Thanks for this. I'm new to Rumelt and strategy. Does he really assume one can deduce the root cause of a problem? He seems to describe it more as educated guesswork.
"Importantly, none of these diagnoses can be proven to be correct. Each is a judgement about which issue is preeminent. Hence, diagnosis is a judgement about the meanings of facts. The challenge facing Starbucks was ill-structured. By that I mean that no one could be sure how to define the problem. There was no obvious list of good approaches or actions, and the connections between most actions and outcomes were unclear. Because the challenge was ill-structured, a real-world strategy could not be logically deduced from the observed facts. Rather, a diagnosis had to be an educated guess as to what was going on in the situation, especially about what was critically important."
I think that is open to interpretation (the doctor metaphor clearly implies it), but either way, it does not render the observation invalid. If the diagnosis is incorrect, the entire exercise falls flat.
Thanks for this. I'm new to Rumelt and strategy. Does he really assume one can deduce the root cause of a problem? He seems to describe it more as educated guesswork.
"Importantly, none of these diagnoses can be proven to be correct. Each is a judgement about which issue is preeminent. Hence, diagnosis is a judgement about the meanings of facts. The challenge facing Starbucks was ill-structured. By that I mean that no one could be sure how to define the problem. There was no obvious list of good approaches or actions, and the connections between most actions and outcomes were unclear. Because the challenge was ill-structured, a real-world strategy could not be logically deduced from the observed facts. Rather, a diagnosis had to be an educated guess as to what was going on in the situation, especially about what was critically important."
Thank you for your comment, Tim.
I think that is open to interpretation (the doctor metaphor clearly implies it), but either way, it does not render the observation invalid. If the diagnosis is incorrect, the entire exercise falls flat.