Adaptive Strategic Planning & Execution

The biggest source of waste in most organizations is poor strategy - waste for our company, waste for our supply chain and partners, and worst of all, waste for our customers. Poor strategies drive: products and services that do not meet customer needs, misguided Sales & Marketing activities, bad investments of people, capital and other resources, and the general overburden of everyone involved. But it is a little known (not to mention alarming) fact that organizations who formalize strategic planning typically do no better financially than those who do not. Yet the consultants that promote those formalized methods all tout the success of their approaches, and even the widely-accepted SWOT analysis has no more than anecdotal support for its usefulness. On the other end of the spectrum is another popular, yet unfortunate, technique - the “gut feel” method. Statistically speaking, we will always find a small number of cases where gut feel has worked for CEOs, but it is not a repeatable skill that can be learned through business books or a risk that most of us should take for our organizations.

In our view, corporate strategy is based on three predictions of the future: 1) how our market will unfold, 2) how we will be able act, and 3) how our competitors and other influential parties will act. Complexity and uncertainty arise because the outcome of each is tied to the outcomes of the other two. What should a firm do then? Adopt a more scientific approach – one that addresses the unique challenges of our market position, culture, capabilities, and processes based on our own specific problems and gaps. Scientific continuous improvement is not a strategy itself, but can be used developmentally to create more robust strategies, and tactically to drive more efficient and effective execution. Strategy Science works with clients to uncover and solve their own specific strategy development, deployment, execution, and ongoing market feedback / strategy improvement problems through: