Organizations around the globe develop strategies and create plans needed to get there. But, many strategies fail to deliver the expected results or achieve anything at all. Regrettably, executive teams are unable to identify the reasons for this impasse so they repeat the strategic planning cycle again, always hoping for a different outcome. As expected, it doesn’t.
There are 5 critical factors that increase the probability of success in setting up and delivering business strategies.
1- be collaborative
Strategy is collaborative by nature, involving multiple layers of organization. Leverage your whole organization, coach employees to perform the strategic elements of their role . Don't limit its reach to few top executives.
2- be pragmatic
Strategy is not a scientific nor a high brain exercise; it is a living, breathing and dynamic "game". Leave behind scenario planning, 100 page documents that gurus suggest they are time consuming, expensive and you don’t need them.
3- Do it all the time, over and over.
Strategy is not a one-off exercise. Build a continuous planning process, live, enabled within a strategic framework and pre-defined roles.
4- look for the “unknown”
Capture what you know and look for what you don’t know. Strategy frameworking provides the playing field to allow your organization to search for new products, end-use markets, geography, channel segments in a consistent and effective way.
5- Quantify and qualify
Translate data into knowledge in order to make your business strategy actionable. Market data, widely available, is the starting point, gather and activate knowledge to create a competitive advantage.
Democratize your approach, let everyone contribute, capture "the known" and search for "the unknown", translate data into knowledge, embrace a continuous planning process, leverage your organization strategic framework; these key factors will achieve the goal of increasing dramatically your business’ probability of success to design and implement strategies for growth.