Johnson, Scholes and Whittington Model Explained

The Johnson, Scholes and Whittington model is the framework behind Exploring Strategy, one of the most widely taught strategy texts in UK business schools. It organises strategy into three connected elements: understanding the strategic position, making strategic choices, and putting strategy into action. This guide explains each element, the suitability, acceptability and feasibility tests, the strategy lenses and strategic drift, and then covers the part the textbooks spend least time on: why sound strategies still fail when a real organisation tries to deliver them.

What Is the Johnson, Scholes and Whittington Model?

Gerry Johnson and Kevan Scholes first published Exploring Corporate Strategy in 1984. Richard Whittington joined as co-author from the seventh edition in 2005, the book was retitled Exploring Strategy from the ninth edition, and later editions added Duncan Angwin and Patrick Regnér. You will see the framework referred to as the Johnson and Scholes model, the Johnson, Scholes and Whittington model, the JSW model or simply the Exploring Strategy model. They all describe the same thing.

The model's central idea is that strategy is not a linear sequence of analysis, then decision, then delivery. The three elements overlap and inform each other. What an organisation can realistically choose depends on its position, and how it acts changes that position in turn.

The Three Elements of the Exploring Strategy Model

1. Strategic Position

Strategic position is about understanding where the organisation stands before deciding where it goes. It covers:

• The environment: macro forces (often analysed with PESTEL), industry structure (Porter's five forces) and competitors, customers and markets.
• Strategic capabilities: the resources and competences the organisation actually has, and which of them are genuinely distinctive.
• Strategic purpose: mission, vision, values and objectives, and the stakeholders and governance arrangements that shape them.
• Culture and history: the taken-for-granted assumptions that influence what the organisation believes is possible. Johnson's cultural web is the standard tool here.

2. Strategic Choices

Strategic choices are the options open to the organisation: how it competes at business level, where it plays at corporate level, whether it expands internationally, how it innovates, and whether it grows organically or through acquisitions and alliances. Each option is then evaluated before a decision is made, most commonly using the SAF tests below.

3. Strategy in Action

Strategy in action is where strategy meets the organisation. It covers how performance is evaluated, how strategy develops in practice (planned or emergent), how the organisation is structured and controlled to deliver it, how change is led, and the practice of strategy: who does the strategising, in which meetings, with which tools. This element is where Whittington's strategy-as-practice work has had most influence, and it is the element that decides whether any of the analysis creates value.

The SAF Tests: Suitability, Acceptability and Feasibility

The model's best-known practical tool is the set of three tests applied to every strategic option:

• Suitability: does the option address the key issues in the organisation's strategic position, exploiting its strengths and opportunities and dealing with its weaknesses and threats?
• Acceptability: are the expected outcomes acceptable to stakeholders? This is usually judged on three measures: return, risk and stakeholder reaction.
• Feasibility: can the option actually be delivered with the finance, people, capabilities and time available?

In practice, feasibility is the test that gets waved through. Boards will interrogate suitability at length and negotiate acceptability carefully, then accept feasibility on the word of whoever is most confident in the room. That is where a great many transformation programmes are lost, long before delivery begins.

The Strategy Lenses

The model also asks readers to look at strategy through different lenses, because no single view explains how strategy really develops:

• Design: strategy as a deliberate, rational process of analysis, choice and planned implementation.
• Experience: strategy as the product of managers' past experience, assumptions and organisational culture, which tends to produce incremental change.
• Variety (earlier editions called this the ideas lens): strategy emerging from new ideas and experiments across the organisation, not only from the top.
• Discourse: strategy as language, where the way strategy is talked about shapes power, legitimacy and what gets done.

For practitioners, the lenses are a useful check on a board paper that reads as pure design. If a plan assumes the organisation will simply execute what was decided, the experience lens will usually tell you why it will not.

Strategic Drift

Strategic drift is Johnson's term for the gradual gap that opens when an organisation's strategy changes incrementally while its environment changes faster. Drift happens because established culture and past success make leaders favour familiar responses. It typically passes through four phases: incremental change, drift, a period of flux in which the organisation tries several responses, and finally either transformational change or decline.

