Strategy as a Process

All too often we come across clients that either don’t have a well-documented strategy or who have invested time into strategy workshops and documents over the years and just can’t seem to get the traction on the back of all their work.

Typically, they are pretty frustrated and most of the time, they don’t know exactly what’s wrong.  So what’s really going on?

Adhoc event vs Process

In the majority of cases, it comes down to a lack of structure and rigour around their strategic process which leads to adhoc attention being paid to the strategically important matters.  We regularly hear of the “sugar hit” that comes from annual retreats or strategic planning sessions, only for that energy to dissipate quickly once everyone heads back to their daily work routine.

This leads to adhoc energy and focus on strategy – something that time and time again proves insufficient to meet the challenges of scaling a business.

Investment is required to address this.  There’s a need to design and embed strategy as a core business process (setting, planning, executing) rather than running it as an adhoc event.  Clients who master this have a much greater shot at successfully scaling and delivering outperformance.

McKinsey analysed the performance of “Strategy Champions” showing the outperformance delivered by those companies that excel at both designing and mobilising the execution of their strategies (top quintile performance).  As you can see below, the outperformance is stark.

Design & Embed

Designing strategy as a process for your business requires some thought as to how it all fits within your broader business rhythms.  As a guide, however, the following is a typical example of a strategy process cycle that we help clients to successfully embed:

The ability to lean on process inside businesses is well known to help drive focus, efficiency and consistent results, particularly operationally with SOPs and workflows.  It’s no different for strategy – design the process, embed the rhythms and then look to continually improve.

As evidenced by the McKinsey study on “Strategy Champions”, businesses that successfully design and embed strategy as a process tend to outperform and generate the returns necessary to support successful scaling.  Those that don’t find it a real challenge.

If you’d like to understand how we can help to design and embed strategy as a process for your business, let’s chat some more.

From Strategy to Execution
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