Strategy as practice
Strategy as practice studies strategy as something people do in their daily work, rather than as a plan a firm merely possesses.
Strategy is usually studied as something firms have. It might be better understood as something people do.
Strategy as practice is a perspective that treats strategy not as a property a firm possesses but as an activity people perform: the meetings, conversations, analyses, away-days, spreadsheets, and rituals through which strategy is actually made and remade. It shifts attention from strategies to strategising, and from the firm in the abstract to the people doing the work.
The everyday work behind the noun
Conventional strategy talk hides the human labour involved. Behind a tidy strategic plan lie countless hours of debate, political negotiation, slide-making, and interpretation. The practice view takes that labour seriously, asking who is involved, what tools and routines they use, and how those activities shape what the strategy becomes. The annual planning cycle, the board presentation, the strategy workshop are not neutral containers; they shape the content they carry.
Tools are not innocent
A central insight is that the instruments of strategy, the frameworks, templates, and metrics, are not neutral. A firm that runs its strategy through a five-forces template will see industry structure; one that runs it through a capabilities audit will see resources. The tool directs attention and quietly excludes what it does not capture. Knowing this makes practitioners more deliberate about which tools they pick up and what each leaves out.
Why it matters for practice
The perspective is less a recipe than a mirror. By making the doing of strategy visible, it helps explain why strategies drift from intention to outcome, why some processes generate commitment and others mere documents, and why the same framework yields insight in one room and theatre in another.
For managers, the lesson is to treat strategising as real work to be designed, not an event to be scheduled. Who is in the room, what questions are asked, which tools frame the discussion, and how the conclusions travel into action determine far more than the elegance of the resulting plan.