Determination of residual strategy gaps against your projected environment
Research is as relevant to your discussion as it is to your strategy. Sounds simple, until you think about how many times you have sat in a room going through pages and pages of research that you can’t correlate back to any kind of decision that will impact your business. In those cases, we know that we are either missing something obvious or the research function has not integrated their deliverable outputs to the business. Strategy and research need to become the two inseparable twins that enable each other and feed each others success.
Let’s not forget about the often ignored triplet, risk management. The function of risk management is inherent in the analysis of the business environment, projected business environment and strategy management process. It’s all one conversation, these things cannot function effectively on their own. Once you have created a perspective across your major focus areas (and possibly a macro focus area) around the business environment factors supporting and resisting your success, these factors need to be projected into a set of assumptions about where these factors are moving. This is a highly useful form of risk management, which needs to be partnered with other dimensions of an overall program but is a key integration point with research and planning.
The point of this discussion is to identify an opportunity often missed:
There are lots of great discussions on the road to this point, however once you are here - don’t forget to determine the residual strategy gap between the existing mitigating initiatives and core strategies and the projected future environment. Risk is not only created through the external forces of a business environment or the creation of corporate strategy, but ignoring implementation risks as your organization creates assumptions about the future environment. This is a perfect opportunity to eliminate those implementation risks as this new information becomes available.
Just another opportunity to stay ahead of the curve.