But you have to start somewhere. So here are six questions that should help focus your thinking about what your strategy development process should address.
1. Are you winning? How well is your organization doing?
- Financially?
- Operationally?
- Competitively?
There are all kinds of indications in the performance data, whether taken over a year, a decade or a week that will give insight into what’s happening in your organization. Think about what the organization finds easy to do and what it finds difficult. Study your organization’s performance hard and from many angles. Are there clear indications as to what you should be focusing on?
2. What do you know?
- Do you know your markets, economies, industries well?
- Do you know yourselves well? The good AND the bad
- Do you know your competition well?
While the answer to who is your competition might be ‘everybody’ in global terms, this isn’t a useful answer. There are some key competitors that you should know everything about. Who are they?
Good strategy requires a deep understanding of your own company and the environment. Well researched, structured information is the life-blood of the strategy development process and is the most time-consuming element to create. Data gathering and analysis (knowledge management as it’s become known) should go on all the time. It’s best to make the periodic data-gathering binges that you undertake for strategy development purposes some part of the ongoing responsibility of managers. Or make it a key piece of your Intranet planning.
3. Do you keep coming back to the same issues and choices?
If so, you’re either:
- not making clear choices or
- not making choices that stick.
Which probably means the choice you’re trying to make is either:
- the wrong one, or
- especially difficult, or
- the organization is secretly divided over what should happen, but you haven’t opened up the debate yet.
How good is your organization at making choices and sticking with them? Have you underestimated how big a choice you’re trying to make? Are you allowing enough dissent before you decide to implement so that implementation is more than just half-hearted?
4. How clear is the strategy to people in your organization?
- Do people know what the organization is going to do?
- Do they know what it’s NOT going to do?
This isn’t just a question of communicating what’s going to happen. It reflects the clarity of what the organization knows about itself and how focused organizational action is.
5. Do ALL your choices fit?
When the strategy has worked its way deep into the organizational DNA, everything you do manifests it. The choices you make at operational levels reflect the strategy not because they are bolted on to the strategy in a crude way, but because the strategy is internalized in the minds of employees.
Which of your choices seem to conflict with what you say you intend to do?
- Do you claim to be empowering the workforce, but the quality teams budget is being cut?
- Did you decide to focus on one part of the market, but the expensive new production equipment you’re installing can make everything?
- You’re going to be flexible and dynamic, but you just appointed a second team to review the first team’s customer service audit?
6. Are you learning?
- Is the organization more skillful this year than last?
- Is the organization’s understanding of itself and its industry better than it has been in the past?
- Are the tools you use to understand things (your performance, the market, your customers) better than they were last year?
- Are you pulling ahead of your competitors? Catching up? Or are you dropping back?
Exploring these questions will help you start to identify what your strategy development agenda should look like. You may need to generate a whole raft of new information. You may decide that you have enough information but that not enough people have been exposed to it or been invited to use it and determine direction. Or you may decide that most of what you have is sound, but the strategy hasn’t really taken hold in anywhere but the marketing department – which means it isn’t really being implemented on an organizational level. Or you may feel there is a particular choice that your senior management group has made, but action doesn’t seem to follow and that maybe you need to revisit the choice more intensely.
Whatever thoughts these questions stimulate, strategy is a live process not a sterile, theoretical exercise. It needs constant not intermittent attention, and only when you can see it alive in the decisions and actions that managers and employees take every day, can you say that it’s being implemented.
