Strategy Needs Context

Evaluating context helps businesses ensure their strategies stay aligned with the current environment and customer expectations. Let's learn more about Context and three ways to institutionalize keeping it aligned with your strategy.

What is Context

Context refers to the specific environment, circumstances, and factors that can impact a business's ability to achieve its Vision. The impact could add positive or negative momentum. Aligning strategy with the Context that underlays your business model accelerates success. To continue to have a good strategy, your business model must stay coherent with this Context.

Your Positioning and Strategy must continue to update and refine where you will compete and how you will win within the evolving Context. Understanding Context helps you formulate and adjust ideas about what must be true for your strategy to succeed and to reach your vision. From this understanding, you create alignment between what your business does and what will best succeed in your Context. It allows for creating focused product market fit, go-to-market, revenue generation, and other Themes of your strategy.

This understanding feeds into Leadership Team meetings and the Adapt and Grow phase of StrategyOS to resolve issues and make necessary changes to the business model that runs on top of Context.

Assessing Context

Assessing Context is an activity that strategy practitioners make complicated. Some of the many ways to evaluate context include: SWoT analysis, 5-forces, competitive positioning, customer segmentation, value chain analysis, adjacent markets, best practices, and internal gap analysis! While these add understanding, they also add time delays and complexity. And they are difficult to keep current and relevant.

There are 3 easier ways to routinely integrate Context with Strategy:

• Listen to customers and employees
• Allow space to work "on" the business
• Council meetings

The most important thing leaders can do to support this step is to listen to customers, employees, and other stakeholders. Support your reps on sales calls. Conduct customer surveys and focus groups. Create formal and informal A/B testing. Check your support desk and other customer-facing processes that define how the world sees your business. Understand customer needs and ensure they see you how you want to be seen.

Similarly, find ways to get feedback from your employees. Tactics include: open office hours, ACT meetings, suggestion boxes, walking around, and team-level council meetings (discussed below.)

The next most impactful thing leaders can do is to allow time to work "on" the business away from the day-to-day. Many leaders I know schedule weekly blocks for this "thinking time." The best leaders schedule longer blocks of time monthly and schedule full day or longer blocks each quarter and annually. Wickman (pg 214) calls these Clarity Breaks. This is not time to catch up on work tasks. Instead be alone, away from work, with a notepad and no distractions. Focus on important questions like Positioning, Context, priorities, people, processes, products, nagging issues, emerging trends, and how you structure your own time and work. You can start with written questions from the week, or focus on what comes to you. The outcome should be ideas that can lead to expanded opportunities, accelerated success, and expanded relevance.

In his book, One Hour Strategy, Jeroen Kraaijenbrink suggests that everyone works on strategy from their level and their perspective. Executive leaders should spend at least 1 hour per day, managers should spend 1 hour per week. He organizes times of reflection around three strategy and context questions (the 3Qs):

• Q1. Relevance: Do we still have the right strategy?
• Q2. Progress: Did we make the right progress?
• Q3. Mood: Is everyone still on board?

From these different perspectives, the goal is to uncover issues, gain insights, and generate innovative ideas (the 3I's):

• I1. Issues: Any problem, bottleneck, or mistake identified
• I2. Insights: Any fact, observation, or experience learned
• I3. Ideas: Any solution, improvement, opportunity, or innovation identified

Peer groups and advisory boards are another way to create time to work "on" the business. Ideally, these groups bring diverse perspectives, take a long-term view, meet regularly, and have the best interests of the leader and the business as their agenda.

Council meetings ensure your company stays in touch with its Positioning and that it stays relevant with evolving changes and trends in the Context in which it operates. These meetings combine the idea of listening to customers and employees with a formal agenda focused on working "on" the business. Where other rhythm meetings are focused on execution, these meetings are focused on strategy (for details see Great Council.)

Cascading Council meetings through all levels of the business ensures good employee input from those who are closest to your customers. It allows everyone in the business to spend at least 1 hour per month considering strategy and the business Context that impacts strategy.

To learn more, jump into how to set up council meetings and how to adapt and grow as you evaluate Context. As you work to integrate Context into Strategy, check it against the green flags for coherence.

What practices do you use to stay in touch with your business Context?

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