Six Questions to Bring Insight Back to Strategy

Skift Take

Strategy processes are getting squeezed. Answering these questions will set you up for building and executing a true growth strategy.

A typical strategy offsite starts with an icebreaker. Then there’s a brainstorm where everybody’s A typical strategy offsite starts with an icebreaker. Then there’s a brainstorm where everybody’s ideas on what the company should be working on are logged. Ideas are thrown around, colored stickers are used to vote on favorites, and a list is created within a few hours. While the process is quick and everyone gets a voice, it is not the most effective way to define your strategic midterm priorities, nor is it a process that will get you to a truly robust list for growth. Strategy and top priorities are not something to gamify.

Strategy processes are getting squeezed. To streamline, we’re using basic templates. To ensure everyone gets a voice, we’re involving more people in the final decision-making phases. Speed matters, as does engagement, but combining the two is simplifying strategy in an unhelpful way. Insights have left and been replaced by the same set of generic priorities: profitable growth, operational efficiency, digital and AI, growth markets, customer centricity, and people engagement. Great things, yes, but the same list as everyone else.

Let’s bring insight back into your growth strategy and set yourself up for building and executing a true growth strategy. You can do so by answering six critical questions, and in this specific order:

1. What Is the Situation, and How Will This Change?

Strategy has always been developed under uncertainty. Strategists never know everything they would like to know about a situation, and the reactions of others to that situation are essentially unknowable. But that does not mean we are completely in the dark. It is a matter of working out what is going on in the half-light around us better than other people, and then learning faster than others. How we do this is by starting a strategy process with our beliefs.

Having robust and productive conversations that lead to strategic insight is only possible if you have a clear and simple situation assessment, so that’s your starting point. Building a situation assessment comes from four steps:

What are the key trends shaping your industry and market right now?
More critically, what do you believe to be true based on those trends?
What do you now know you need to know -- or test -- to learn more?
What do your beliefs imply for the future? Given these beliefs, what should you do or not do?

Consider building a strategy by completing this statement repeatedly: We are seeing X, and we believe Y for the next three years, which means Z for us. The power move is the middle step: the belief. Avoid the temptation to jump from trend to implication, articulate your beliefs first. Your beliefs guide your choices, and these strategic beliefs become the foundation for making strategic choices and testing and adjusting them over time.

2. What Is Our Right to Win?

This is a competitive game -- you are setting and executing strategy to win. Strategy is an articulation of how you will create value: move the willingness-to-pay needle up or the total cost needle down, or keep the two as far apart as possible. Your competitive advantage expresses how you will force these two needles apart, but more critically, your competitive advantage -- your right to win -- articulates how you will continue to keep the needles apart over time.

A major difference exists between having a right to play and a right to win. Before you address where you want to play in the market, you need clarity on how you are differentiated. Only three avenues allow you to win:

Resources: You have things others do not.
Capabilities: You can do things others cannot.
Barriers to Entry: You can build fences around your advantage.

With your team, go through each aspect of your business and ask: What do we have that others don’t? What can we do that others cannot? How can we build moats? To build a right to win, your resources and capabilities should be valuable (able to make you more money than they cost you), rare (hard to access and not widely possessed by others), and inimitable. Inimitability is the holy grail of strategy, as it means others can watch you, study you, spend more money than you have and still not be able to do what you can do in three to six years.

Be prepared to identify gaps in your right to win at this stage. You can discuss how to close them, but don’t ignore the insights this set of questions gives you. Also remember to assess your right to win going forward -- in the world you believe will happen based on your beliefs, not in the previous world.

3. Where Will We Play?

Deciding where to compete in your market involves tough trade-offs. Many options may look attractive, and it can feel easier to have more on the table than fewer. But a company that tries to be everything to everyone is a company for no one. The potential playing field is intimidatingly large, but to win, you must draw some lines and declare definitively: We are going to play here.

Making these informed decisions comes from addressing overlapping questions:

WHO are our ideal customers, and which are our ideal markets?
WHAT are we offering them? What is our value proposition or “jobs to be done”?
HOW will we reach them or go to market?

These sub-questions, the WhoWhatHow, should be addressed based on your right to win from the previous question. Compete where you have, or soon will have, differentiation. Ensure these elements reinforce each other. Your WhoWhatHow is the heart of value creation, so spend time here and be open to new options.

4. What Is Success?

At this halfway point, it’s time to ask: Given these insights, where should we be trying to go? What does success look like?

Strategies need a finish line. If you do not know where you want to be by the end of the strategy cycle, then any path or set of priorities may or may not take you there.

Strategy has another job: helping us understand how to act and react as we work toward that finish line, because unexpected things will happen. So you also need to determine your boundaries, the nonnegotiables or parameters your team must stay within as you run toward that finish line. There is a paradox here: Boundaries are not what you are trying to optimize; you are trying to optimize the main intent. But boundaries are more critical because they cannot be breached. Leave this set of questions with a clear goal (finish line) and boundaries (fences).

5. What Will Stop Us?

After resetting your definition of success, you want the path to get there to be as clear as possible. You do not want to be thrown off course, and the best way to avoid that is to think through what could do that: What could stop or break us?

People often ask: Why should we talk about our top challenges before setting our top priorities? Shouldn’t we set the top priorities first and then ask what the challenges to execution are? It’s better to identify the biggest challenges the organization is facing first, because sometimes addressing them becomes a top priority.

6. So, What Should We Do?

The definition of success is what you will achieve. Your top priorities are then how you will achieve it. So defining your top priorities should be the last question to discuss, because you need the insights from the previous questions to answer it correctly.

At this last step, watch for linear-growth traps and avoid reframing or updating your current list of initiatives and priorities every time. Doing the same things a little better every strategy cycle is not a growth strategy. Rather than starting a new topic, pull the top insights from your most critical beliefs, your gaps to close (and strengths to leverage) in your right to win, the insights from new “where to play” choices, the critical pathways needed to reach success, and the top challenges that must be addressed to get there.

While this may feel like a longer list, you will have identified only a few overlapping themes, and these are now your top midterm priorities. Aim for fewer than six to meaningfully impact value creation.

Slow Down to Speed Up

So what should we do? Let the critical insights about how the situation is evolving and how you can win guide you to a clear, compelling finish line and then a set of priorities to get there.

This will take a few days rather than a few hours, but you are building a base to make decisions faster and better as the team executes. Executing a winning strategy through changing markets means you need to slow down and agree on insights and gaps so you can speed up as you execute.

And strategies with clear growth insights and executable priorities tend to win.