5 Tips for Creating a Successful Strategy
Strategy, the art of planning. Strategy can be thought of as a general plan to help achieve long-term goals in a broad variety of contexts, from entrepreneurship or war to winning that next paintball match. Today, companies and organisations often use the word 'strategy' in their daily lingo, but it can come across as a concept that is more complex and confusing than it really needs to be.
Strategy doesn't have to be difficult and here are five tips to help you create your next winning strategy!
1. Use a designer’s approach
Designers use a huge toolkit to help themselves experiment, think broadly, come up with crazy new ideas, solve problems and design solutions. They constantly experiment, learn from those experiments, and iterate until they nail a solution. Doing this will help you to create strategies that are flexible enough to iterate, but stable enough to serve the longer-term purpose of achieving a goal.
A designer's approach also strives for simplicity, cutting back on complexity without denying the complex nature of something. Applying simplicity as a guiding principle will help you to create strategies that are concrete, practical and straightforward. This makes them easy to grasp and naturally increases their chance of success.
2. Make it a team effort
Involve everyone in your organisation. By making it a team effort, you create an open culture that breaks down levels and silos so the right information flows upwards, downwards and sideways. Furthermore, involving the whole team often results in a strategy that resonates with everyone. And if everyone stands behind a strategy and works steadily towards it, then is that accomplishment I see at the end of the line?
3. Create trust and delegate
A strategy will have a higher chance of good execution if you can create trust and delegate. This means that whilst some steps in the strategy may be solidly planned, other steps and decisions are left to individual roles to make in the moment. Think about it this way, an in-store employee will be able to convince customers to buy products if they have the freedom to use tactics that they know from experience work best.
4. Consider your capabilities
Capabilities are a part of strategy, so it's important to consider which capabilities you can leverage and turn into a competitive advantage. Also think about which you might be missing or are weak in. You will go very far if you have the capabilities to execute your strategy.
5. Observe your competition
Besides your market and customers, it's also important to know your competitors. Observe what they do, what sets them apart, what makes their customers loyal and what causes your customers to move towards them. Once you've understood your competition, you can pave the way to making your strategy really stand out from your competitors.
Now that you've got these five tips tucked in your back pocket, you're on your way to achieving higher forms of strategic success. Good luck and feel free to get in touch if you have any questions!
