Microlinks: Reconceiving Strategy Research as Inputs to Strategic Design

ABSTRACT Strategy is an applied field: its value depends on whether it helps practitioners design responses to the challenges they face. For two decades the field has pursued that value through two norms, the causal identification of empirical claims and the accumulation of novel theory. Both have succeeded on their own terms, yet neither has made strategy research appreciably more useful for strategic design. We argue the reason is structural, not a failure of execution. A strategy is an interlinked chain of decisions calibrated to a particular context, while causal identification and theoretical contribution each produce isolated nodes: a well-identified estimate or a well-defended generalization. Four features of strategic problems, interdependence, irreversibility, multiplicity, and temporal urgency, make average effects a poor guide for any specific firm, while theoretical contributions strip away the specificity a designer needs, rest on unobservable constructs, and offer no framework for choosing among them. We propose that research becomes useful when it is recast as microlinks: causal claims relating two variables, each articulable at many levels of abstraction, such that broad theory and granular findings are microlinks differing only in abstraction. Practitioners assemble microlinks across studies and levels to compose strategies fitted to their situation. The resulting view of strategy research is teleological, aimed at enabling effective action, rather than epistemic, aimed at producing correct beliefs.