Extending Ansoff’s Strategic Diagnosis Model

Given the complex and disruptive open-ended dynamics in the currentdynamic global environment, senior management recognizes the need for a formalized,consistent, and comprehensive framework to analyze the firm’s strategic posture. Modernassessment tools, such as H. Igor Ansoff’s seminal contributions to strategic diagnosis,primarily focused on identifying and enhancing the firm’s strategic performancepotential through the analysis of the industry’s environmental turbulence level relativeto the firm’s aggressiveness and responsiveness of capability. Other epistemic modelingtechniques envisage Porter’s generic strategic positions, Strengths, Weaknesses,Opportunities, Threats (SWOT), and Resource-Based View as useful methodologies to aid inthe planning process. All are complex and involve multiple managerial perspectives. Overthe last two decades, attempts have been made to comprehensively classify the firm’sfuture competitive position. Most of these proposals utilized matrices to depict theposition, such as the Boston Consulting Group, point positioning, and dispersedpositioning. The GE/McKinsey later enhanced this typology by expanding to 3 × 3,contributing to management’s deeper understanding of the firm’s position. Both types ofassessments, Ansoff’s strategic diagnosis and positional matrices, are invaluablestrategic tools for firms. However, it could be argued that these positional analysessingularly reflect a blind spot in modeling the firm’s future strategic performancepotential, as neither considers the interactions of the other. This article isconceptual and takes a different approach from earlier methodologies. Althoughconceptual, the article aims to present a robust model combining Ansoff’s strategicdiagnosis with elements of the performance matrices to provide the management with anenriched capability to evaluate the firm’s current and future performanceposition