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Use Of Power And Rationality On Strategic Decisions

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Strategy is a crucial element in the context of an organisation’s or firm’s mission. The question is to what extent is strategy influenced by power and rationality and how does the strategic decision-making come into play when deciding about long run strategy-making.
In the following, I will apply strategy models and theories to the scenarios of the film ‘Apollo 13’ (1995) in order to evaluate how the strategy-making is affected by strategic decisions and vice versa. Therefore, I will consider the influence of power and rationality on strategic decisions in relation to the resulting outcome. To start with, I will analyse the scenario planning process, its relation to risk management and the resulting issue of recursive and adaptive…show more content…
Therefore, scenario planning can be used as a tool to analyse the feasibility of a plan and evaluate how realistic it is to achieve set objectives as a part of the mission (Schoemaker, 1995).
Applying this practice of scenario planning to the procedures in ‘Apollo 13’, one can observe a similar approach, as the astronauts use a simulation programme to prepare for their mission and the issues that may affect the procedures, such as pressure, temperature and technical difficulties. For the simulation to be as realistic as possible, the crew members ensure that the conditions in the simulator are exactly how they would expect them be or at least as close as to how they would expect them in space (‘Apollo 13’, 1995).
One possible reason for this could be that according to Schoemaker (1995, p.26), the simulation of a scenario is a ‘distorted representation’ which means that as it is used to simplify actual issues it tends to exclude essential issues that may arise as a result of under- or over prediction of a specific scenario. Hence, the truthfulness of the simulation outcome is not necessarily reliable for the actual process as unforeseen circumstances may occur without previous warning such as the sudden explosion of the oxygen tank in our movie example. Since the crew was not prepared for this problem to arise as no previous scenario included the emergence of this problem, it underlines the limitations associated with the
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