Strategic time awareness : implications of strategic thinking

Abstract: Strategic time awareness (STA) is a research project that strives to gain new insights about the strategic thinking process and better understand time in the context of strategic management. The purpose of this study is to understand what managers think is important with regard to time in the process of strategic thinking. This will be accomplished by studying how managers articulate time in strategic issues, behave in situations that have time implications, and what attitudes they display towards time. Most classical strategic management models use time implicitly and in an opaque way or simply as a stable linear function. However, reality has shown that time has significant effects on the management process.In this research project, three series of logical, structured data collections have been analysed in an attempt to explore what managers are thinking about when they think about time in strategic issues. The first data set comes from group discussions, conducted to gain an understanding of the object of interest and to garner data and ideas for further studies. The second data set is a laboratory study with a microworld, in which the participants' ability to handle time in the context of results (P) was studied. Thirdly, a questionnaire to measure different categories of individual attitudes to managerial time was used. The last two data sets contained mainly quantitative data.The results of these studies give reasons to argue that strategic time awareness has effects on how executives develop and execute strategies, and that P = f (STA). Certain strategic issues require a clear focus on the present and the future (prospective), e g demand forecasting. Other strategic decisions revolve around a better understanding of the past (retrospective) and present, e g an analysis of why the execution of a strategy failed. We can speak of this shift in focus as time gravity centres, meaning that the focus of the effort gravitates towards a particular time period. A major discovery in this dissertation is differences in time gravity centres, between retrospective, present and prospective time frames. Another conclusion is that time requires greater attention than classical models have paid it, especially in terms of dynamics. It is essential that executives create a better time awareness in the management process. I argue that the difference between individuals in their awareness of time has direct implications on the strategic management. By improving strategic time awareness, managers' probability of producing better results will increase. The Swedish Armed Forces Headquarters and the Swedish National Defence College sponsored the project.