Today my blog will be about strategy development after the stakeholder expectations are understood and a common understanding of the current reality is established. In my experience once these two steps have been thoroughly completed, the identification of the necessary strategies if quite natural for the competent and experienced strategy development team, typically senior leaders with some handpicked key players.
The strategy development is typically done during a workshop with the entire strategy development team in smaller teams of 3-4 people with our doHow® Inspirational Persuasion Methodology.
The doHow® Gamification gets the teams of 3-4 perform alternating individual and collective tasks, both lasting just a couple of minutes. As the participants perform these tasks, they start thinking, and thinking collectively, for arriving at outcomes in consensus. In this case study of strategy development for a Tier 2 MSME, the first three individual tasks were to explain a player’s point of view using intended procrastination as a hint for decisions for effectiveness, automating repetitive tasks in delivery/distribution process as a hint for engineering with attention to detail and creating demand by offering a newer version of the product/service as a hint for strategy by connecting the dots. In between each of these individual tasks the teams simulated a machine for fostering creativity, defined the goals, KRAs, KPIs with targets to keep the strategy grounded and picked the top 3 strategies in consensus for focusing all the efforts on the wildly important goal. Such alternating tasks continued till clarity was achieved for executing the strategy. The outcome was 25% YoY Growth combined with 5% YoY increase in Profitability.
In some of our other assignments, the gap between the stakeholder expectations and the common understanding of the reality was so obvious that we didn’t need a doHow® strategy development workshop to define the top strategy for the quarter.
You may be wondering why I am mentioning strategy for a quarter, when the strategy needs to be of a long term perspective. Well, I agree with your perception from the perspective of constancy of purpose and disagree from the perspective of the VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity) world we are all living in today. I believe companies can really achieve amazing outcomes, using the quarterly business planning, I have explained in my blog from July 2020. You may want to check it out.
The outcome of the strategy development will surely be a list of strategies, preferably 3-5 for the quarter, along with the metrics or key performance indicators with targets for validating the successful outcomes after executing these strategies. In my next blog I will explain the rolling plan for these targets, for providing the constancy needed for operations and agility needed for business.
Happy reading!
Interesting post. I often wonder that for any organisation which does not have a unique offering and is reliant on derived demand, the only strategy can be Op Ex with focus on cost or Diversification.
Also maybe, when it comes to a quarter, planning would be a better word than strategy which is generally understood as more long term
Absolutely is agreement with your comments, Ramesh. For most of the Indian companies it is just OPEX and diversification. Of course it is quarterly planning based on the strategy, which may have to be reviewed too every quarter, to accommodate the rapid changes in the external environment while maintaining the constancy of purpose. I will elaborate this in my next blog.
The quarter to quarter strategy is also aligned to the OKR way of working aligned to the big plan as well as the emerging VUCA scenarios too