Playing to win

When I started a recent role, my exec team peers were working on the three-year strategy using a framework outlined in Playing to Win. I have been really impressed by the work and the outputs, so I read the book. Here are my notes.

What would have to be true

The most valuable idea in Playing to Win is the process it outlines for how to make strategic choices. Creating a strategy often requires difficult trade-offs, and the “What would have to be true” process is an excellent way to take personal feelings out of the debate, and work together to a good outcome.

It also has useful advice on how to think about core capabilities and what management activity is needed to support the strategy. A strategy is not just one and done. You need to execute and continuously iterate, and the Playing to Win framework takes you beyond creation of the strategy and into execution and iteration.

Strategy is making tough choices

It is natural to want to keep options open for as long as possible. But it is only through making and acting on choices that you can win. “Yes, clear, tough choices force your hand and confine you to a path. But they also free you to focus on what matters.” And what matters is winning.

A strategy consists of choices of where to play, why playing there wins, and how you will arrange your organisation to support that strategy. There will be activities outlined, but they will be internally coherent (as Richard Rumelt says in Good strategy, bad strategy.) Collectively, these actions will achieve your goal.

It’s different from a plan both because of the necessity of the internal coherence, and also because the outcome is uncertain. A strategy may make you feel nervous because you can make the bets, but you cannot control the outcome. However, it’s only by having a strategy, rather than a plan, that will enable you to win.

Roger Martin has a short video (10 mins) that explains these points.

Five choices you need to make

1. What is our winning aspiration? A statement about the desired future. For example, for Oil of Olay (all the examples in the book are from P&G): $1bn in sales in US and “establishing skin care as a strong pillar for beauty”.
2. Where will we play? In which markets, segments, customers, channels etc. No company can be all things to all people and still win, so this defines the playing field.
3. How will we win on this playing field? This is intimately tied to the choice of where to play. What is the firm’s competitive advantage? What will enable it to create unique value and sustainbly deliver that value to customers in a way that is distinct from the firm’s competitors?
4. What core capabilities do we need? What are the absolutely essential capabilities that need to be in place to allow the company to win? These should support and reinforce each other.
5. What management systems need to be in place? Systems that support the strategy, e.g. how to communicate choices to all employees, talent management, budget processes, etc. These should all be set up to support the strategy.

Don’t stop after definining the winning aspiration and where to play: all five questions must be answered if you are to create a viable, actionable and sustainable strategy.

The answers should fit on a single page.

What is our winning aspiration?

“Define the purpose of your enterprise, its guiding mission and aspiration, in strategic terms”. What does winning look like for this organisation?

It’s very important to make winning a priority because winning is hard and requires tough choices. You won’t wander into it. And “a too-modest aspiration is far more dangerous than a too-lofty one. Too many companies evenutally die a death of modest aspirations.”

Craft aspirations that will be meaningful and powerful to your staff and to your customers. “It isn’t about finding the perfect language or the consensus view, but is about connecting to a deeper idea of what the organisation exists to do.” A good rule of thumb is to start with people, i.e. consumers and customers, rather than money.

Simplicity in comms is important because the simpler the message the more likely it will be understood and the better able you will be to marshall resources of the whole company.

You don’t play to play, you play to win

Having the customer always in mind helps you think about how to meet their needs rather than focusing internally on how to make your existing product better. And it’s not just about serving customers, it’s about winning with them. You don’t play to participate.

Also think about your competitors – who are you winning against? – and not just the usual suspects. If you are focusing on the customer when you think about the winning aspiration (for example, not just the best cleaning product but rethinking the cleaning experience) then you might find competitors are smaller or in different niches than you imagine.

Who really is your best competitor and what can you learn from them?

Where will we play?

Geography, product type, consumer segment, distribution channel, etc. The authors give the example of focusing on North American market, so pulling back from a worldwide approach, which allowed them to really focus.

Choosing where to play also means where not to play, which can be a harder decision if you already are in some markets.

