I live in the portion of the country where winter carnivals are a thing, and one of the always interesting things to catch is the creation of the ice sculptures. A sculptor, skilled with power tools, chisels and hand saws goes to work and amazing forms emerge.
As a “most senior executive,” can you do the same with your firm’s strategic plan? To be successful in the age of COVID, you need to craft a strategic plan that moves you and your firm into the driver’s seat. Far away from some unconnected high-level PDF that is buried in the cloud, you need a strategy system that listens, discriminates the wheat from the chaff, and gives you the insight to act proportionately.
COVID has created a unique, yet daunting, inflection point, requiring that we make a series of irreversible decisions on everything from products, people and technology as well as issues as fundamental as how we will work together.
Making these decisions tactically and without a really concrete, shared vision of the “sculpture inside” will result in a hodge podge, and your best team members are already voting with their feet. We know the failure statistics and have seen strategies that look great on paper that have taken firms nowhere.
You deserve something better.
Much like the image being “found” inside the generic block of ice, a purposeful strategic plan provides real traction for a firm to find the precise “fit” for the market and moment it finds itself in.
A Fork in the Road: Choosing The Path of Greatest Insight
We are at a crossroads moment where strategy matters more than ever – and can make the difference between whether your firm is on a trajectory to compete a year from now or not. If you are a firm that prides itself on operational efficiency, I can hear the collective groan from the sales and operations side of the firm that views strategy as something done “up in the tower.”
This is not that time and we need to do strategy better if we want to stay afloat and relevant in this current phase of the pandemic (and, spoiler alert, some of the richest insights come from the sales and ops teams).
The hard part is getting there in a practical way, a way that captures our best insight and allows us to see that hidden company within the company to serve the client in the market clearly – both as individuals and teams.
The best strategies create a future picture so real and tangible it has an inevitability and firmness about it.
Some of you will hit the books and look for a “do it yourself” solution. For the leader that needs a truly operational strategy, diving into the bottomless pit of opinions, books and journal articles can exhaust the most persistent of hard-driving leaders. There is richly-heated debate, strong voices and nuanced articles. Given the importance of getting this right, it’s no surprise then, that there are many opinions on how to find, form and carve out a strategy (some of the richest debates are among strategy consultants themselves – If you’d like to take a dip in that pond, I’d suggest getting the big picture first by starting here).
It is critical then, in this moment, to quickly and efficiently get in a position to ideate on, align to and execute fresh, practical strategy. To do that I’m going to frame the strategy work we need in just two options: traditional and emergent.
Sound good? Let’s meet the moment.
The Traditional
Let’s define traditional strategy as a tops-down approach of achieving a favorable position in the marketplace. To do that we define the current state, and then use that information to set objectives. We then identify challenges, integrate line items of strategy, implement our insights and monitor.
This typically means a deep dive on the social, market and technical environment to understand product and service distinctives like features, function and aesthetics. This rich analysis is then contrasted with a portfolio of direct and indirect company capabilities and consumer avatars for the target market. By carefully unpacking this set of insights from the analysis, we can then synthesize a strategy, freshen the mission and select high-priority tactical investments.
This work results in what I would call the formal strategic plan of record. This is then implemented (project-management style) and in the course of the plan meeting and its buzzsaw of reality, some of it works well, some of it proves less successful and some of it is quickly dismissed. You then wind up with the “net” installed strategy which is the formal plan minus those items that proved less useful or were unsuccessfully implemented by the firm.
Said another way, this becomes the “framework” for the firm and is usually evaluated every few years (spoiler alert: COVID has moved the game along faster than traditional methods can respond to).
If this feels a bit dusty and static, you’d be right. To make it more flexible, some add scenario planning (i.e. planning for multiple, specific sets of environmental shifts and responses) and others create an “innovation” group to assess mid-term changes. In my experience, both of these approaches quickly get walled off and disconnected from the core operational group, making it hard to make use of the depth and scope of data available there.
The Emergent
The short summary is that you can think of emergent strategy as coming forward quite organically irrespective of the function or level within the firm or its clients in the course of normal operations. These are the small natural experiments and serendipitous positive outcomes that occur as part of the day-to-day activities within the firm. These small strategy “seedlings” can merge and find one another to build substantial grassroots additions to the net strategy.
It is important to consider that most firms are built to resist and extinguish these insights as not being part of the “plan of record” or “on point.” This is the key moment where many firms give up the tremendous strategic advantage of detailed and rich data of what is changing real time in their clients’ needs and wants. This data is important and needs to be regularly harvested and sifted for important fresh insight.
Contrasted with the traditional strategy, these small experiments can easily get overlooked in the high-level environmental scans used to set the formal strategic plan of record. By setting up a robust and efficient process to find, form and focus on them, it changes the posture of strategic work to be runway level and practical.
This process can be kickstarted by setting up a practical culture of learning and growth that is predisposed to put in place preferential serendipity. The process usually entails drawing out insights using a dedicated central internal and external resource to capture these early stage insights and develop them into “snapshot” themes for use by the Tier One leadership team. There are tools that can make this scale to firms both large and small.
Putting Your Thumb on the Scale
Let’s be clear, If you are going to pick one to concentrate on, focus on building your emergent capabilities. It’s the path for the quickest returns and most meaningful work.
This is critical to stakeholders in many corporate environments who need to have results showing in the same cycle as their tenure, many times in as short as 24-30 months.
Most firms have a “sufficient” unarticulated formal strategy that is sufficient to build robust planning and business operations. By keeping a close eye on the emergent piece, you’ll pick up disruptive signals quicker than the 2-3 year traditional review. With the COVID moment, we simply can’t wait.
What makes emergent strategy hard for most firms is synthesis and proportionality. Most firms are built for analysis and critique, not synthesis and creation. When presented with data, the tendency is to try to find an answer by going deeper in analysis, when in fact what is needed is to synthesize and test the resulting hypothesis. This leads to the second challenge: the tendency to over prioritize and over invest. Most firms are predisposed to “get to the short list” too fast, then bet big.
This reduces agility, blows big holes in credibility (not to mention budgets) and can kill careers.
The key metric is to evolve, efficiently, a bit faster than your clients’ needs. Let me give you five considerations to get you started.
Next Actions:
- Every firm has a guiding strategy, yet some have not made it visible – and that can limit your ability to align your team (particularly new members). If you don’t have your current strategy on paper, you need to complete that work to provide a foundation for your emergent work. The most efficient path is to hire an external resource to work with an internal sponsor who can access your leaders to surface and document the deeply embedded views that are governing your current approach.
- If you don’t routinely capture emergent strategy ideas, insights and plans and make them visible – coming out of the pandemic, now is the time. If you intentionally help to surface the best insights, you’ll have a rich new view to get to work on, and the deep fatigue your team is feeling will shift to hope.
- There are significantly more people in the firm and your supply chains that can lead to a fully-voiced powerful strategy – you need a tool to access and capture those insights efficiently.
- Give the process room to breathe. Once rolling, you need to give any strategy process some calendar time for integration and momentum building.
- Provide an incentive. Building a process to encourage a portfolio of investment with some out year payoffs is essential, and can be encouraged through thoughtful performance bonus plans.
Capturing the Moment
Tensions are high and talent is really looking to their leaders to provide more than they did pre-pandemic. The best talent will vote with their feet to be drawn to firms who do this work well.
Ultimately, you want your strategy to carry a lunchbox and progress your firm to the next level.
Through working with dozens of clients, I’ve derived a tested experiential framework that will put you on a path to the next level. If you’d like to talk further, please reach out via email or put a 20-minute call on the books with this link.
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