CREATING A STRATEGY:
Strategy allows a company to set the target and have everyone on the team pull in that direction. It acts as a decision-making guide across departments and roles. It calls out shiny objects vs. Opportunities. It sets the expectation across the company. Strategy provides a framework for how you do what you do.
Ready to start designing your Company Strategy?
The first step is the organization and the external factors that impact it.
The Strategy Design Tool walks through questions to ask, research that is worth exploring, and activities that bring clarity and value to a strategy.
These factors include:
- Customers: Defining what your customers want and how the environment is shaping or impacting their wants and needs.
- Competitors: Defining your competitors and how you measure up against them.
- Capabilities: Identifying your company’s capabilities and how those capabilities must be improved or adjusted to meet customer needs.
- Key Factors: Determining the environmental factors (e.g. political, economic, social, technological) to monitor as indicators of changes in the market.
- Goals: Defining the company vision, who you are to the customer in relation to your peers and how you intend to establish that.
- Performance: Identifying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that help measure if the company is on target.
- Gaps and Risks: Identifying gaps and risks that could keep you from your objectives and creating plans to address or mitigate these items.
Top 3 “Do’s” of Strategy
These three “Do’s” are helpful to keep in mind:
1. Do base your strategy on what your customer wants. It isn’t about what youwant to offer. It’s about offering what customers are willing to pay for because it solves their need. Perform customer research and analysis to identify your customer’s wants and needs. Use this evidence-based customer information as the basis for your strategy.
2. Do set clear, specific, measurable objectives. Your strategy should communicate the expectations and actions needed clearly. Vague objectives won’t make the goal a reality. Ensure the strategy includes timelines and accountabilities that clearly identify actions needed to reach each objective, who will do it, and by when.
3. Do build your strategy with the likely scenarios and clearly defined assumptions in mind. Consider scenario planning. Define the scenarios including assumptions and probabilities. Define and implement the mechanisms required to recognize and react to different scenarios.
With these “Do’s” in mind you’ll establish a clear, achievable future.