Leveraging Strategic Change with Continuity

Continuity and change have always served as backbone of both strategic thinking and practice, in some form or the other. Previously, when business environment was stable, the strategies were largely evolved around the issue of “continuity.” Some important strategies in this respect are that of “continuity” and “logical incrementalism.” The organizations used to form strategies so as to survive and grow by maintaining continuity in their business domain. The strategy of “incrementalism” also focuses on continuity with an incremental change to dynamically evolve over time. Stability and longevity used to be considered as principal criteria of success. However, in the last few decades, globalization processes made the business environment highly turbulent, and the concern for “change” has received immense interest, both by strategic thinkers and practitioners. Many new theories, such as regenerating strategy, strategic change and transformation, complexity and chaos, and blue ocean strategy, have taken the center stage. But even in a highly turbulent and chaotic business environment, a discontinuous change may not always be desirable, as it might be risk prone and may also fuel the fire of turbulence and chaos. Further, it has been observed that success rate of strategic change initiatives of different kinds such as restructuring, reengineering, and strategic transformation has not been encouraging in a variety of contexts globally. This has prompted for a fresh reappraisal of strategic thinking and practice to introspect about significance of continuity in leveraging effectiveness of change.