New Game-Plan: Strategic Change
Services
About Us
Our services and capabilities:
- Using Roadmapping to make strategy an activity for wider groups, not elites
- Developing strategies that are implemented, not just communicated
- Enabling organisations to engage external stakeholders effectively
- Equipping leaders and managers with practical toolkits
Developing the capability for strategic change
While expanding operations and sharing information is easier today, the same cannot be said for developing winning business or organisational strategies. Externally, markets are changing fast due to social changes and technology; internally, simply issuing instructions will not bring about change alone.
Indeed, creating a winning new product, service or supply-chain today typically requires building and managing a complex network of external partners, not just the internal organisation. Hence, developing the capability for strategic change is critical to business success.
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Successful strategies bridge difficult chasms |
How do we enable strategic change?
Many kinds of capability are required for an effective business or organisational strategy. We catalyse programmes of strategic change by using powerful tools, 'joining-up' all the necessary elements, and involving people meaningfully -
something which even large organisations can find difficult.
The key elements include
- Articulating, understanding and learning lessons from current operations
- Bringing external foresight to bear on strategic thinking
- Gaining buy-in from external stakeholders
- Using Capability Analysis to inform the identification of future opportunities
- Formulating goals, options and strategies
- Analysing and validating proposals
- Translating strategies into well-specified, properly-resourced programmes
- Engaging internal stakeholders in implementation
- Embedding strategies into organisational routines
- Providing practical toolkits and performance scorecards which make strategy 'real'
- Reviewing and adapting strategies in the light of experience and emerging challenges,
- Making strategy a ‘living’ as opposed to a ‘planning’ process.
Our distinctiveness as a catalyst for strategic change comes from our fusion of Knowledge, Facilitation Services, a Practical Toolkit, and Supporting Technology. Our services are relevant equally to global companies, public bodies and cross-sector groups. Whatever the level of intervention, and the type of organisation, we always combine internal and external perspectives - 'how we see the world' and 'how the world sees us'. We deliver strategic change through partnership - we provide powerful tools and the client focuses on key decisions.
Our services for strategic change
Our approach deliberately uses tools which avoid the three notorious 'chasms' that cause strategies to fail. The chasms are between:
- Formulating strategy - as distinct from implementing it and making it 'stick'
- Developing strategy - as distinct from operational planning (including budgeting and financial management)
- 'Push' strategy driven internally from current capabilities and past successes - as distinct from 'pull' strategy driven by external market changes and views of trends
Some of our most powerful and relevant services for enabling strategic change are described below.
Capability Analysis and Development
Every organisation needs a clear understanding of current capabilities and of those critical for future success. This applies equally whether a business is radically downsizing or has exciting prospects for growth through innovation. While everyone in an organisation has some understanding of its capabilities, this can only be a part of the big picture. The challenge for organisations is to build an objective, collective understanding of capabilities and to develop those needed in the future for the organisation as a whole.
Our methodology for Capability Analysis and Development is powerful because it:
- Effectively engages people - harnessing knowledge and achieving buy-in
- Gets the level of detail right – avoiding the traps of being too high-level or getting bogged-down
- Clearly distinguishes basic as opposed to differentiating capabilities
- Clearly distinguishes the organisational capabilities which have evolved to date from those required for future success
- Addresses, equally, externally-accessed and internally-provided capabilities
- Uses decision trees to guide the selection of options for external provisioning
- Is applicable to all kinds of capability in all kinds of organisation
Our distinctive approach to Roadmapping combines: effective engagement with stakeholders; the use of special technology to support the process; experience in catalysing structures and capabilities for networking; and broad experience in strategy work. We have successfully used our Roadmapping approach to develop Roadmaps, innovation programmes, and strategies for future research. Our sponsors for this work have included public bodies, global companies and diverse cross-sector partnerships (including Knowledge Transfer Networks).
Our highly innovative workshops ‘break the mould’ - contrasting sharply with the traditional ‘talking heads, flip charts and post-it notes’. Our use of special technology enables collaborative interaction and building of ideas ‘on screen’. Everyone gets a fair and equal opportunity to contribute their views - anonymously. The Workshops are highly productive and capture all contributions. Our distillation and assessment techniques enable participants to obtain clear outcomes for later refinement. Our service covers design, facilitation, analysis and reporting.
Our model for stakeholder engagement emphasises developing new knowledge and forging tangible collaboration. We focus on ‘learning’ rather than ‘persuasion’, recognising that those leading the engagement, and those targeted by it, will both gain through dialogue. We have successfully deployed this approach both within and between organisations. Recent applications include: developing strategies for new products; developing roadmaps for 'Lean Manufacturing'; and learning lessons from product development.
The way to achieve success is first to have a definite, clear, practical ideal 'a goal', an objective. Second have the necessary means to achieve your ends, wisdom, money, materials and methods. Third adjust all your means to that end.
Aristotle (384-322BC). Greek philosopher and scientist. Student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great.