Think about competitors when thinking about where to play. Choosing a playing field that is the same as a strong competitor might be a bad choice; but it might not be if you have a distinct advantage over them.

How will we win on this playing field?

“Winning means providing a better consumer and customer value equation than your competitors do, and providing it on a sustainable basis.”

They should be suited to the specific context of the firm and difficult for competitors to copy.

They say all strategies either take an approach of cost-leadership or differentiation. Either your costs are lower than your competitors so you can sell lower or reinvest the margin, or your product is differentiated in some way that your customers value and will pay more for. (Michael Porter’s generic strategies model also includes a third approach: focused, which is offering a specialised service in a niche market.)

“Life inside a cost leader looks very different from life inside a differentiator. In a cost leader, managers are forever looking to better understand the drivers of costs and are modifying their operations accordingly. In a differentiator, managers are forever attempting to deepen their holistic understanding of customers to learn how to serve them more distinctively.”

The process of ‘What would have to be true?’

Strategy is about shortening your odds. Nothing is guaranteed, but having a good strategy make it more likely you will win.

They describe a very recognisable scenario of creating a strategy: pulling together data, compromising to a strategy, making sure it’s actionable so no creative thinking, arguing for it, etc.

Instead, reframe it. “What would have to be true for this to be the correct decision?” This creates room for inquiry into ideas rather than advocacy of positions. It encourages broader consideration of more options and reduces defensiveness, as it’s not about choosing one idea over another.

It is the following steps:

1. Frame the choice. At least two independent solutions that might get us to our winning aspiration, things that it would be hard to do at the same time. For example, to get to the winning outcome described above, the team could either transform Oil of Olay into a worthy competitor to e.g. Lancôme, or alternatively they could buy an existing brand to compete.
2. Generate strategic possibilities. Thinking outside the box. Any option should be considered and openness encouraged, even potentially controversial choices. All will go through a thorough process later, so there is no risk to including wild suggestions here.
3. Specify conditions for each. What would have to be true for this option to be a terrific choice? Reservations are important and should be taken into account, but as conditions that would have to be true.
4. Identify barriers to choice. Which conditions are least likely to be true?
5. Design valid tests. For each barrier, design a valid test that would generate commitment.
6. Conduct the test. Hypothesis-driven analysis, starting with lowest confidence conditions.
7. Choose.

This enables the team to discover the strongest options together, rather than in opposition

It’s not arguing about what is true, it’s about working out what would have to be true for the group to commit to that strategic direction.

Any reservations about a strategic position are valid and are taken into account, but not as criticisms, rather as conditions that would have to be met. E.g. not “our customers would never buy that” but “we would need to be confident that customers would buy that” – the latter is a condition that has to be true.

Of the conditions for success of each potential strategy, which are the conditions least likely to be true? The ones you are sceptical about are the ones you devise strategic tests for.

A test might be surveying 1,000 customers, crunching loads of numbers, speaking to one key supplier, analysing competitor data, or other work. The main thing is that the test is valid, and for this, the person who is most sceptical of this condition is a useful judge. For example, one person feels that “we are confident that our customers would buy that” is really unlikely. What would a valid test be that could convince this person?

Test the least likely ones first. If the tests fail, you’ve saved time by not doing everything. If they pass, move on to the next least likely.

Make sure you elimiate any nice-to-have conditions. Every condition has to be fully binding – if it weren’t true, you wouldn’t pursue that strategic option.

Rather than a fraught offsite, battling out ideas at the end of the process, following this framework makes the choices “simple, and even anticlimactic”. The team only needs to review the test results and come to the conclusion they dictate. This accords with my experience using this process.

What core capabilities do we need?

They reference Michael Porter again. It’s essential that a company has core capabilities that both fit with each other (i.e. don’t conflict) and reinforce one another (i.e. make each other stronger than they would have been alone).

