When Lives Are at Stake: Managing Temporal Complexity with a Strategy Process Repertoire

Humanitarian organizations assisting victims of armed conflict face fragmented and potentially conflicting temporal demands on strategy making. Annual donor funding requires detailed planning, unpredictable outbreaks of war and violence demand quick and flexible decisions, and long-term societal challenges must be addressed over the next decades. Few studies have examined how organizations can achieve temporal fit in such temporally complex environments without accepting internal fragmentation or decoupling from certain temporal demands. We draw on a longitudinal case study of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), a humanitarian organization with the mandate to aid victims of armed conflict, to explore this gap. We find that the ICRC has developed a repertoire of multiple distinct strategy processes tailored to the fragmented temporal demands. These processes include emergency responses, strategic planning, and long-term strategizing. Although each strategy process retained its distinctiveness, their loose coupling ensured a sufficient alignment of resource allocation in pursuit of the organization’s humanitarian mandate. Strong shared principles and an episodic activation of strategy processes helped to manage the inherent complexity of loose coupling. Thus, strategy process repertoires may form a capability supporting strategic decision making in temporally complex environments. Our study contributes to strategy process research by introducing loose coupling as a mechanism for integrating multiple strategy processes with different temporalities, complementing previous studies on strategy processes as a tightly coupled structural context. Furthermore, we advance theorizing on ambitemporality by analyzing how the loose coupling of internal temporal structures may help organizations cope with temporal complexity.