Dynamic Strategic Thinking

Market analysts and marketing strategists stress understanding the fundamental dynamics of a market but how deeply do they think about the interplay of such fundamentals and what frameworks do they use in such thinking? How do business schools teach managers to think this way? The premise of this paper is that in their strategizing, senior marketing executives, boards of directors, consultants and financial analysts should see the market and the firm’s embeddedness in a market as a moving video rather than a static snapshot. We propose that what makes the video move are fundamental feedback effects that create the evolutionary paths that a market and a firm may travel. A taxonomy of systemic feedback regularities is presented with applications that demonstrate how the taxonomy and proposed soft mapping techniques can be used to construct dynamic mental models that help managers and consultants improve their dynamic strategic thinking and the strategic foresight of firms.