How Do You Find The Right Strategic Style?

Why are businesses finding it harder to build strategies in this new environment? Is there a way to define strategy in this digital age? If you look at the classic environment, which is highly predictable and non-malleable, it is easy to identify the gap between the starting position and target position. As a strategist, you should know how to bridge the gap between the two positions. How do you define the two factors of predictability and malleability?

Predictability means that, by having?enough understanding of the different market variables,?you can know with certainty how the market will evolve in the future.?Malleability, on the other hand,?means that you can only influence your own business trajectory. Markets satisfying these two conditions are scarce—and yet they still do exist.

The strategy needs to be adaptive to the environment and industry; the matrix below highlights the different categories of environment and the strategy required for the same:

Adaptive:?Long-term planning will not work; trial and error are the roads to be taken. Perform small iterations based on experimentation and scale up the successful experimentation.

Shaping:?Strategy to tag along with the complete ecosystem to build a vision.

Visionary:?A strategy to understand the unmet needs of the customer that nobody has addressed. Such strategies require funding and persistence.

To be accurate, a company needs to choose the right combination of approaches as any given company is likely to operate in?different environments with different business lines, geographies, or products.?For example, a company can run a legacy infrastructure business in classical environments, but such a business can be shaken by a substitution technology – similar to what banks face with blockchain today.?This can create uncertainty on customer response,?transaction risk, on regulation.

As the title of the book by Reeves, Haan?s,& Sinho says:

?                    Your Strategy Needs A Strategy.        

Reflect on your business challenges, think about how can you shift your digitization mindset from thinking about a process of thinking about the customer journey. How could you use technology to better support your customers?

Tip: Don’t think about a process, think about a customer journey, said journey being a step-by-step experience a customer goes through to use a service or a product.