In Search of Adaptive Capacity: Development of a Strategic Management Model through a Co-Redesign Effort

The Strategic Management literature has been for a long time bringing the issue of Complexity to its agenda and pointing to the need for organizations to develop their Adaptive Capacity. However, the design of a management model for the strategic management of established organizations, so as to replace the traditional strategic management model — the one associated with strategic planning and the follow up and correction framework — still needs to be the object of systematic Research & Development efforts in the field of Management Science and Engineering. This paper presents an approach in the context of such a Design Science Development effort, where the first redesign process, carried out in partnership with the organization where the practices are to be implemented (i.e. a core-design), is described, and its results analyzed. It presents a real-world solution for how the traditional model of strategic management can be overcome dialectically — when the initial design proposition is preserved, denied and exceeded at the same time, by the adoption of new management practices within and complementary to the standard model as adopted by the organization.