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ACCA Strategic Professional · Strategic Business Leader · Concepts of strategy

Brightwater Telecom's staff in different regional units have independently trialled new service ideas. Senior management does not plan these but notices that some trials succeed and then become adopted company-wide, while others fade. Which implication follows from viewing this through the strategy as variety lens?

The variety lens implies strategy emerges from diversity and experimentation at different levels of the organisation. Management's role is to encourage variety and then select and amplify the trials that succeed, rather than planning the strategy centrally in advance.

  1. AStrategy should be set by top management through detailed analysis of the environment and then cascaded down
  2. BStrategy emerges from diversity and experimentation, so management should encourage variety and select what worksCorrect
  3. CStrategy is mainly shaped by the language and rhetoric managers use to justify decisions
  4. DStrategy is primarily determined by the organisation's history and cultural paradigm

Explanation

The variety lens sees innovation arising from diversity, experimentation, and even randomness, with management's role being to foster variety and select or amplify successful ideas. The first option describes design, the third discourse, the fourth experience.

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