strategically.
When I was on the course, especially as we started to touch on the idea that certain strategies arise inherently from the structure of any situation (especially the [bliki]Value Net[/bliki]) it occurred to me that design patterns may be the natural way to express the thinking in a condensed form.
Unfortunately (in one sense) this was also a new idea to the people on the course, and as I didn’t have time to refresh my rather surface knowledge of pattern languages whilst I was on the course, I wasn’t really in a position to develop the thinking.
In the spirit of release early, release often, I’ve made a small start with this, indexed at Strategy Patterns, and will continue to build it as I work through the books and a review of my course notes.
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March 5th, 2006 at 1:57 pm
Always interesting to see when someone else hits on idea of using patterns to describe business and specifically business strategy.
I’ve taken a stab at this myself over the last few years, and taken some of them through a full pattern review cycle. The results (and some work in progress) are here http://www.allankelly.net/patterns/
I think the answer is: Yes, you can use patterns and pattern languages to describe business strategy. This is particularly clear when you view patterns as a form of knowledge management.
March 6th, 2006 at 11:14 am
Allan - thanks for the pointer, I look forward to reviewing your site!
March 8th, 2006 at 11:50 pm
[...] Allan Kelly commented on my post from last year about the possibilities of using pattern languages to describe business strategies, to point out that he has done quite a bit of this already. [...]
October 17th, 2006 at 10:40 am
Very interested in what you are doing here.
There is an unexplored angle on strategy from industrial design. I had some conversations with an outfit called Live/Work based at the design centre in Islington.
Our idea is that if you write down what design is supposed to do (and they are partcularly interested in services) then you will find that it is about bringing more meaning and a kind of useful order to things in a very contextual way. This is a whole new way to do business strategy, but it seems to me that it might be the right way.
October 17th, 2006 at 7:13 pm
Stephen - good to hear from you again.
The idea you express seems elegant, perhaps an extension of the “design as conversation view” expressed in books such as “The Psychology of Everyday Things”?
I wonder what a semiotician would make of our struggle to bring order to chaos in the strategy process?