When a leadership team says they need a strategy, they usually mean one of two different things. The first is that they genuinely do not know where the organisation should be going. The second, which is more common, is that they have a direction but cannot get the organisation aligned around it. These are different problems and they require different interventions.
The Clarification Problem ¶
Most mid-sized organisations that have been operating for more than five years have a strategy, in the sense that they have made a series of choices about which markets to serve, which clients to pursue, and which capabilities to build. The problem is that those choices were made at different times, by different people, and were never synthesised into a single coherent statement. The result is a leadership team that holds slightly different versions of the strategy in their heads, and a wider organisation that is trying to read the strategy from the decisions it observes.
What Clarification Involves ¶
Strategy clarification starts by surfacing the implicit strategy: what choices has the organisation actually been making? We do this through structured interviews with the leadership team and a review of the last three years of significant decisions. We then test whether those choices are internally consistent and whether they are still appropriate given current market conditions. The output is a one-page strategic intent statement that makes the existing strategy explicit, resolves the inconsistencies, and gives the organisation a shared reference point.
When You Actually Need a New Strategy ¶
New strategy creation is warranted when the existing choices are no longer viable: a market has contracted, a technology has disrupted the business model, or the organisation has grown into a different competitive position than the one it started in. In these cases, clarifying the existing strategy would be counterproductive. The organisation needs to make genuinely new choices. This is rarer than most consultants would have you believe, and it is a more expensive and uncertain process.
The One-Page Constraint ¶
We insist on a one-page output for the Strategy Clarification Sprint. This is not a stylistic preference. A strategy that cannot be stated on one page is a strategy that cannot be communicated to the people who need to execute it. The discipline of reducing the output to one page forces the leadership team to make real choices about what matters most, which is often the most valuable part of the entire process.
If your leadership team is spending time debating priorities rather than executing against them, the Strategy Clarification Sprint may be the right starting point. Get in touch with us to discuss whether it fits your situation.