A company’s strategic position is made up of the activities the company does. Companies can be good at lots of things, but there are a smaller number of activities that together create distinctiveness.

Instead of starting with what you are good at and attempting to build a strategy from there, you need to determine where to play and how to win, and then consider your capabilities in light of these choices. “A company needs to invest disproportionately in building the core capabiltites that together produce competitive advantage.”

Be honest about the state of your capabilities. You may find you need to invest in strengthening some weaker capabilities. You also need to determine if your capabilities are defensible against competitive action; if not, you need to revisit your where to play and how to win choices so that you can find a set of strategic choices and an activity system that are difficult to replicate.

Select a small number of core capabilities

In the example the authors give in the book, at an offsite they initially asked leaders to come up with the core strengths of the company, but they created a list of more than a hundred. The next day, they set three constraining criteria:

1. Reasonably sure the company already had competitive advantage in the area and could widen it
2. Company-level rather than business unit-level
3. Decisive: a real competitive advantage that was the difference between winning and losing

This resulted in five core capabilities, and they could then create an action plan for each to broaden and deepen competitive advantage.

Develop strategic skills throughout your company

It’s not enough just to define the strategy and broadcast it. You also need management structures to support work on it, structures to support core capabilities and measures to ensure it’s working.

The authors go into detail on a transformation in the company. The starting point was that “strategic” discussions were about defending a position to leadership, and VPs felt judged by execs on whether they had all details of the strategy worked out. It was all about walking people through a long PowerPoint deck, and making sure you had all the answers.

Instead they moved to a process where no slides were allowed, the topics of discussion were agreed in advance and the focus was on the strategy: where are you going to play and how are you going to win?

Leaders did not have to have the strategy locked down, they just had to be able to engage in a productive discussion about real strategic issues. They also explicitly adopted a specific mindset for discussions; “assertive enquiry”, i.e. “I have a view worth hearing but I may be missing something.”

They had three objectives with this change:

1. Make the culture more dialogue oriented
2. Create a structure where the business teams could benefit from the experience and wider business perspective of senior leaders
3. Build the strategic thinking capabilities of their executives

Over time, the leaders realised this was a safe environment to have their strategies challeged, and learn, and the company saw improved strategic discourse and correspondingly “better choice-making, more willingness to make hard calls, and eventually better business results”.

Make sure you are measuring what’s actually important to the customer

They have a great example of Pampers, that was the most absorbent nappy on the market and that was the metric they were optimising for, and congratulating themselves on being the best.

But actually, other factors, like how the baby looks in the nappy, and the ease of putting it on the child, were much more important to the customer than they’d realised, so they changed their internal metrics.

How to think through strategy – the logic flow framework

The authors identify one of my main issues with strategy. There are many tools available, e.g. SWOT, VRIN etc, but unless you have a process around them you can end up with an unfocused mass of data and analysis.

For me that was what led to me writing my talk, Analysing, Deciding Doing: How to develop and execute an effective strategy and writing a blog post about pulling models together.

The way the authors group the models together, they call the logic flow framework.

You need to ask the following 4 questions:

1. What is the structure of your industry? (Five forces helps here.)
2. What do your customers value? Note, unless you sell direct to consumers only, there are two levels of customers. P&G for example need to offer a compelling value proposition to retailers, otherwise they won’t stock the product and the end consumer won’t get to buy it. If you can work collaboratively with your customer to create value for both, that’s ideal.
3. How does your company fare (and how could it) relative to the competition? Are you a cost leader or a differentiator?
4. What will your competition do in reaction to your chosen course of action? This is to help you build a sustainable strategy, not one that could be copied quickly, or easily nullified, by a competitor.

Some signs that you have a winning strategy in place

These might include:

• resources to spend in an ongoing way
• competitors making a healthy profit (meaning you have left some how to win and where to play on the table so they don’t have to attack you)
• customers who adore you and non-customers who can’t see why anyone would buy you (showing you’ve made choices).

