The Strategy Creation Process
A Participative Approach to Strategy Development & Business Planning
Involving the key people in your organisation in the strategic planning process by obtaining information about your business and its future is a critical part of building a strong strategy. We will work closely with you and your team to understand your business and your vision for its future. This helps us to gain a clear understanding of where your business is today, where it will be in the future and what may get in the way.
To do this, we use proven strategy development tools and techniques to that help manage the development of strategy more effectively and with better results. It is a highly participative approach to strategy development which works from ideas generation to the development of strategic options and even managing the activities that help attain your organisation’s goals.
Importantly, emphasis is placed on consensus rather than compromise. This increases the chances of creating a strategy that works for the organisation and, therefore, being implemented.
The fact that we are identifying and evaluating activities that will help the business achieve its goals means that we have a solid foundation on which to create a business plan.
Understanding how activities interlink and ultimately lead to achieving objectives and goals means that decision making is improved. This is because there is an increased awareness of all of the issues, activities, objectives and goals within the organisation.
The key to the successful development and implementation of business strategy can be found in the management of the six components summarised below:
Decide Who Should be Involved
The strategic making process should involve key people in the organisation who have an interest in the future of the organisation. This will normally include senior managers and decision makers, as well as people who have knowledge that is important to the process.
Gather Strategic Information
Gathering & managing information, much of which is complex, is the foundation of building a robust business strategy. This information is obtained from the key people in your organisation in one of two ways – interviews and strategy workshops.
Capture Strategic Data
The information we gather in the second phase is linked together to create a causal map which is a proven technique for acquiring and managing the detailed, sometimes delicate, information that often surrounds complex situations.
Analyse the Strategic Data
Analysing the information from phase 2 and 3 is an important step in the creation of the business strategy. The focus of this phase is to identify the primary ‘building blocks’ of the strategy model – key activates, outcomes, objectives, goals and vision.
Create the Strategy Model
We use the results of the analysis of the strategic data to create structured strategy model. This is done by linking activities to objectives, to goals and to aspirations using causal mapping. This allows the strategy group to visualise the emergent strategy.
Refine the Emerging Strategy
Once the strategy model has been created, the next step in the process is for the strategy group to review the emerging strategy. The aim is to continue to develop and refine it until consensus is reached about the way forward for the organisation.
What Next?
Once the final strategic plan has been agreed we move on to creating the Business Plan which is designed to attain the Objectives, Goals and Vision that have been agreed. This stage builds on the work done in the strategy creation phase to create a ‘roadmap’ detailing how you will move the organisation from where it is to where you want it to be.
Once the business plan has been created, it’s time to implement it. This means identifying the key activities and prioritising them to ensure that the organisation attains its long-term goals and vision. It is also important that short-term ‘wins’ are identified to help ensure that people buy into the process by seeing early success. Creating a measurement system to ensure that the activities undertaken by the organisation are resulting in the expected outcomes.