It is now widely accepted that strategy making and policy development require both rational analysis and an ability to work with insights that are sometime hard to pin down. Operational research has made major contributions to strategy development, though there has been a tendency to argue that greater use of substantive rationality is needed. By contrast, alterative rationalities such as the procedural rationality suggested by Simon, provides a clear rationale for the demonstrable success of some soft OR methods in strategy development. In addition, the suggestion of Sagasti that metaphor and language are powerful tools in strategising also needs to be taken seriously