“Effective strategists are not people who abstract themselves from the daily detail, but who immerse themselves in it while being able to abstract the relevant messages from it.”
–Henry Mintzberg
Strategy-making is not exclusive to CEOs, corporate planning departments or consultants. Strategy development can involve different groups of people within an organization: strategy leaders, business unit heads, functional heads, and department heads. Further down the organization, a range of teams can be involved in innovating, designing and communicating the strategy.
Even if you are not involved directly in the strategy design process, understanding your organization’s strategy is essential to getting ahead in your career. To get ahead, you need to show that you can take individual initiative and contribute to the success of the organization as a whole. Moreover, you need to be able to sell the idea that your decisions are aligned with the overall objectives of the organization.
Strategy-making is relevant for all types of individuals and organizations. If your business is competing with others in the marketplace, developing a strategy should be on your to-do list. So, where do you begin? How do you come up with a strategy?
In his book, What You Need to Know About Strategy, Jo Whitehead shares six basic strategy questions. These questions are straightforward and a great place to start your strategic thinking. I share these 6 questions below:
- What is the external environment?
- Describing the external environment is a great place to start
- Take a look at the context, opportunities, threats, and the competitive environment
- What is the internal situation?
- Try to understand the objectives of the organization and its capabilities
- Examine the organization’s strengths and weaknesses
- It is not enough to know that your organization has R&D capabilities; you must understand how valuable these capabilities could be in generating superior products for your customers
- How might the situation evolve?
- Project how things might evolve
- Identify the greatest sources of uncertainty
- Get to know your odds before placing your bets
- What is the primary issue?
- Defining the primary issue is a key step
- What is the difficult situation you are trying to resolve?
- What are the options?
- Look at possible resolutions
- Come up with alternative options
- Which option is best?
- After careful evaluation, select one option that best resolves the primary issue
So, if you are looking to develop (or re-think) your organization’s strategy, come up with answers to the six questions outlined by Whitehead. Begin here. Do not over-complicate it. These questions may be simple but getting the correct answers is not. Answers are not always immediately obvious – even the best management teams struggle, including those that eventually get it right.
As you go through the strategy-making process within your own organization, understand that it is not a sequential mechanical process. The book compares creating a strategy to the way a potter shapes a pot on the wheel: partly the application of a learned skill and partly an intuitive response to the nature of the situation and the emerging results.
Ultimately, the development of a good strategy is a creative act; the process involves a mix of data analysis, sound judgment, gut feeling, and trial and error. So, a skilled strategist has to be a structured yet flexible thinker, deeply engaged to the situation they are evaluating as well as dispassionately objective.
With strategy, as with much else, practice makes perfect. So, practice, practice, practice!
Jo Whitehead is a Director of the Ashridge Strategic Management Centre. He holds an MBA from Harvard and a PhD from London Business School. You can find out more about his research here:
https://www.ashridge.org.uk/faculty-research/faculty/jo-whitehead/
