Why You Should Invest in Developing Strategic Agility

WHERE IS YOUR FOCUS

Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersma, in their book The Discipline of Market Leaders (1997), described three generic competitive strategies: operational excellence, customer intimacy and product leadership.

• Product Leadership- creating a great product and leading the market with a new idea or solution
• Customer Intimacy- understanding the pains of a customer and how their experiences with the market are
• Operational Excellence- using automated tools for invoices, correspondence, making sure there is no waste in the value chain.

For more details, see here.

As to Treacy and Wiersma, companies need to choose their customers, narrow their focus and dominate their market. In order to succeed, companies must strive and then achieve market leadership in one of the three above mentioned disciplines and perform to an acceptable level in the other two.

Being clear about strategic priorities ensures that all processes are built to accommodate this priority and everyone in the organization is contributing towards the same goals.

HOW CAN YOU DEVELOP STRATEGIC AGILITY?

Strategic agility is the result of combining a clear business strategy, including long term goals and key milestones, with the openness to adapt that strategy as the business progresses.

A wide adopted framework to draft a business strategy, especially among tech entrepreneurs, is the Business Model Canvas. 

The Business Model Canvas is a strategic management tool that allows describing, design and pivot any business model along with nine easily understood business parameters:

• Value Propositions
• Customer Segments
• Customer Relationships
• Activities
• Resources
• Partners
• Channels
• Cost Structure
• Revenue Streams

SITUATIONAL AWARENESS LEADS TO STRATEGIC AGILITY

A better understanding of your business environment allows for faster decision-making, better planning and clearer internal and external communication. Continuous monitoring of your business environment helps you to systematically screen, understand and evaluate emerging technologies, disruptive innovations, competitive products and services in your business space.

Situational awareness helps

• communicate to customers why they should do business with you
• focus on what you do best
• stay ahead of your competitors

WHAT’S NEXT?

It should be clear that developing strategic agility is a necessity to make smarter strategic decisions. Where to go next, which leads should be your first focus or what technologies you need to watch closely, adapt or neglect, are questions better answered with a data-driven approach. Doing is only possible when you really understand your environment.

Achieving strategic agility requires organisations to rethink their information needs. Based upon an inventory of existing data, tools and processes, you should map the ideal information flow and the interaction between all involved stakeholders.

• what data do we need to understand our business environment, i.e. leads, customers, competitors, strategic partners, suppliers e.a.
• which mega-trends might impact our business environment, i.e. technological breakthroughs, climate change, urbanisation e.a.
• who needs access to which information at what moment, i.e. business development, sales & marketing, the board of directors
• how can we build a scalable process to collect relevant data, transform it in actionable insights and share it with all involved parties