How can you adapt your strategy for the future?

If your strategy is to grow sustainably, study the attribute of your product most valued by your customers and focus on introducing incremental improvements to that feature. If your strategy is to grow by disruption, embrace a culture of allowing innovation while your core business is still strong. Often businesses start looking for innovation after disruptive competition starts impacting the core business, which is typically too late.

The main point is that you DO NOT adapt your strategy for the future. You adapt your strategy according to the things that are happening right now. We do not know the future. Anybody knew that there is going to be war or a pandemic? I did not. You adapt to what is happening, not to what might happen. Ok, you can anticipate certain trends, like AI or the change of customer behavior and start adapting. But the real adaptation challenge is the result of unexpected events.

To adapt my strategy for the future, I continuously monitor market trends, technological advancements, and competitive landscapes. I remain agile, fostering a culture of innovation within the organization. Regular strategic reviews and feedback mechanisms help identify opportunities and challenges, allowing for timely adjustments to ensure long-term relevance and success.

While frameworks such as Porter's Five Forces & SWOT analysis are useful, when crafting strategy in the real world, the 'known unknowns' and 'unknown unknowns' are almost always impossible to factor in. A more effective way is to anchor strategy on enduring user behavior/needs, i.e., what is it that your users will value and pay for 1, 2, 5, 10 years down the line and what will take us in that direction? This approach is simple, but not easy.

To adapt your strategy for the future, regularly assess the business landscape, anticipate market shifts, and maintain flexibility for adjustments. Define your vision and goals by reflecting on long-term direction, setting SMART objectives aligned with this vision, and ensuring clear communication to foster team commitment.

Strategy should be an iterative process, so the fact that this step is listed after the step to "Understand Your Context" doesn't have to be an issue - except for the way this section is defined. Specifically, a huge part of your vision helps determine the set of industries (lines of business) you compete in. So do not allow the prior step to limit your vision, especially because this post is all about your strategy for the future. As an example, LLMs and Generative AI have quickly expanded the vision many have for their companies, including entering new industries.

Defining a clear vision involves articulating a compelling and inspiring future state for the organization. It's about establishing overarching objectives that align with the organization's values and purpose. Goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Regularly revisiting and refining these goals ensures they remain dynamic and aligned with the evolving needs of the organization, guiding strategic initiatives towards a successful future.

Vision needs to be understandable and inspiring to the team which needs to carry it out. Use simple short sentences, and vivid images, stir emotions. Set few KPIs as deliverables of your vision. 2-3 financials, a couple of business metrics (e.g. penetration).

In today's dynamic market, adaptability is the key to long-term success. As trends and innovations continuously reshape industry landscapes, it's crucial for businesses to regularly revisit their goals and vision statement. Being open to change and willing to realign your strategy with the evolving market direction ensures that you stay relevant and competitive in an ever-shifting business environment.

- Ensure that your vision and goals are flexible and adaptable to changing circumstances. While a clear direction is essential, it's equally important to have the agility to adjust your goals as needed in response to evolving market conditions and new opportunities. - Communicate your vision and goals effectively within your organization to create a shared sense of purpose and motivation. Engage your team in the process of defining and refining these elements, fostering a sense of ownership and commitment to the overall strategy for the future.

In addition to understanding your market and the key drivers, scenario planning is very important to adapting your strategy to the future. You need to have a plan for an optimistic business scenario, a status-quo scenario, and a pessimistic scenario to build some agility to respond to future business needs into your strategic plan. Adapting your business strategy to the future also entails a continuous assessment of the business landscape and being open-minded to changes to enable you to spot and proactively respond to market changes.

This is completely wrong: "scenarios are the possible outcomes that might result from your actions". Whoever wrote this has absolutely no clue about what Scenario Planning might be. Just more shallow consultants' fluff dumped in here.

A strategic tool to keep the strategy adaptable to the future is Scenario Planning. Its used to envision multiple possibilities and prepare for them. For instance, it is used across different functions within United Nations in light of the massive disruptions caused by pandemic and conflicts across the globe in recent years.

