This project investigates the level of interdisciplinarity of Strategy as well as seeking to find a way to apply interdisciplinary integration to Strategy and find a novel way of teaching it beyond the traditional strategic schools. Since Strategy exists in a variety of fields such as military, intelligence, politics, business, design and environmental protection, we posit that teaching intentional integration of strategies from across different fields can be useful to both graduates and employers.

I started by stumbling upon an old master’s course called ‘Strategic Studies’ which seemed to be stuck in the past, claiming to be interdisciplinary while factually just focusing on geopolitical strategy.

Over time I learned that strategy itself is quite interdisciplinary, and the thing strategists do when developing tactics is quite similar to interdisciplinary integration. I used bibliometrics to gather information about the similarity between strategy and interdisciplinarity.

I interviewed real world professionals that work in strategy fields from different areas. From these interviews, I not only learnt about the inherent interdisciplinarity of strategic work, but also the way to teach strategy better while learning to integrate tactics.

Business strategy, logistics strategy, financial strategy, political science, data science, sociology, module design were all perspectives I used when working on my project. Since my eventual product is a syllabus that’s supposed to help teach interdisciplinary strategy it only made sense to delve into the various disciplines that use strategic concepts.

My project ended up as a explanatory mixed method study that integrated knowledge from across different fields, both academic and professional. Even the product “a syllabus for a module” seems to be a very interdisciplinary way of impacting the world as it mixes the need of the real world with academia.

The result of this research project is a syllabus for a new module which we call “Interdisciplinary Strategy”. A module which aims to teach students the essentials of modern strategy techniques, the ability to integrate strategies and tactics from diverse and disparate fields and the module aims to increase the value of graduates for employers in strategy-related fields. Complete with a ten-week content list, each week has one vital concept of interdisciplinary strategy that the students would grasp and be tested on in novel interdisciplinary ways.

One of my key takeaways was that the big consultancies currently have a distorted version of what strategy is. Even experienced professionals said that the current models of the largest consultancies is opposed to the inherent nature of good strategy. It is a model of fitting the best idea in the shortest period of time, while good strategy involves understanding the landscape of the problem and then integrating and weighing the options.