Your approach to strategic reflection is just as important as your strategic choices.

By developing your strategy in a vacuum, you increase the risks associated with the quality of your choices and their implementation. While you gain short-term efficiency, you lose effectiveness. You create potentially suboptimal choices that will be more difficult to implement.

The result? A lack of alignment and laborious execution.

To reverse this dynamic, here are three imperatives to consider to strengthen the robustness of your choices, accelerate the deployment of your strategy, and maintain its relevance.

Break Down Silos and Involve Key Contributors

It is impossible to involve the entire organization, and that is not the goal.

However, it is essential to invite teams with unique perspectives on clients, competitors, the organization's key competencies, and key partners of the value chain. The idea is to integrate various perspectives into the reflection process.

By maximizing the capture and sharing of diverse viewpoints on your challenges and opportunities, you encourage collisions of ideas and foster the emergence of innovative solutions.

Make sure to integrate the voices that are closest to the action. Integrate these perspectives into your reflection.

Assemble Multidisciplinary Teams

The contribution of these key players is not limited to understanding challenges and opportunities. It is even more significant in the context of exploring strategic opportunities.

When asking the question, “How might we?” the input of these multidisciplinary teams helps increase the robustness of potential solutions and can also shorten the time required for hypothesis validation.​

This contribution fosters the development of richer scenarios and the consideration of key variables that not only shorten necessary validations but also highlight the constraints associated with implementation.

This also facilitates the identification of the most promising opportunities and helps identify the strategic plan best suited to the organization's reality.

Maximize the Impact of Collective Strategic Thinking

The active involvement of key multidisciplinary teams democratizes the exercise of strategy. By involving more, we need to explain less.​

With success factors being known, it is easier for teams to continuously monitor changes that could affect and put at risk the strategic choices.

The organization can capitalize on collective strategic thinking. It becomes possible to proactively monitor weak signals and elements that may affect clients, competitors, or the organization.

This organizational capability can become a real competitive advantage, ensuring the organization’s adaptation to an environment in perpetual change, as is currently the case (see “Is Your Strategy Already Obsolete”).

Key Takeaway

A strategy is not developed in a vacuum. Integrating your teams' unique perspectives enhances the quality of your strategic choices, facilitates implementation, and ensures their adaptation.

Next Steps

Evaluate the following three questions:

1. How is it possible for you to integrate additional perspectives into your strategic challenges? This applies both to framing your challenges and opportunities and to exploring solutions.

2. Does the active participation of various stakeholders in the reflection allow you to explore the systemic impacts of strategic options?

3. Do engaged members have the means to communicate strategic observations that could affect initial choices and, ultimately, promote a proactive adaptation of your strategy?

As a leader, you can greatly influence and accelerate the achievement of your strategic objectives with these questions.

Have a great week,

Eric L'Heureux

P.S. Do you want to strengthen your competitive advantage?

Contact us to structure your next strategy review to boost decision robustness agile execution.