Cognitive analysis and choice of an enterprise’s strategic goals

One of the most crucial and vulnerable stages of strategic management is the cognitive stage associated with the transformation of the strategic vision and of the enterprise’s mission into its strategic goals. At this stage, management is faced with the problem of developing a coordinated collective opinion on the content of the goals being formed and with the problem of objective assessment of their effectiveness. The difficulties here are due to the phenomenological features of the stage, such as the informal nature of the transformation procedure, the multi-criteria nature of goals, numerous uncertainties and risks exacerbated by the increased variability of business environments, cognitive barriers caused by linguistic discrepancies and differences in the professional experience of strategy developers. Such features of the stage ultimately lead to ambiguous decisions regarding the content of goals and ambiguous assessments of their effectiveness. In these circumstances, traditional support tools (numerous versions of expert methods, brainstorming, Norton and Kaplan's BSC, SMART technology, etc.) face serious limitations. This paper proposes a cognitive technology for forming a coordinated set of the enterprise’s business goals that to a large extent takes into account the features of the given stage. The technology is a single procedure integrating the capabilities of traditional support tools and expanding the creative potential of support based on psychosemantic models and nonmetric multidimensional scaling methods. The results of a real study conducted at a number of enterprises show that cognitive technologies open up new prospects for goal analysis. They can serve as a useful complement to existing support tools and contribute to the design of more effective and realistic business strategies.