The Best of Corporate Strategy & Execution

 

Business change can be hard. Everything from managing the disruption of digital transformation, integrating agile business practices, building a culture of innovation or shifting business priorities to monetize new revenue streams, requires significant change throughout the entire operation. That’s why many companies have relied on organizational methods and strategy-making processes for years, in order to make the “business of change” easier and more effective.

There are three well-known models when it comes to building strategy: RACI/RACSI, Design Thinking, and SWOT analysis, each with their own unique value. Separately these models are effective in guiding companies through change, but together, can be truly transformational.

 

The RACI/RACSI Model

RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed – the S is sometimes included and stands for Supported. This model is one of the most popular methods for assigning responsibility in organizational change processes. To generate organizational change, team members need to “do” something, and the RACI model makes clear what should be done and by whom. It helps identify key tasks and activities that don’t have a lead responsible party (therefore they may not get done in a timely fashion), tasks that have more than one lead responsible party (therefore they might lead to confusion) and tasks that have many responsible parties all with unique skills (therefore the task should be broken down into sub-tasks). RACI empowers individuals in an organization with the autonomy to take charge and accomplish a task or activity promptly with a team of supporters.

 

Design Thinking Tool

A “hot” strategy tool of the moment is Design Thinking, a process that sets the framework around business innovation by using the best practices of design. When considering adding a new product or service, or even making internal process changes, this method helps increase the time to implementation while lowering risk and cost of mistakes. Design Thinking employs some iteration of the following steps: Discovery, (Re)Frame the opportunity, Incubate, Ideate/Illuminate, Evaluate/Refine, Rapid Prototype/Test, Deliver and Iterate to help companies understand and promote innovation that contributes to organic growth.
Explained in a different way, Design Thinking guides companies to invent “a future state” by immersing themselves in their customers’ experience, test ideas through “good enough” products and experiences, bring new products and offerings to life and figure out manufacturing and distribution logistics to enable growth. Design Thinking enables rapid innovation without fear of expensive mistakes and enables the real-time responsiveness so critical to the digital age.