Very helpful exercises I've utilized over the last 20 years include scenario-based planning, but also can be helpful to explore "constraint release" and "war gaming." With constraint release, can be useful even as a pressure-test exercise for emerging strategies and/or level setting upfront, which essentially boils down to assuming that current existing constraints or market preconditions are removed and/or no longer exist (e.g., competition and dominance, regulatory, customer perception and appetite, etc.). With war-gaming, also can be helpful to lay out a stakeholder map for particular market ecosystem (e.g., manufacturers, customers, retailers, distributors, regulators, etc.) and play out particular moves and reaction to scenario

Identify 4-6 key battlefields that link to your overall strategy. For each battlefield, identify the 4-6 key actions to carry out, KPIs, task owners.

Always Start with Why. When communicating, it is absolutely critical to center the company's vision / mission / values here. Assuming there is a clear vision and everyone is aligned and supportive of it (if not, don't move on until there is!!), you have the right context for communicating the strategy. - Our vision is X - To achieve our vision we need to become Y and Z - To become Y and Z, we must to accomplish A, B and C. It can then be helpful to reverse the path and communicate it often: - When we accomplish A, B and C, we will have achieved Y and Z (skills, competency, market position, whatever)... and once we achieve Y and Z we will be on a direct path to realize our our vision/mission/values - X.

Choosing and communicating your strategy is akin to giving your vision wings. It's not merely a decision; it's a commitment to a carefully crafted plan that embodies your aspirations and ideals. Selecting the right option from many possibilities demands keen judgment, considering factors like feasibility, desirability, profitability, and sustainability. Equally vital is the art of communication; your strategy, no matter how brilliant, gains life through effective storytelling, compelling visualizations, and coherent frameworks. Clear, convincing communication not only aligns your team but also resonates with your customers and stakeholders, creating a shared narrative of purpose and progress.

Select a strategy aligned with your vision and goals, considering your strengths, market opportunities, and competitive landscape. Communicate this strategy clearly and consistently throughout your organization, ensuring everyone understands their role in its execution. Encourage feedback and adapt as needed to ensure alignment and success.

- Involve key stakeholders, both internal and external, in the strategy development process. Seek input and feedback from employees, customers, suppliers, and other relevant parties to ensure that your strategy is well-informed and aligns with their needs and expectations. - Communicate your strategy clearly and consistently throughout your organization. Use various channels, such as town hall meetings, internal memos, and digital platforms, to ensure that all employees understand the strategy, their role in its execution, and the importance of adapting to future challenges and opportunities.

Communication and co-creation of Strategy is absolutely critical for both developing a robust strategy AND engaging organization to adopt. This is particularly helpful in and around merger and acquisition and/or partnership and JV or licensing situations to engage two or more different organizations in joint vision and strategy.

Your team is unlikely to execute your strategy if they're not onboard with it, and they're unlikely to be on board if they weren't involved in the process of crafting the strategy itself. The process of having a healthy debate and letting your team ask difficult questions is key. If you don't get that out of the way early on, then your strategy is likely to be second-guessed later.

Almost nothing of what was entered into this initial section has any specific meaning for Strategy's adaptability. Stuff like "You should monitor the changes in your context, and adjust your actions and tasks accordingly" is just general, superficial wording. The only elements that are relevant for adapting our Strategy along its execution cycles are the hypotheses that were employed in building our Strategy model and our Strategic Plan model, specifically about: 1. The selection of the Trends, Weak Signals, and Key Uncertainties affecting our models 2. The impact of the selected Trends and Weak Signals upon our decisions related to these models' components 3. The impact of the interplay of the Key Uncertainties upon our Scenarios.

"Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory." - Sun Tzu For an effective implementation framework, consider the Hoshin Kanri approach to strategy deployment. Ensure that everyone in the organization has goals related to strategy implementation, and establish a regular cadence for monitoring and adjusting using the Plan-Do-Check-Adjust cycle: Plan - create an implementation plan (annual goals, quarterly milestones, roles / responsibilities, etc..) Do - execute the plan (use project mgmt tools, teams, etc..) Check - monthly/quarterly check-ins to evaluate progress and learn from what has / hasn't worked Adjust - revise your approach, adjust expectations and timelines based on what you've learned Go through the cycle again.

