Abstract for: New Planning Methodologies in Strategic Management; An Inter-Paradigm System Dynamics Approach

The main concern of strategic management today is the controlling of the interactions between the organization and its environment as this constitutes a highly complex system of interrelated parts. The solution to this problem lies on understanding the underlying structure of the organizational-environmental system with all its possible observable manifestations in constructs and quantifiable variables as well as the steering possibilities or decision rules that this structure allows. This requires the drawing of the patterns of interaction of a large number of important variables. In this paper we argue that by combining the strengths of two prominent planning methodologies, which belong to different and to somewhat conflicting paradigms and modeling schools, we may indeed produce a single more effective planning framework. We proceed by outlining the strengths and limitations of the two approaches namely PIMS and System Dynamics and then drawing on the complementarities we integrate them into a single composite strategic planning framework. The PIMS/SD inter-paradigm composite planning model is finally evaluated across theoretical conditions and practical relevance criteria.