STRATEGIC PLANNING – Are you Stuck or Scattered?

The teams and leaders I’ve been working with on strategic planning seem to fall into one of two camps – Stuck or Scattered. The Stuck camp folks feel out of ideas or frozen with uncertainty about the future – or both. The Scattered folks, also uncertain about the future, see so many possibilities, they don’t know where to begin. 

If either of these describe you and your team, try one of these processes with your team.

If you’re STUCK – use this process to generate new ideas.

Begin by re-articulating your collective WHY and putting that at the top of the screen or whiteboard. Then try using one or all of these questions to generate new ideas.

1. WHO – Who are your current customers? (age, location, gender, race, profession)  Who else could benefit from your products and services? Choose 2 or 3 and schedule conversations to learn more about them and their current challenges. 
2. WHAT – What is your current product/service? What value is it creating? What are all the subcomponents of your offering (physical mechanism, algorithm, data, knowledge, patented capabilities)?  What additional value might you create by selling/licensing the disaggregated subcomponents? Or by combining them in a different way? 
3. WHERE – Where is your current product/service sold? delivered? consumed/used? How might changing one or more of these locations open up new opportunities? The obvious shifts many have made is from in-person to virtual and from in-clinic to at-home, but what about shifts from individual to group experiences (or vice versa), from fixed to mobile, or from local to state to national to international?

You get the gist. Continue with WHEN and HOW – start by articulating what you currently do (this is important to do, no matter how “obvious”), then brainstorm ways to branch out on that dimension.

By the time you finish, you may be feeling Scattered! If so, the processes below can help you identify the ideas most worth pursuing.

If you’re SCATTERED – sorting your ideas on multiple dimensions will help you prioritize.

Begin by creating a list of all the options under consideration. Then use one of the following sorting processes to help organize your thinking. Both exercises are best done as a group, but a combination of synchronous and asynchronous processes can used to accommodate globally-distributed team members.

Visual/Whiteboard process

1. Write each option on a paper or electronic sticky note. 
2. Create several grids on the white board (physical or electronic) with unlabeled X and Y axes.
3. Generate a list of dimensions on which to sort the options. I suggest starting with the following and adding any unique to your company or product: Company Capability, Speed/Time to First Revenue, Market Size, Market Access, Market Readiness, Cost (or Margin), Long-term Viability
4. Add dimensions to the grids in various combinations:
   • Company Capability + Speed/Time to First Revenue
   • Company Capability + Margin
   • Speed/Time to First Revenue + Long-term Viability
   • Discuss where each option fits in each grid, and add the stickies to the appropriate quadrants. 

5. Based on the results, identify 2-3 opportunities for further investigation and experimentation.

Logistics note: To deal with the need to sort the same stickies multiple ways, you make multiple copies of the stickies or mark those that end up in the “high priority” quadrant for each sort.

Spreadsheet process

1. Put all the ideas/options in the first column of your favorite spreadsheet application.
2. Generate a list of dimensions on which to sort the options. I suggest starting with the following and adding any unique to your company or product: Company Capability, Speed/Time to First Revenue, Market Size, Market Access, Market Readiness, Cost (or Margin), Long-term Viability
3. Make the dimensions column headers.
4. Define what Low, Medium, and High (or 1, 2, 3) for each dimension means for your team. 
5. Focusing on one column at a time, rate each of the ideas/options on that dimension.
6. Then use the Custom Sort function to sort the spreadsheet on various combinations of dimensions and see what bubbles up.
   • If short-term revenues are the primary concern:  Company Capability (high to low)  Speed/Time to First Revenue  (low to high)  Margin (high to low)
   • If the priority is longer-term viability and getting out of a “red ocean,”:  Company Capability  Long-term Viability  Market Size  Market Access – all sorted high-to-low
7. Based on the results, identify 2-3 opportunities for further investigation and experimentation.

These are uncertain times. A no-pressure Discovery Call to explore new options for your company is always free. Click or call (+1 512-497-9097) to schedule.