Building Growth Capacity Beyond the Strategic Plan
Your strategy is your company’s connection with the aspired future. It articulates how you will be attractive for your target customers, how you will build and direct your critical resources and assets, for success. It describes your vision, your choices and your path forward, in the face of the fast developing technological, economic, competitive and customer behaviour space.
And it’s exactly in the way you deal with this ‘uncertainty’ that you determine your future business success. Research of our academic partners Prof. Paul Verdin and Prof. Amy Edmondson indicates that the “…widely accepted view that strategy and execution are separable activities, sets companies up for failure in a fast-paced world” (HBR, 2017). Gone are the days that all you needed was a plan. And that deviations from plans were considered failures or implementation mistakes. You need to live ‘in the territory’, not in the map, and hold course, while reading and adapting to emerging realities. Strategy is a verb.
The way you do strategy, or ‘strategise’, matters. In two ways:
- It focuses less on the document called strategy, but more on the capability to continuously:
- See: understand the context within which you are and will be operating, through a robust analysis of your relevant context, an active radar for trends and discontinuities, and through exposure to outside inspiration from leading edge players, that stretch your perspective and cognitive bias.
- Choose: identify and explore alternative strategic options, before deciding on your unique path forward.
- Act: set the critical path in line with your choices, and engage critical teams in an agile strategy-to-action approach.
- Embed and learn: face anomalies and new insights, review the deliverables and course correct the approach where needed, and gradually integrate the new ways of working into ‘the way you do things’.
- It stimulates a climate for growth and development: “culture may be having strategy for breakfast, but the way you do strategy is certainly making lunch for the culture”. Strategising is creating the space for:
- curiosity for new developments and ideas coming from different sources,
- open mindedness for different perspectives, stretching the thinking,
- timely decision making, under uncertainty,
- alignment and collaboration, without compromising,
- ownership and responsibility to make deliver results,
- transparency, radical honesty, and trust,
- constructive conflict, leading to new and better conclusions.
