Strategy is the foundation for success. It gives you direction, allowing you to organize activities that help you achieve your goals. A good strategy leaves no stone unturned. It encompasses development, alignment, and integration that all lead to positive progress.
A key part of strategy that often gets overlooked is the creation or provision of value. This can be both within your organization and what you offer externally. By establishing value, you give your stakeholders and strategy the drive and purpose required to succeed, helping your organization to make positive progress and solidify its competitive edge. On the other hand, if you don’t have a defined goal or value, your efforts and activities could seem pointless, which could limit buy-in for any future initiatives.
Strategic planning doesn’t always come quickly. It involves careful thought and consideration into all the various moving parts. Before you begin, you need to understand and define its purpose, including highlighting key priorities. Frame your strategy, combine the ideas and themes of your mission, vision, and values. This will indicate where you are currently, where you aspire to be, and ensure that you also know:
This list may change as your strategy develops, more information comes to the forefront, and throughout the end-to-end strategy execution process. You will need to define what success looks like so you can efficiently track performance and make optimizations to plans as needed.
Strategy planning should be an iterative and collaborative process. This ensures you are being thorough with your ideas and considering a variety of opinions and expertise when committing to your plans. Collaborating in the early stages of strategy creation enables you to align both resources and stakeholders, ensuring that your plans are both feasible and achievable. However, if you take a fragmented approach — and do not have clear lines of communication between teams, departments, or stakeholders — this can delay progress and cause confusion.
There are various different methods or frameworks available that you can use to collate all the necessary detail required to plan a strategy. My personal favorite is the OODA loop.
The OODA loop is a decision-making model designed to help individuals or organizations make informed decisions, particularly when not all information is available or if the environment is changing rapidly.
OODA consists of four key stages — observe, orient, decide, act — with each designed to support a pragmatic approach when making important decisions. It is best used for procuring and organizing all the information that will guide your strategy’s direction. The process is iterative, meaning you will be making regular adjustments throughout the planning stages as you discover new information, opinions, or expertise that will affect your strategy.
Using OODA does not need to be a standalone exercise. However, being aware of these phases in decision-making will assist in bringing focus to your strategy when defining your priorities.
Strategy creation can be done by various people within an organization, via several different approaches. However, there is a distinct difference between who creates a strategy, and who is responsible for it.
If you involve too many people in strategy creation, this can confuse the process and reduce clarity on what you’re trying to achieve. But, if not enough views or expertise are contributed in the planning stages, your strategy may fall short and not consider critical information that could help you progress.
There are three main ways of building a strategy, each following a different approach:
Having a variety of stakeholders included in the strategy creation process improves buy-in and alignment across the organization. To quote Simon Crowther, “the best thinking is done by the people who are doing the work.” Involving multiple areas of expertise encourages collaboration across different departments, ensuring everyone is working towards the same collective goal.
There are various frameworks you can use to help you build a cohesive strategy, each designed to align stakeholders on your ultimate goal. They highlight pain points and potential issues you may face, allowing you to factor in contingency plans (strategic agility) to overcome blockers if they arise.
SWOT analyses (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) inform strategic decisions by giving you oversight on the internal and external factors that could impact your plans. This would form part of the OODA observe phase, while you are gathering information to guide your strategy.
Using SWOT enables you to understand where you should excel in your strategy, and what could become a problem as the strategy progresses. This means you can create competitive advantage, and tap into gaps in the market, while being aware of any potential threats. SWOT can also support resource allocation for the strategy, as you will have a better understanding of the skills and capabilities within your organization that will make executing your strategy successful.
A PESTLE analysis — political, economic, social, technical, legal, and environmental — helps you to understand the external factors (that are usually beyond your control) that could have an effect on your strategy. These influences will give you an overview of the current state of the market and the potential trajectory of your strategy, again, allowing you to plan for unknowns.
PESTLE works well in the OODA orient phase, as you will be beginning to assign relevant context to your previous observations. This leads to better, more informed decisions in the later strategic planning stages, minimizing risks and unwanted surprises.
Objectives and key results (OKRs) will support you in measuring progress throughout your strategy planning and execution. They simplify the larger tasks into smaller, more attainable steps that keep stakeholders accountable for their part in strategy execution.
If using OODA methodology, OKRs will contribute to the act phase. This will allow you to keep regular track of progress and make optimizations or adjustments to your plans as required. Implementing OKRs into your initiatives means you will have clear direction, alignment, and milestones that all contribute to a successful, and actionable, strategy plan.
The key part of a strategy’s success is alignment — which can be difficult when dealing with a complex or large-scale project that has multiple moving parts. OODA methodology helps to organize all the different ideas and critical information into a cohesive narrative, which you can use to formulate your strategy. It creates feedback loops, meaning your strategy planning will follow an iterative process, contributing to effective strategic agility.
However, like I mentioned earlier, a critical part of the strategy planning, creation, and execution process is clear communication. When working in various business disciplines or departments, this can prove challenging ensuring that everyone is up to date with the most current information (and agreed plan!).
Cocreating strategies from a single location, where you can cascade the latest updates and action plans, can close the gaps in strategy execution, simplify strategy development, and bring that desired clarity, collaboration, and cohesion that strategy deserves.