Strategic planning
With everything that’s happened in the last year, lofty strategic planning has become more difficult. However, there is another way.
At the end of the day, strategy is about resource allocation. It defines what we focus on and give our resources to. It’s also possible to approach it from the bottom up. This perspective can help us to adapt to change more quickly, which is one of the key pillars of resilience.
How do we take a bottom up approach to strategy?
A bottom-up approach to strategy doesn’t start with the big picture and future-focused predictions, but with where you are and what you’ve got right now. It starts with your resources. It’s a look at what you have now in terms of people, skills and capabilities, and other assets and what else you could be doing with them.
What moves could you make with the resources you have now?
It’s the identification of latent capacity and capability and it’s an opportunity to achieve greater financial security and potential growth.
Bottom-up strategy still looks at where you want to go, after all you need to have somewhere you’re directing your resources towards. However, it looks at where you want to get in the shorter term and then what strategic moves you need to make to get there.
Bottom-up invites you to think more widely or even to take a ‘start again’ perspective.
Armed with the office, people, and skill sets that your business currently has, what would you do with them now if you were to start over?
While this is a worthwhile perspective to explore in this environment, this shouldn’t be taken as an invitation to abandon the activities that have worked for you until this point. It’s not about cutting off your nose to spite your face, but concurrently it is worth considering what else you could be doing with what you have. It’s about thinking laterally about what you need to consider to deploy your resources effectively.
This idea may make some business people uncomfortable. It flies in the face of typical strategy. It could even appear tactical, and to some extent it is if you’re feeling forced to consider other options. However, it can also still be inherently strategic, especially as it can result in the uncovering of something genius.
Start to flip your thinking
If you want to put a bottom-up strategy into action in your business, consider the following steps:
- Start with a problem statement.
- Clearly define the problem that you want your strategy to solve.
- Diagnose the situation and opportunity.
- What do you need to impact to see success now?
- Look at your current resource allocation. What latent or under-utilised resources do you have that you can redeploy?
- Get creative. Mind map all of the available options, with no limits to your thinking.
Consider what will govern your decision-making process. Obviously, you won’t implement everything you’ve dreamed up, so how will you determine what makes the cut.
Define how you will measure success and determine progress, then commit to going through your plan more frequently, increasing the tempo to meet the market’s rate of change.
Consider the case of a restaurant that’s unable to open, but still looking for ways to generate revenue.
What resources do they have available that they can use to do this?
Their kitchen, a company car, their people, their premises. How will they decide what activities are meaningful?
How quickly can they iterate and make decisions?
They need to look at what impact they want to have and what gaps they need to plug. Then they can define the metrics for success – how will they know if what they are trying is working?
Unlock bottom up thinking
To unlock bottom-up thinking, you need shorter horizons and sped-up cadences. Not only does this require structure and process, it also takes a commitment to looking at things more frequently. You also need creative thinking and a dose of entrepreneurial spirit, people prepared to push their thinking further, or advisors who will challenge the status quo when considering what you can do with the resources available.
The businesses that endure and thrive in this challenging environment will be those with resilience. It will be those that have great leadership and governance, a clear strategic direction, a highly engaged culture that is innovative and adaptive, and key relationships that provide options.
The way we do business this year is different, but what hasn’t changed is the need for a clear, executable strategic plan. For many though, they need to go about this differently to take advantage of opportunities, go beyond business as usual, and achieve something exceptional.
