Of all the thinking exercises a company goes through, the most important concerns that which sustains the competitive advantage that keeps its customers loyal and prevents them defecting to rivals.
So, if a company’s strategy is its life-support system, the most important question any business must answer every day is, is our strategy working?
It is said that a strategy must become an organisation’s way of life, but of course this is so only if the answer is yes.
If your own life depended on it, you probably wouldn’t buy a life-support system that didn’t come with an operating manual. So, why wouldn’t you aim to develop one that provided a better way of building more robust, responsive strategy for your business?
Likely as not, in any business, to achieve any of the array of possible favourable outcomes, effective strategy formulation will no longer be a one, two or three-man job, because the world is changing and the tools are here to enable a better job to be done collectively.
A company must develop a way of giving shape to its strategy that makes sense from the sum of the intelligence and experience available to it, not just a sub-set.
By engaging social technologies in this pursuit, many minds may make lighter work of developing new opportunities, because each has a perspective and critical sensitivities no other shares. But, collectively, they will only transform the scope for better strategy formulation if their understanding of the context in which they are making their contribution is common and shared.
As that is not the case in an overwhelming majority of companies, this is likely only to happen best when organisational learning, focused and directed for this purpose lies at the core of effective strategy formulation.
Community learning is a powerful force. There is energy to be tapped here, and common purpose and interest, because it protects livelihoods and provides opportunities for personal growth.
More importantly, when everyone is learning together, the most compelling purpose for applying that growing intelligence is to focus on strategy, because the articulation of strategic need paints a shared destiny and reveals the competencies on which the future organisation must itself be built.
As it is the stone on which the attainment of factors critical to success will be built, the explicit recognition of required competencies will come to shape the organisation itself. It will focus the learning of the learners.
Given a new, shared sense of where it is heading, the organisation has many new choices.
What delivers operational excellence to the business but does not deliver explicit strategic advantage may no longer need to form a core part of its operation. That which is not strategic may be achieved and managed in other ways, perhaps even outsourced.
Better knowledge and awareness improves focus on what matters most.
Much less a document than frame of self-constructed understanding, the operating manual for developing better strategy is built through the active engagement of precisely those sensitivities and insights that enable the organisation to learn from itself, that keep it in business and grant it the strongest possibility for sustained strategic superiority.
So, if a company’s strategy is its life-support system, the most important question any business must answer every day is, is our strategy working?
It is said that a strategy must become an organisation’s way of life, but of course this is so only if the answer is yes.
If your own life depended on it, you probably wouldn’t buy a life-support system that didn’t come with an operating manual. So, why wouldn’t you aim to develop one that provided a better way of building more robust, responsive strategy for your business?
Likely as not, in any business, to achieve any of the array of possible favourable outcomes, effective strategy formulation will no longer be a one, two or three-man job, because the world is changing and the tools are here to enable a better job to be done collectively.
A company must develop a way of giving shape to its strategy that makes sense from the sum of the intelligence and experience available to it, not just a sub-set.
By engaging social technologies in this pursuit, many minds may make lighter work of developing new opportunities, because each has a perspective and critical sensitivities no other shares. But, collectively, they will only transform the scope for better strategy formulation if their understanding of the context in which they are making their contribution is common and shared.
As that is not the case in an overwhelming majority of companies, this is likely only to happen best when organisational learning, focused and directed for this purpose lies at the core of effective strategy formulation.
Community learning is a powerful force. There is energy to be tapped here, and common purpose and interest, because it protects livelihoods and provides opportunities for personal growth.
More importantly, when everyone is learning together, the most compelling purpose for applying that growing intelligence is to focus on strategy, because the articulation of strategic need paints a shared destiny and reveals the competencies on which the future organisation must itself be built.
As it is the stone on which the attainment of factors critical to success will be built, the explicit recognition of required competencies will come to shape the organisation itself. It will focus the learning of the learners.
Given a new, shared sense of where it is heading, the organisation has many new choices.
What delivers operational excellence to the business but does not deliver explicit strategic advantage may no longer need to form a core part of its operation. That which is not strategic may be achieved and managed in other ways, perhaps even outsourced.
Better knowledge and awareness improves focus on what matters most.
Much less a document than frame of self-constructed understanding, the operating manual for developing better strategy is built through the active engagement of precisely those sensitivities and insights that enable the organisation to learn from itself, that keep it in business and grant it the strongest possibility for sustained strategic superiority.