Drift matters to boards and investors because it is rarely visible in the numbers until late. By the time performance falls, the organisation is often already in flux, and the choice is between a deliberate transformation and one forced on it.

Why Strategy Models Fail at the Implementation Stage

Every framework on this subject describes analysis well and implementation poorly. That is not a criticism of Johnson, Scholes and Whittington specifically; it is a structural feature of the field. Analysis can be taught in a classroom. Implementation happens inside organisations with histories, politics, incumbent systems and people who have watched three previous transformation programmes come and go.

In our experience across more than 100 programmes, the gap usually opens in three places:

• Decision rights are never actually moved. A new operating model is announced, but the people who could previously say no can still say no. Nothing changes because nothing was given up.
• The feasibility test was passed on intent, not evidence. The programme is resourced for the organisation leadership believes it runs, not the one it actually runs.
• Strategy is handed over rather than embedded. Consultants produce the analysis and leave, and the organisation is left holding a document it had no part in writing and no capacity to act on.

This last point is why Intology works the way it does. The Embedded Change Model exists because strategy delivered to an organisation tends not to survive contact with it, whereas strategy built inside the organisation, with its own people carrying it, usually does.

Where a programme has already gone off track, the three elements provide a fast, structured diagnosis. Our programme recovery consultancy work almost always finds the original failure in strategy in action, or in a feasibility test that was never properly applied, rather than in the strategic choice itself. The intent was sound; the organisation was never set up to deliver it. For programmes still in flight, independent programme assurance applies the same discipline before the damage is done.

Common Pitfalls When Applying the Model

• Treating it as a sequence. Running position, then choice, then action as separate stages, rather than revisiting position as delivery reveals new facts.
• Skipping culture. Analysing environment and resources thoroughly while ignoring the cultural web, which is usually where resistance to change lives.
• Applying SAF selectively. Rigorous on suitability, generous on feasibility.
• Keeping strategy at the top. Failing to involve the middle managers who will make or break strategy in action.

How Intology Uses the Model With Boards and Investors

Intology is an independent UK consultancy. We do not resell software or implementation partners, so our assessment of whether a strategy is deliverable is not shaped by what we would like to sell next. Private equity operating partners, portfolio company CEOs and CFOs use us to test feasibility honestly before capital is committed, to diagnose programmes that have stalled, and to embed change so it survives after we leave. To see how that translates into delivery, explore our business transformation consulting services.

The analysis is the straightforward part. Making it survive contact with a real organisation is the work.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Johnson, Scholes and Whittington model?

It is the strategic management framework from Exploring Strategy (originally Exploring Corporate Strategy). It divides strategy into three overlapping elements: strategic position, strategic choices and strategy in action.

What are the suitability, acceptability and feasibility (SAF) tests?

They are the three criteria for evaluating a strategic option. Suitability asks whether it fits the organisation's strategic position, acceptability asks whether its return, risk and stakeholder reactions are tolerable, and feasibility asks whether the organisation has the resources and capabilities to deliver it.

What is strategic drift?

Strategic drift is the gradual gap that opens when an organisation's strategy changes more slowly than its environment, usually because culture and past success favour familiar responses. It tends to move from incremental change to drift, then flux, then either transformational change or decline.

What are the strategy lenses?

They are different ways of viewing how strategy develops: design (deliberate and rational), experience (shaped by culture and past assumptions), variety or ideas (emerging from across the organisation) and discourse (shaped by how strategy is talked about).

Who is Richard Whittington?

Richard Whittington is a strategy professor at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School, known for his work on strategy as practice. He joined Gerry Johnson and Kevan Scholes as co-author from the seventh edition in 2005.

Is the Johnson and Scholes model still relevant for real organisations?

Yes, particularly the SAF tests and the focus on strategy in action. Its weakness in practice is not the model but how it is applied: feasibility is often assumed rather than evidenced, which is where independent challenge adds most value.