Strategy

Strategy is a cognitive structure to simplify and explain the world and thereby facilitate action. Strategic management scholar Henry Mintzberg wrote that people need strategies because they have a need for consistency. Consistency provides people with a sense of control. Strategy provides relief from the anxiety created by complexity, unpredictability, and incomplete information. Furthermore, it helps overcome the paradox of competence. As Stuart Albert describes this paradox in his research on timing, the human brain has what is called the quantum capacity, or Q capacity, which allows people to think about the distant past and the future without analyzing all of the intermediate steps involved. He says that people would be paralyzed if it took an hour to think about any action that took an ...