A methodology for supporting strategy implementation based on the VSM: A case study in a Latin-American multi-national

Abstract

Soft OR tools have increasingly been used to support the strategic development of companies at operational and managerial levels. However, we still lack OR applications that can be useful in dealing with the “implementation gap”, understood as the scarcity of resources available to organizations seeking to align their existing processes and structures with a new strategy. In this paper we contribute to filling that gap, describing an action research case study where we supported strategy implementation in a Latin American multinational corporation through a soft OR methodology. We enhanced the ‘Methodology to support organizational self-transformation’, inspired by the Viable System Model, with substantive improvements in data collection and analyses. Those adjustments became necessary to facilitate second order learning and agreements on required structural changes among a large number of participants. This case study contributes to the soft OR and strategy literature with insights about the promise and constraints of this soft OR methodology to collectively structure complex decisions that support organizational redesign and strategy implementation.