Strategy is a journey, you also need mechanisms for tweaking and refining it

But even if you have these signs you shouldn’t rest because no strategy lasts forever and all companies need to evolve. “Ideally, companies should see strategy as a process rather than a result – adapting existing choices before business and financial results (which are always lagging indicators) start to turn down.”

This is why it’s valuable to build up strategy muscles in the organisation. “Creating a truly robust strategy takes the capabilities, knowledge, and experience of a diverse team”, who are all committed to winning as a team.

The book itself is not great to read

There is a lot of quite boring and frequently sexist detail about P&G products (e.g. “every mom using Huggies, Luvs or Pampers preferred the shaped diaper”; lots of talk about skin-care products being focused on making women feel beautiful). It could have been a lot shorter.

It also can be offputtingly consumerist; for example, after talking about how “baby diapers are one of the most expensive items… in a parent’s shopping basket every week” they then say “The market is big and growing steadily in emerging markets where there is a huge potential to serve babies who will begin life using cloth or no diapers at all”, i.e. sell an expensive and environmentally unfriendly product to people who don’t actually need it.

However, the principles all still hold even if your company has a higher level purpose; if your goal is to improve the world, you still need a winning strategy to achieve it.

The method really works

Even though I didn’t love the delivery of the message, the message itself is very valuable and the ‘What would have to be true’ method is extremely effective. It’s not the only method to get to a good strategy; but it is a good one, and clarifies the work needed, how do do the work, and helps you get to a good, agreed outcome.

CTO reflections on my first year at Kooth

I joined Kooth as Chief Technology Officer just over a year ago. Kooth has spent the last two decades building digital mental health services for young people to help provide early and responsive mental health support. I recently shared my reflections on my first year with the team, and wanted to also share them here.

It’s incredible to work on such a meaningful purpose

One of the things that drew me to Kooth was the opportunity to work on such an important mission. Mental health, particularly for children and young people, is one of the most important issues of our time. We see some terrible statistics, for example over one million UK children and young people were referred to NHS mental health services in 2023/24, and 22% of high school kids in the US have contemplated suicide in the past year.

At Kooth, we know we are working on a product and service that is directly improving on that, and I feel really motivated, knowing that I am part of the solution. I know that most people who work at Kooth feel the same way.

We also have a lot of exciting technical challenges

Another thing that really drew me to Kooth were the technical challenges. When I joined in 2023, we had won a contract to deliver a new, improved version of our service to California. This was Soluna, and it was app-first (in the UK, https://www.kooth.com/ is a web-based service). It also involved developments to our underlying service model.

We rolled out Soluna at the beginning of 2024, and have spent this year adding features and improving on it. If you are in the US you can download it here. And if you are in the UK, hold tight, because one of the next big exciting technical challenges we have is bringing Soluna back to the UK.

Kooth is a very inclusive and friendly place

Before Kooth, I worked at the Financial Times, which is a really nice place to work. One of the things that drew me to Kooth was the opportunity to be part of a smaller and fast-paced organisation, but I was apprehensive - I didn’t think anywhere could be as nice and friendly as the FT. But I was completely blown away; it is a very fast-paced environment, things can change quickly, and we are having a big impact; and also everyone is very kind. I am really enjoying working here and am so glad I joined.

I’ve particularly loved the inclusiveness of the engineering team. When I first joined I met everyone on the team to ask what was going well and what we should look to improve, and one thing that many people mentioned was that it was a place where they could really rely on their peers to be supportive. People mentioned they’d never worked anywhere else where people were so willing to hop on a call to help you solve a problem.

Over the past year we’ve launched Soluna, new pilots and grown our team

So much has happened since I joined, but I’d like to call out some particular highlights.

As I mentioned, launching Soluna was a huge thing this year, and we have had a great response from users, including near total positive feedback from users who’ve completed coaching sessions: 97% “felt heard, understood and respected” and 98% would recommend Soluna to a friend. And one incredible highlight that stood out for me was Governor Newsom mentioning Soluna by name in his state of the state address.

