# 3.1 Digital Strategy as a learning activity

‘Strategic management has been a rapidly growing discipline since the 1980s, reflecting the expansion of business schools or schools of management in which it is housed and of its core territory of MBA programmes.’ (Ferlie and Ongaro, 2022: ,p:4). As discussed in Section 2, we frame creating a digital strategy as strategy as practice, an important sub field of strategy as practice is the learning school of strategy. This approach to strategy was initially coined by the publication of Charles Lindblom’s (1959) article: The Science of Muddling Through (Lindblom, 1959). In this article Lindblom takes as an example, the ‘messy’ world of policy making to describe how different factors shape policy making, and the ways in which one individual’s version of rationality, may be in direct conflict with other members of the policy making team. Baxter (2017), picks up on this in her description of how education policy is constructed and implemented, pointing out that ‘the idea of policy making as a learning activity `has found favour with researchers who align it with work into organizational learning and single and double loop learning’ citing the work of Argyris and Schon (1976).(Baxter, 2017) The idea of single and double loop learning is interesting when considering the messy process of strategy making. In the next section you will look at single and double-loop learning and how it applies to your own process of strategic thinking and design. (Argyris, 1976)

Figure 5: Digital Strategy as a learning activity

OpenLearn - Strategic planning for online learning
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