Technology strategies in a complex environment

Over the course of 100 years, strategic managers have been developing strategies and techniques to achieve competitive advantage and to position their organizations for success. Historically, the systematic command and control strategies derived from reductionism and linear principles popularized by Newtonian physics and Cartesian mathematics have directed the field of strategic management. These approaches to strategy formulation and implementation work well for static environments exhibiting little change. The modern competitive environment, constantly changing and increasingly dynamic is anything but static. The new sciences include chaos, complexity and quantum physics. Together, these disciplines expose a world of bounded uncertainty, unpredictable change, self-organization, fractals and complex relationships. More importantly, however, the new sciences are multidisciplinary and have established a new trend in thinking; they base theory and practice on a holistic view of the world. Despite their proliferation since the 1970s, there has been relatively little application of the new sciences in the field of strategic management. This paper develops a strategic management framework based on two of the new sciences-chaos and complexity. The Chaos and Complexity Strategic Management Framework provides generic guidelines for establishing strategic goals, policies and boundaries for operation within a complex and dynamic competitive environment.