We also made some changes and improvements to our UK products, Kooth and Qwell, and started planning for our migration to Soluna in the UK.

We have had a lot of great new starters, including our first US engineering and data science hires. And we’ve also done a lot of work on improving our development processes, how we run out of hours support and improve the reliability of our systems, and how we share knowledge within our teams and across the company.

What I’m looking forward to over the next year

There is lots more to do and I’m really excited about what we’ll be doing over the next year. We are improving Soluna. We are also launching new pilots and making rolling them out much more straightforward: we are aiming for a “cookie-cutter” approach, so we can get to improving outcomes for our users as quickly as possible.

I’m also really excited about improvements we are planning to how we use data at Kooth. All our data teams (data analysts, data scientists and data engineers) are working together to optimise how data flows through the organisation and make sure we are putting it to best use for our users, our customers and for the business. We’ve already talked a bit about our AI and data strategy, and watch this space for more!

I’m also looking forward to bringing the team even closer together across the UK and US next year. We are fully remote in engineering and so we are well placed to make sure that we really feel like one team even though we are distributed as far apart as San Diego, CA and Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.

We are hiring!

Please watch this space for more, and if any of this sounds exciting to you too, we are hiring!

This post originally appeared on the Kooth Product and Technology blog Building Kooth

Panel: AI in SaaS: Blessing or Bandwagon?

I was really happy to join Mal Minhas and Chris Evans on a panel at The SaaS CTO conference. Moderated by the excellent Jon Topper, we covered what criteria we use to differentiate between genuinely transformative technologies and overhyped trends, how we communicate the value and risks of adopting new technologies to stakeholders outside of technology, and what advice we’d give to a tech leader on how to get started with AI.

There is a short-writeup on LinkedIn and I will share the video when published.

Strategy for Directors: Tying it together

I did an excellent course on Strategy for Directors. On Monday, I shared some models we learned about and in this post I pull those together.

Whether you are in leadership or not, you can use this process and the models to help your strategic thinking. If you prefer to watch rather than read, I covered a lot of this in my talk Analysing, Deciding, Doing: How to develop and execute an effective strategy.

Analyse, Decide, Implement

The course splits strategy work into three stages.

1. Strategic analysis: Make a diagnosis of your current situation (external and internal)
2. Strategic choice: make a decision about what you want to do
3. Implement

Strategy is often set by the person with the loudest voice. One of the aims of this course was to teach techniques and models to allow robust discussion, surface ideas and allow everyone to be heard.

With all the models, the value comes mainly in the discussion and the shared understanding that brings, rather than the output itself.

Can you hear the baby cry?

A running theme was, can we hear the challenge? There is a lot of noise, but can you recognise the one challenge that you need to address, and then work out what you need to do to address it?

The analogy the course instructor used was “can you hear the baby cry?” When a baby cries, it cuts through other noises, and you know you need to do something: pick it up, feed it, change it, etc. What, in the noise of your situation, external factors, challenges and opportunities, is the one key noise that you need to act on?

Analysis: what is the strategic context?

The purpose of the analysis is to understand where you are, what the challenges are and what the opportunities are.

Part of the analysis phase is about challenging groupthink. Sometimes knowledge or understanding can be outdated, and sometimes the board or leadership are predisposed to see what they want or expect to see. The main outcome you are looking for from the strategic analysis is a common understanding.

Don’t start with a SWOT analysis

Many of us are familiar with a SWOT analysis: identifying the organisation’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It is often a starting point for defining strategy.

One interesting thing this course recommended was doing the SWOT analysis last, after other models, because it is quite a blunt instrument; it can be quite simplistic. They recommend instead using SWOT to pull together the outputs from the other analyses.

Analyse the external and internal environment

Firstly, look at the macro-external market, i.e. the world. For this, use PESTLE. You can also do scenario testing for analysing a VUCA situation, which is imagining some changes in the external world that could affect your business, and for any that would have a large impact, plan what you could do.

