Is Your Business Overwhelmed? A Back to Basics Approach to Strategy Can Help

The last few years have been topsy turvy for everyone. A pandemic, worldwide lockdowns, a struggling global economy, civil and social unrest, climate change – any number of significant disruptions have required organizations to make big changes, adjust priorities or course correct their vision. 

In times like these, sometimes the wisest course is simply to go back to the basics. Strip away the complexities that have been layered in over time and start fresh with the most important principles. We find this works especially well with something as nuanced as strategy. 

Strategy is often confused with a company’s vision or its mission. More to the point, we often meet companies who believe that their strong mission or purpose equates to a strong strategy. That isn’t necessarily the case. Yes, your company’s strategy should reflect its mission, but it is much more than that. A successful strategy is a long term plan for how you’re going to achieve specific objectives that map back to your mission, as well as shorter term goals and metrics that will form the building blocks for achieving your long term plan.

How do you begin?

It can feel daunting to know just how to create a strategy – whether you’re beginning a strategy from scratch or you’re looking to reevaluate a strategy that may have grown stale. One easy way to begin is to honestly assess where you are against where you want to be. This article goes into greater depth about three key questions you should be asking: 

• Where are we right now?
• Where do we want to be?
• How do we get there?

The beauty of these questions is that you can ask them as often as needed, and they are also the right questions to ask on a micro-level, when considering various elements and projects that map back to your long term strategy. Understanding where you are currently, in light of where you want to be, helps form the framework for a targeted strategic plan.

What makes a good plan?

There are as many approaches to strategic plans as there are organizations who create them. Even amid all that variation, however, there are consistencies that can ensure greater success. 

In his well known book “The Strategy Concept,” Canadian management scientist Henry Mintzberg laid out his Five Ps for Strategy. His argument was that it was implausible to consider only one path to strategic planning. Instead, he put forward five pillars – Plan, Ploy, Pattern, Position and Perspective – which allows for not only static planning approaches but also more dynamic evolutions as strategy shifts to meet the ever-changing needs of the organization.  

Mintzberg’s five pillars can be a helpful guiding light when considering why you need a strategy and how that strategy can best serve your organization. In a recent blog post, we drilled down into the efficacy of the strategic plan itself and what we’ve seen work well (and not so well) across the many companies we’ve worked with.

Much like the static and dynamic approach that Mintzberg identified, we also see the value of considering both tangible and intangible elements to a good plan. Intangible elements, such as communication, design and innovation, are not easily measured, but that does not negate the critical role these elements play in building a strong strategic plan.

More tangible elements such as work output, monitoring outcomes and risk assessment,  can be easily measured. They offer a more concrete method to monitor performance, but they are informed by those important intangible elements. A strong strategic plan should account for both the tangible and the intangible, and it should be designed in such a way that it provides both a static measurement of where the company is right now, along with the ability to flex and adjust as the strategy shifts or grows.

When do you know if you’re successful?

Much like strategic plans themselves, the way to assess success is varied. One sure fire way to track execution performance is to assign metrics (KPIs), inside a framework like OKRs for example, and evaluate on an ongoing basis—at least every month. Allow for flexibility—these regular check-ins are a way to adapt and change if something isn’t working well or you’re not seeing the results you wish.

Another way to measure the success of your strategy is to evaluate the success of your business outcomes. Are you growing? Is revenue increasing? What about share of market, operational efficiencies, customer engagement or product innovation? Success can come in many different forms, and some of the most obvious metrics can take the longest to move in a positive direction. Fellow team members can be a fantastic resource for understanding the efficacy of your strategy and its impact on parts of the business that may not be as easy to see.

With so many challenges and opportunities coming your way, it’s normal to lose sight of strategy when you’re working to adapt and stay above water. Sometimes one of the smartest things you can do for your company and your team is to take a step back, return to the basics, reevaluate where you are and where you want to be, and put a new strategy in place. 

We’d love to help you out and can offer a no-pressure, 30 day trial to see if StrategyBlocks is the right fit for your organization. Contact us today!