How to Integrate Strategy and Culture for Transformative Change

Abstract

Purpose: This paper demonstrates that strategy and culture are important collaborators in the successful design and implementation of transformative change for sustainable corporate transformation and ethical institutional development. Materials and Methods: The researcher explores select, classic, contemporary and current scholarly literature on the theory of change. The research reviews theory articulated by Kurt Lewin on change management, systems theory, theory U and complexity in relation to their efficacy in facilitating organization change in global and local contexts. The study draws from ubuntu philosophy and the African business experience to propose a conceptual framework for the integration of strategy and culture to establish transformative change.  Findings: The study finds a distinction in the context in which the theory of change is applied at the global and local levels. Business leaders need to use different approaches to change initiatives in the two contexts. The study also shows why culture has the power to frustrate transformative change and the implementation of new strategy. Subsequently, the paper proposes that sensitivities to culture should be built into strategy design in order to mitigate its inertial power during strategy implementation. The study submits that global change theory presumes the stability of the macro-operating environments in which strategy is developed. It also assumes the existence of supportive institutional culture, predictable environmental forces and the availability of well-developed macroeconomic infrastructure to underwrite desirable change initiatives. Conventional models suggest that the only intervening agency to establish change is the design and implementation of a new strategy. However, continental business microenvironments are made up of unstable, diverse, complex and volatile microeconomic disparities and cultural undercurrents that resist the implementation of change. In other words, the outcomes of strategy implementation in microenvironments, do not always mirror the predictive designs of global change theory. The study suggests that while global contexts may also benefit from the proposed model, culture should be integrated into the design and implementation of corporate strategy, in local contexts, to facilitate sustainable change.   Implications to Theory, Practice and Policy: This paper recommends that; 1) Business and institutional leaders should carefully evaluate the strategic initiatives and development models they adopt and establish whether they indeed have the capacity to create and sustain transformative change within their operating environment, 2) Because proposed change always invites a response from culture, businesses must put in place mitigating measures to ensure that undue cultural inertia does not hinder ethical institutional advance, 3) Business leaders must remain alive to the fact that strategists, however brilliant, are not in control of the environmental forces in the ecosystem they seek to navigate. Hence the need to take pre-emptive measures, design strategic alternatives and employ dynamic approaches to successfully implement strategic plans, 4) Successful strategy implementation depends on the supportive confluence of multiple, complex and dynamic environmental factors beyond the designers of a good strategic plan. Thus, business leaders need to protect good strategy from being disoriented by fluctuating environmental change, 5) The perceived conflict of culture and strategy can be resolved by incorporating the ends of both in the design of crafting transformative change, 6) Ubuntu provides a powerful ethical lens to evaluate the acceptability, suitability and sustainability of strategic business initiatives in the continental business experience.