Building strategic agility
Have you ever wondered why, when faced with true uncertainty your traditional strategy tools fail you? Why your forecasts are no longer reliable? Why you are beating competition, but lose the market?
The likely answer is you are using the wrong tools for strategizing.
The reason this is happening to more and more executives is that digitalization alone is already transforming many industries to an extent that old rules of game no longer apply. Other change drivers like the sustainability shift or raising political uncertainty are adding to disconnect between strategic problems you face and tools you have applied in the past.
The solution is to zoom out and adopt a new way of thinking. For that new way of thinking you need to make three important shifts:
- Shifting from expecting that industry boundaries are clear to see them as membranes that are not fully gone, but where new rivals can enter if they are interested enough.
- Shifting from expecting that the old strategies from the past secure success in the future, to understanding that the only true value is in strategic creativity, where you apply strategies that are new and not been tested before.
- Shifting from expecting that moves of rivals are predictable, to understand that, to win you need to be better at pre-thinking moves and countermoves and be ready to act fast.
While this process may appear time-consuming, we experience regularly that right from the beginning energy fills the room, as executives understand that they now have the tools to enter a much more meaningful discussion than before. In addition, the power of the approach is building over time. The more it is applied the more you are building on existing mental frameworks, existing analysis, and good practices, making the process much faster than traditional strategy projects. The big prices of applying this approach are to build true strategic agility into your top management team.
To find out more about the prospective competitive strategy process: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2018.10.001
