5 - Strategic Perspectives and Value Lenses

Summary

Introduction

This chapter will provide the background and reasoning for adopting the concepts of Strategic Perspectives and Value Lenses in an impact assessment. It will establish the originating foundation stones of theory and influences that underpin the BVI Model. At the core of this chapter is an explanation of the way strategy interacts with values in a broader context, including a focal case study from the SMK to illuminate these strategic issues.

Strategy and values in memory institutions

What is a strategy?

A strategy, most simply, is a plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim; it is the answer to the question ‘where are we going and why?’ Strategy differs from the everyday management processes and plans implemented as a procedure, policy or protocol that answers a different question: ‘how do we get things done around here?’

As Freedman puts it, a strategy is ‘about maintaining a balance between ends, ways, and means; about identifying objectives; and about the resources and methods available for meeting such objectives’ (Freedman, 2013).

Technology is accessible to logic and planning, whereas it is always the human factor that provides the greatest variable, the most unknowable link in any chain of actions. Thus, a strategy is also much more than a plan. A plan supposes a sequence of events that allows the organisation to ‘move with confidence from one state of affairs to another’ (Freedman, 2013), but, as is often stated, no plan or project survives its first engagement with people fully intact. Alternatively, as heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson memorably put it, ‘everybody has plans until they get hit for the first time’ (Los Angeles Times, 1987). This quote also reflects the military origins of a lot of strategic rhetoric that pervades the literature.

The balance between ends (desirable outcomes), ways (plans for achieving outcomes) and means (what resources or inputs can we mobilise) is delicate, requiring a clear sense of the starting situation and the desired outcomes. A strategy usually assumes some challenges, conflict or contest – if the steps to the destination are clear, smooth, low risk and uncontested, then this is hardly worth being named a strategy. It is when there are conflicting needs, competition for scarce resources, contested digital spaces, intangible rewards or high risks that the most effective approach is a strategic one.