Teaching Operational Research and Strategy at Warwick Business School

This paper describes the development of three courses that have run for more than 30 years at Warwick Business School in the United Kingdom. The courses focus on supporting the strategy process, which consists of activities such as: setting direction and goals; creating, rehearsing, and evaluating strategic initiatives; exploring the external environment; and measuring and learning from organisational performance. We present the structure of the three courses (for undergraduate, Specialist Masters, and Executive MBA students) taught during the 2009–2010 academic year, highlighting the frameworks, methods and models, or tools, covered on the different courses. A key contribution of this paper is that it demonstrates how tools drawn from the operational research/management science field, but also other fields, including strategic management, can be brought together to support the strategy process. The tools are typically but not exclusively qualitative, or soft, and participative in nature. We describe how we teach five particular tools in some depth: visioning, scenario planning, SWOT/TOWS analysis, system dynamics, and the balanced scorecard. We also highlight how these tools are combined with other approaches covered in the courses. This paper ends with reflections on our experiences of teaching the courses and signposts potential future developments.