Strategy Design
Inspired by over fifty years joint exposure to a wide range of strategic theory and practice, in both the public and the private sector, we offer a wholly innovative, intuitive, and iterative approach to guiding you through the development and implementation of your strategy.
Strategy Design, Development and Management
Strategy Design
To us, strategy is a handrail, a blueprint, a framework to illuminate the ways and means by which a defined system might be influenced to move from one state of existence to another over time. We work in some tenets of Systems Theory to drive inclusive thinking.
Strategy should not be restrictive, and cannot promise to predict the future. Strategy should be enabling to your organisation, allowing everyone to contribute using initiative, whilst fully understanding the intent and desired outcome. And it needs to be flexible enough to adapt to the changes that are inevitable.
To help you to iterate your strategy, we look at the whole system of which your organisation is a part. That includes your customers, competitors, and other market forces that have - or potentially may have - an effect on your intended direction of travel. Here, we introduce basic elements of complexity theory to ensure we focus on combined effects, not purely on activity.
Then, using a well developed and tested range of models, tools, and techniques, we work with you to define the critical capabilities, requirements, and vulnerabilities of that 'system' that you wish to change to your benefit. From these we offer a framework of selected effects that must be realised in order to attain your strategic goals.
Strategy Management
Having helped to design your strategy around a framework of required effects, we can either wish you every success in its implementation or - better still - we can remain engaged to help you manage its development through a series of periodic reviews.
We offer a ‘light touch’ framework for through-life management assisting you to measure, monitor, and adjust the practical implementation of your strategy in relation to the overall effect that is being achieved. This involves the development of suitable measures of performance and measures of effect (they are different) through which we can advise possible adjustments to your strategy.
A typical series of engagements to support the implementation and management of a strategy would require one- or two-day reviews on a monthly or quarterly basis throughout its 'life'. We can also develop tools such as balanced scorecards to support this process.
Operational Planning
If strategy is a framework of intended effect, it is enabled by a series of plans that instruct the activities to be undertaken. We can assist in developing those plans and ensuring coherence with your strategy.
In October 2005 research by The Harvard Business Review noted significant gaps in most company strategies between planning and execution. Reasons for this included mis-alignment of strategy and planning. They are different and we can show you how whilst offering approaches to ensure coherence.
We can also engage with you on specific issues to advise, inform, support, produce, or develop operational planning in line with existing strategy. This includes producing specific reports on discrete subjects to inform your planning, or alternatively producing the full plan itself in order to guide sets of activities.
We are particularly adept at preparing plans to support new market entry and supply chain integrity and viability in remote areas or at distance.