Then, look at the micro-external environment: customers, competitors, suppliers etc. For this, use S-curves, market segmentation, generic strategies, and Five forces.

Then, look at the internal environment: how your organisation currently is. For this, use capabilities, core competencies, threshold/distinctive capabilities (VRIN), and value chain analysis.

Bring it all together: portfolio analysis and SWOT!

Now you’ve analysed the external world and your organisation, bring it all together for an integrated picture. Firstly, you can do a portfolio analysis, and then use SWOT to bring together all the other outputs.

SWOT is a nice way to share the outputs of this work, but be aware that people you share only the SWOT with will not have all the context of the work you did to get to that, so it is not always a very effective communication tool.

Now you have the diagnosis, what’s the prognosis?

The situation analysis is often relatively straightforward. What it means for your organisation is the more challenging conversation.

The prognosis is what will happen to the market if the organisation does nothing. If the prognosis suggests a discrepancy between the anticipated market conditions and the forecast for the business, there will be a strategic gap.

Articulating the main challenge can be difficult. It has to be seen as a challenge by all of your key stakeholders. One way to get into the mindset is taking a step back and first asking the question of other organisations. For example, what is the main challenge facing your national rail provider? Your country’s health service? Coca-Cola?

Internal communication drives change

You now need to make the call to action so that everyone can hear it. Everyone needs to be able to hear the baby cry.

You need to provide context, because other stakeholders weren’t present during your analysis. You need to make it clear why change is vital: use story, example and metaphor; be clear. Show what value your call to action provides, and stress the consequences of doing nothing.

What are you are trying to do here is communicate a compelling call to action that ensures that all stakeholders who will be involved in implementing the strategy understand why change needs to happen. You want to get everyone keen to move to the next stage and thinking about options for the business.

Generating strategic options

You’ve now completed your analysis and you know what the central challenge is for your organisation. So what are you going to do?

Models to use to come up with options include Three horizons, Ansoff matrix and Blue Ocean approaches. It is also worth looking at the disruptive innovation model now in case disrupting your own industry is an option.

Evaluation and making a strategic choice

You now have your analysis and your options. So what do you do?

Whatever you choose is informed by all this work. It needs to be explicit, forward thinking, and simple. Some models to help choose are SAFe and weighting and scoring.

They also spent some time on the course talking about decision-making biases, including cognitive bias (Wikipedia has a good list), unconscious bias and group decision-making vulnerabilities including social loafing (people are prone to work less hard when in a group than when working alone), evaluation apprehension (nervousness about what others might think) and the Einstellung affect (thinking a method that has worked in the past will work again now, even if more effective methods exist).

Apart from all this, a potential obstacle to good decision-making is not being clear about what decision is to be made and who is to make it.

It is a good idea to set up or strengthen your strategic decision-making processes and put in place corrective measures to lessen the impact of some of these biases and vulnerabilities that hinder good decision-making.

Doubt hinders strategy: this is where leadership comes in

Some will resist the strategy. It calls for change, so some will be disadvantaged, and some who may be advantaged cannot be certain that will be the case. So this is where strong leadership comes into play, through will, focus, communication, repeating why the status quo is no longer acceptable and reminding everyone of the vision for the future.

Ask those who say no what it would take for them to come along on the journey.

You need to win “hearts and minds”. Commitment is easier to gain when the organisation is in jeopardy. It’s much harder to secure commitment when the status quo is acceptable or even desirable. This is why leadership is required, to ensure stakeholders can hear the baby cry.

You must now implement the strategy

“Five frogs are sitting on a log. Four decide to jump off. How many are left?”

Many people say “one”. But the answer is “five”. There is a big gap between deciding to jump and doing it.

Often boards and leadership teams will have intentions rather than commitments. They announce they are going to jump off the log, but things get in the way of the actual leaping. Good ideas can be lost through lack of implementation.

