Would your colleagues and staff describe your strategy in the same way you do?
How do you get your organisation to follow the plan?
Teams should meet annually to review the core of their strategy in the session it may be a good idea to review the core of their strategy including:
- The business concept and purpose
- Their vision
- Their values
In discussing strategy workshops Jack Welsh suggests a straight-forward, five point agenda:
The current situation
The quality of your strategy will depend on the quality of your understanding of the environment in which you operate and the state of affairs within your organisation. You could consider using any or all of the following models to assist you to collate and understand this information:
- PESTEL analysis (looking at Politics, Economics, Social factors, Technology, Ecology and Legal factors)
- Porter's Five Forces of competition (Buyers, Suppliers, Barriers to entry, Substitutes and Intensity of rivalry)
- BCG Growth-Share Matrix (Dogs, Cows, Stars and Question-marks).
- Stakeholder analysis (Who are the key stakeholders governing the definition and implementation of your strategy?)
- Scenario Planning to create memories of possible futures.
What the competition has been doing
Jack Welsh says you should know what your competitors eat for breakfast. For a thorough competitor analysis it would be worth doing some of the ‘current situation’ and ‘’what you have been doing’ exercises from the perspective of the competitor's perspective.
What you have been doing
It is a good idea to review progress against the current strategy and plan in the period leading up to a strategy workshop. You may also wish to consider the following exercises:
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Strategy Canvas showing your Value Proposition (from Blue Ocean strategy)
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Value Chain diagrams and Activity-System Maps to show your unique activities through which you deliver your offer
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Three circle diagrams to identify the "Sweet Spot" in your strategy
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Porter's Generic Strategies to position your offer in your industry
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Core Competencies (What you do that delivers high value, is attractive to your market and is difficult to imitate)
Threats and opportunities coming at you
Here it would be worth conducting a thorough SWOT analysis. This should include a plot of the strengths and weaknesses against opportunities and threats to suggest a generic strategy.
- SWOT diagram (Matching your resources and capabilities to your competitive environment).
What you intend to do
The outcome of the strategy conversation should be commitment from the team to a set of imperatives which they have all discussed, understood and agreed. A good way of compiling and documenting these imperatives is in the format of a Strategy Map. The team may also benefit from compiling a balanced scorecard showing the measures and targets used to gauge success of the strategy as well as the initiatives and actions.
How we support this activity at StrategyWorks
We regularly facilitate workshops using the models described in this note. Stephen also coaches business leaders through these exercises to initiate the strategy process.