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."
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."