As well as commitment, you need to ensure the organisation can execute. Neilson, Martin and Powers suggest there are four fundamental building blocks that influence effective strategy execution: decision rights, information flows, aligning motivators and structure; and furthermore found that changes to the first two are twice as effective as changes to the second two. Share context, ensure information flow in both directions, don’t undermine decisions and ensure everyone, especially people on the ground, have the data and information they need to understand the impact of their decisions.

Using the implementation web

The last model we learned about that can support your execution is the implementation web. This allows you to create a spider diagram of where you are across the 8 key areas of implementation and where you therefore need to put more focus.

There is a lot to cover in the implementation web but some of the key areas follow.

It’s all about communication

If you’ve heard me speak about strategy you will have heard me say that it’s all about communication. You can have the best strategy in the world, but if no-one knows about it, it’s worth nothing: people won’t know how to act.

It is very hard to do sufficient or varied enough communication. Some of the suggestions from the course:

• Repetition. A quote from the course handbook: “Many boards underestimate the amount of communication required in terms of quantity and frequency. If you double what the board thinks is required, then double it again, you’re probably half way to meeting the needs of your other stakeholders”
• Be able to visualise the future; paint a picture of the destination. It should be clear and brief: you should be able to draw it on a napkin
• Using ‘big rocks’ or key strategic themes

Implementation requires effective alignment across the organisation. Everyone needs to understand what the strategy means for them.

Measurement to help drive strategy

Measurement can help drive strategy both by communicating intent and as a way to show progress. You can have both lagging and leading indicators. Lagging indicators are the consequences of earlier decisions, for example financial results. Leading indicators are outcomes or metrics that will show you are on the right path early enough to adjust your course.

Balanced scorecards are one way to address this, by including internal processes, customers and learning as well as financial results. Dashboards are another way to show leading indicators, real time data, and/or RAG statuses (Red, Amber, Green, also known as traffic light reporting) to indicate how projects are progressing towards their goals.

They also noted that you need to think about performance and measurement on different horizons differently, and that should impact how you allocate resources to that work.

Culture is the hardest part to change

Culture is the hardest to change: so the more closely the implementation plan fits with the prevailing culture, the more likely it is to succeed.

It’s perfectly legitimate for the implementation of a strategy to seek to change the prevailing culture, but it’s important to be aware that this will be very challenging.

Review could be the most important part of the implementation web

It’s often easier to change direction when you’re already in motion rather than getting stuck in ‘analysis paralysis’, and as long as you incorporate review into your strategic process, you can flex. However, review is the one that leaders do least often. The board and leadership tend to be enthusiastic about driving the organisation forward, meaning often not enough attention is paid to tracking progress against the plan.

Because competent implementation includes review, it’s actually less important to have a perfect strategy than it is to have a good implementation, because a good implementation will include reviewing and adjusting the strategy. As you progress, you will gain more data, more strategic insight and a better understanding of your choices.

It’s important to move fast, so it’s better to move into implementation as soon as you have a “good enough” strategy. Implementation is about achieving goals and generating value, but it is also about learning, and the ultimate competitive advantage might be the ability to learn more quickly than your competitors.

There is no “right” strategy

The implementation web can be used as a tool to help you work out if you are putting the right inputs into your strategy. Ultimately, there is no “right” strategy; outcomes are impacted by many factors some of which are out of your control, so what you can do is make sure the process of strategy works in your organisation and you are giving the right inputs.

How to use this

I enjoyed this course, learned a lot and would highly recommend it. However, at the end, the question I was left with was how to put all this information together to work on strategy. Answering that question is what led to me creating my talk, Analysing, Deciding, Doing: How to develop and execute an effective strategy, and these two blog posts.

You do not need to use all of the models in order, but you can. You don’t need to be in leadership to do this strategic thinking. I hope these two blog posts have given you some thoughts about what your next steps in strategy could be.