"Is your strategy a duck?"

Jeanne Liedtka asks this question in a recent article in the Journal of Business Strategy (Vol 27, No. 5, 2006). Her presenting problem is the "Knowing-Doing Gap" - why is it that so many organisations fail to turn their strategies into outcomes? Liedtka's hypothesis: too many corporate strategies are "ducks".

Liedtka takes this idea of a "duck" from the architecture book "Learning from Las Vegas" (Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, 1977, MIT Press). Here Venturi et al define a "duck" as a "building-becoming-sculpture". A building that has sacrificed so much for symbolism that it fails to be useful as a building. (You can read a good discussion of Venturi et al's book, as well as a picture of the original offending duck, at John Lumea's blog, here).

So, the question to ask, and Liedtka asks it well, is - can strategies be ducks too? The answer is clearly yes. As Liedtka shows, there are "strategies that function as symbols, not roadmaps." Strategies that are "high level abstractions" that leave most people in the organisation "clueless" as to what they mean.

The solution is to make strategies "real". And it's here that Liedtka returns to architecture for inspiration. Michael Benedikt's book "For an Architecture of Reality" (Lumen Books, NY, 1987) sets forth four components of a building "that contribute ... to a sense of realism":

• Presence.
• Significance.
• Materiality.
• Emptiness.

Liedtka goes on to apply these ideas to strategy - in an attempt to answer the question: what can make a strategy real?