Continuous strategy, or continuous planning, is an ongoing and iterative approach towards strategy creation and execution. It involves looking at both internal performance and external influencing factors before making an informed decision or implementing strategy optimizations.
Real-time data drives continuous strategy, as it enables you to ensure that your business goals are both resilient and relevant in changing market conditions. A static approach to strategy, on the other hand, means your strategic progress will only be reviewed at set intervals and limit strategic agility (or adaptability) — especially if there are drastic internal or external shifts that weren’t originally expected.
Continuous strategy works best when it is viewed as a collaborative exercise, much like product development. Those involved will each be looking for ways to improve the strategy, its direction, and how robust it is. Collaboration enables a variety of different views and experiences to be shared which will better inform decision-making and strengthen strategic outputs.
Why is continuous strategy important?
Continuous strategy can be applied to both large-scale, broader initiatives and smaller, departmental focused activities.
Adaptability
Being adaptable with your strategy will strengthen it. This includes things like your business and operational processes, tooling, and allocated resources for strategy execution. Adopting an iterative approach will enable you to make regular optimisations or changes that take advantage of new emerging opportunities, or prevent (or limit) risks as conditions change and new information comes to the forefront.
Collaborative
Strategy plans typically have various moving parts with multiple stakeholders each responsible — and accountable — for a different remit. By making continuous strategy a collaborative process, you will benefit from receiving different views and expertise that contribute to a strategy’s overall success. Each person involved will have experiences that can help to shape, and redirect, a strategy when there are sudden external or internal changes. Working collaboratively also enables better communication and trust among team members, which will enhance business operations and departmental relationships, allowing you to create more detailed and actionable plans for the future.
Enablement
There are often unexpected hurdles or blockers that arise when executing a strategy, due to things that might or might not be in our control. This includes unclear or misaligned priorities, gaps in data to inform your strategy, resource constraints, or rapidly changing market conditions.
When taking a static approach to strategy, this means blockers are only addressed at set points throughout the strategic journey. However, treating strategy as an ongoing exercise will allow you to identify these blockers and mitigate them sooner before they have detrimental effects to your progress.
How to implement continuous strategy
Continuous strategy is, simply put, another workflow — and should be treated just like your other internal processes. This means strategy will guide your delivery, and insights from delivery will inform your strategy in a continuous feedback loop. When defining your strategy, it’s important that you use quantitative and qualitative data analysis to guide your actions.
Allocate resources
Allocating resources includes looking at financial budgets, time, and people. This will help you to better understand what you will be able to achieve with your strategy and any adjustments. You will need to be precise with how you allocate your resources as this will also highlight both any areas that you need to improve, or be wary of where issues may arise. Treating this as a continuous process also ensures you won’t need to do a complete overhaul with your allocation should there be any major changes, reducing the risk of wasting your time and resources.
Monitor performance
How you monitor performance will depend on the methods you already use. For example, you could use rolling forecasts, KPIs, OKRs, or other data dashboards. As long as you have a structured way of tracking performance in place that gives you the information you need, this will help you to understand whether your strategy plans align with reality. Your defined metrics should paint a picture of your progress, and where you need to make any changes. Hold regular reviews, even if it’s a weekly or monthly check-in, to ensure everything is on track for success. This will also improve accuracy for future forecasting activities.
Adjust & optimise
Even with regular reviews in place, you don’t need to wait for the next set opportunity before discussing how your strategy is evolving. Things can change very quickly — you need to be reactive to the external conditions by observing the conditions and orienting in response. Use real-time data from your performance monitoring, coupled with tried and tested frameworks, to understand what’s working well and what needs updating to keep you heading in the right direction.
Continuous strategy frameworks
When devising continuous strategy, there are several frameworks you could use to help you maintain a structured approach.
Balanced scorecard (BSC)
Balanced scorecard supports aligning the overarching strategy with daily activities. It’s highly flexible, looking at four key areas (finance, customer, internal process, learning), and treated as a living document. The iterative nature of BSC means you will be able to track ongoing performance and optimise your strategy sooner than taking a static approach.
Hoshin Kanri
The Hoshin Kanri method connects your company objectives with specific internal projects, ensuring that everyone is working towards the same targets through effective communication. It combines top-down and bottom-up goal setting with regular reviews to keep everything on track.
SWOT
A SWOT analysis ensures you are aware of your current internal situation plus external conditions that could impact your strategy — helping you to understand (and realize) your full potential. With a detailed SWOT, you can take advantage of your strengths and weaknesses to progress your strategy.
PESTLE
PESTLE analyses encourage you to look specifically outside of your organization to define strategic steps or general direction. Regularly revisiting this analysis will improve strategic agility, anticipating external changes, and enable you to adapt when required.
What next?
Continuous strategy is all about doing the right work, at the right time, with the right insight. When you treat strategy as an ongoing activity, you create a smooth process across your organization that is constantly learning and adapting to things beyond your control.
Using frameworks as part of the continuous strategy process ensures you are always following a structured approach that includes frequent reviews, collaboration, and shared accountability for results.
Embedding continuous strategy into your operations will help to formalize the overall process and enhance your strategic agility when you need to suddenly pivot — ultimately resulting in a strategy that stays relevant, resilient, and aligned with your objectives.