Strategy Cockpit Insights In the strategy execution cockpit, the role of the strategy team can be reduced to 3 simple, clear but critical steps: Step 1 - AIM: Achieving absolute clarity regarding our strategic objectives. Step 2 - ACT: Prioritising a set of profoundly transformative initiatives. Step 3 - TRACK: Continuously monitoring and improving our strategy's execution. It is very simple, but every step is hugely critical. You can use BSC, OKR, MBO, ... I usually build a tailor-made approach for my clients. Because the methods can be useful but they are often limiting. Because tools don't matter, only results matter. #StrategyAccelerator #StrategyExecution #Reframe

Once the strategy was set, I took charge of turning our plans into reality. This meant creating a detailed action plan, setting clear deadlines, and ensuring each team member knew their role. To stay on top of our progress and understand our impact, I used a variety of tracking tools, making adjustments as needed. This ongoing vigilance and willingness to tweak our approach in response to external changes were key to keeping us on the right path and ensuring our strategy remained effective over time.

Strategies are like road trip plans. They guide, not restrict. Just as you adapt a route when venues are closed, updating strategies based on insights keeps your journey to success on track. Plans change; the goal remains.

Strategy is a long-term commitment, requiring a patient and deliberate approach. It's not a realm for quick fixes or impulsive decisions. Regularly reviewing and updating a strategy is imperative, but these intervals must be long enough to allow the results of the strategy to manifest. While agile methodologies thrive on short, iterative cycles, strategy necessitates a more extended perspective. To gauge the true efficacy of a strategic plan, it's essential to give it the time it needs to unfold and deliver results.

Treat strategies as living documents, not fixed plans. Anything past your immediate window of activity is an intention not a fixed list of steps to achieve. You need to build and recognize the assumptions in a strategy and constantly observe and test them.

Evaluating outcomes helps identify what works and what doesn't, offering valuable insights. Learning from both successes and failures is crucial - it's where growth and innovation thrive. Regularly revisiting your initial vision and goals ensures they remain aligned with the evolving landscape. Are they still realistic and desirable? Or maybe the world has changed in the meantime... Being adaptable here is key. This cyclical process - design, execute, review, adapt - is indeed what keeps your strategy agile and relevant. It ensures you're not just planning for today, but preparing for the challenges and opportunities of tomorrow.

In my experience, Change is the only constant in life, and that is what one needs to focus on when they are drumming up a working strategy! The key ingredients to any strategy are (according to me) - Ensure continuity: you can look different, but should still be relatable, and that is a must for continuity! - Look for the known forks: There is no new business idea, someone has done it already, or someone is doing it. Execution depends on how enabled, equipped and hungry you are! Learn from other's pitfalls and course corrections... this can save you valuable time and resources! - Give it the time: Strategy, when it shows up as results needs a constant churn, and the strategies that fail the most are the ones that do not receive enough time.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast! A psychologically safe environment where the team can speak up constructively is invaluable. Feedback from internal and external sources (as discussed above) will provide input for the leader/s to evolve and adapt the strategy as needed.

Adapting your strategy for the future is a dynamic process, critical for long-term success. Includes: 1/ Continuous environment scanning to stay abreast of emerging trends and competitive shifts. 2/ Leveraging data-driven insights for real-time performance evaluation, ensuring strategy remains aligned with evolving realities. 3/ Building agility into your models to facilitate quick pivots, and regularly engaging in scenario planning to prepare for various outcomes. 4/ Maintaining a customer-centric approach, listening to market demands and iterating accordingly. 5/ Fostering strategic collaborations to diversify risk. 6/ Establishing regular review mechanisms to measure outcomes and pivot as needed

In my experience, adapting the strategy for the future involves a multi-pronged approach. We must continuously monitor technological advancements and market dynamics to ensure the laws and regulations remain relevant. Collaborating with industry stakeholders and international counterparts helps harmonize standards and foster innovation. Embracing forward-looking regulatory frameworks that accommodate emerging technologies like 5G and IoT is essential. In this ever-evolving landscape, agility and proactive policy reviews are vital to ensure the strategy undertaken is appropriate with the needs of all stakeholders.

Change begins and ends with the customer. If you keep the customer at heart, are aware of how their needs have changed (and will in future), and strategise to improve your product and/or service to evolve as the customer needs do, your business and its success will continue. Look at top names in auto like mercedes/bmw to tech firms like apple/amazon/google and more, you’ll see this in practice. They strive day in and day out to make sure customer needs are met. It’s not easy to know what your customer wants and that’s what separates the successful businesses from the rest. Tools are great but the best place imho is to start with direct customer feedback which many miss very often..

Easier said than done - encourage your organisation to discuss & listen to aspects of strategy and to question every day if what each of is doing is aligned to strategic goals. If not - they should stop doing such tasks and seek clarity.