How Origin Story flowchart help make strategic choices?

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu said, He will win who knows to fight and when not to fight. Strategy can get you from good to better or bad to good by making the right choices. In his book, The Myth of Strategy, Jerome Barthelemy showed that not many companies make strategic decisions. IKEA, the Swedish furniture company, made strategic choices to become the leader in low-cost, self-assembly, and minimized packaging. IKEA’s strategy gave it a price advantage in a competitive furniture industry

Having a good strategy is a balancing act, a combination of different tactics to achieve the perfect result. The paradox is that the success of strategic choices can only be measured in retrospect. How do you know good strategic choices? Despite strategy research, businesses still struggle with formulating strategies and communicating strategic choices. In his talk on leadership and management, at the Nordic Business Forum, Seth Godin said strategic decisions take time to be right. So business leaders should embrace the loops, and the opportunities to try new ideas. The loop helps you identify milestones in the process, even when the road is volatile. Defining your origin story connects the loop and builds a strategy to communicate it. I designed the Origin story strategy flowchart to help identify milestones.

The strategic tool helps define purpose, understand the pain point of the audience, experiment with ideas, implement core ideas into a solution, and use the insights to improve the solution. When making a strategic choice, a company needs to stick to core values and answer the question of

• Who is your product or service for?
• How is it going to improve customer and business values?
• What is the offering?

Using a Backward-looking, Forward-thinking approach a business can identify the position where strategic choices resonate.

Not all good strategies need careful planning. A case in point was the development of IKEA’s self-assembly, flat-pack furniture system. IKEA made strategic choices that helped reduce damages, saved storage costs, and lowered shipping costs. I built the company’s strategic choices in the Origin Story Loop strategic flowchart below.

Look at IKEA’s website the strategic choices are reflected in the storytelling strategy. Businesses can highlight strategic decisions, and how choices moved their companies from Point A to Point B. The ability to communicate this transition means their strategy connects to the right audience.

Communicating strategic choices

The answer to these questions determines what strategy will work for you. Innovation is the driving force of a good strategy, which is often not chosen by managers because of fear of disrupting the system. Seth Godin continued in his talk that to be lean means a business must be willing to be wrong. To write their own story. Stephen Covey in The 8th Habit” showed that only 1-in-5 understand the difference between the tasks, team, and organization’s strategy. Some Finnish companies in my experience play safe when it comes to trying new tactics. As long as the status quo works, the rule is not to disrupt it. This suffocates the environment of innovative ideas. A risky process, but worth the experimentation. To build a strategic loop that resonates a business needs to review past strategic choices.

Defining their origin story and the problem they are looking to solve is the first phase of the process. Improving the process requires refining the ideas and solutions. The success of strategic choices is the ability to try out new ideas and solutions. Repeating the process creates a strategic loop.

In the mid-2000s, a medical technology I worked for introduced the 5s lean system to boost their productivity. Low-level employees disconnected from implementing the new process. They felt left out and were not enthusiastic about implementing the system. Senior management miscommunicated strategic choices; who is it for and what is it for. Communication breakdown like this impacts a company’s strategic choices. and the team understands what tasks need to be done to achieve it. Often, when top executives explain strategies, they make a list and say how they want to be the best or no. 1, without focusing attention on the process of achieving the goals. Storytelling helps communicate these core values to stakeholders. Be innovative, and creative in solving business problems, while keeping the core values in sight. Want to learn how to make strategic choices using the Origin story-loop strategic tools, contact [email protected]