Are you taking your strategy-making process far too seriously?
Leadership teams struggle with strategic options:
· All too often they focus on trying to create credible proposed options, with those that sound “silly” or “boring” or “political” finding the waste bin too soon.
· They are overwhelmed with countless analysis — SWOT; Ansoff; PEST; GAP; VRIO and the list goes on. All of which gives them reasons to kill their ideas at worst and slow down coming up with ideas at best.
· They treat strategic option generation as a construction exercise — build an option with a bunch of pieces and assemble it to logically fit together in an airtight way.
This is way too hard! And, this will likely produce a bunch of options that are not much different than your current strategy.
My solution? Think about strategic options as being stories about the future. Positive, successful and full of joy. I use a technique called Destination Postcard to help leadership teams create aspirational stories about the business in the future.
If every participant tells one another a happy story, the group will have a wonderful list of options — and quite quickly — because participants won’t feel that they have to work super hard and be terribly careful and highly logical.
The standard on all of those dimensions is brought way down. Meanwhile, the creativity is elevated way up — because these are just stories; happy stories.
Once you have these strategic options you can begin the process of feasibility and attractiveness. That is the easiest way to produce great strategies.
Thanks for reading. I’m John McAuliffe and I help companies accelerate growth more consistently and with greater predictability.
I am a learner. I find myself constantly reading on a variety of topics with an insatiable appetite for continuous learning. My thoughts on business have been influenced by many. You may feel a bit of déjà vu in reading some of my thoughts because of this. When it comes to strategy and business management systems I follow the likes of Jim Collins, Roger Martin, Gino Wickman, Verne Harnish amongst others. On consumer insights, marketing and sales I am influenced by the likes of Adele Revella, John McMahon, Geoffrey Moore and many others. Thanks for reading.
