Traditional strategic planning approaches often fail to deliver the results that firms require to jump start growth or pull out of a sustained decline.  Legacy approaches emphasize a periodic focus on strategy—often an annual refresh against a long-range plan.  This “strategy as an event” approach is increasingly obsolete in a world that changes overnight, with markets being born, maturing and dying at hyper-speed.  Instead, what is needed is a more dynamic means for professionals to experiment, innovate and to assess results and refine activities in near-real time.

Organizations that learn to work in “Strategy Bursts” are able to learn, adapt and refine their strategic activities faster than more plodding competitors, but this new style requires learning and internalizing a new approach to strategy management and execution.  For many leaders and executives, succeeding with this new model requires letting go of old strategy habits and biases. 

Ideas for Managing Strategy in Bursts:

  • Make strategy a key part of the job of a large number of people.  The development of a core strategy team comprised of executives, functional heads and more importantly, mid-level leaders and knowledge workers is a great way to introduce strategy into a firm’s genetic pool.
  • Create a strategy regimen that is different from operational routines, but that merits almost the same level of review and same frequency of coverage.  Call out strategy as a regular activity with monthly or more frequent contact to review strategy execution and, identify what’s working and what needs to change.  Meet often to refresh on market forces, competitor strategies and most importantly to incorporate what the team is learning from customers and market activities into the strategic activities.  Frequency of engagement on strategy is one key component of a “Strategy Burst” approach.
  • Your core strategy group must establish great bi-directional communications with their teams about all things tied to strategy.  Functional and project teams must match their activities to strategic objectives and also have the means to communicate insights and ideas to people and in environments where they can be vetted and potentially adopted.  Get the broader organization involved in both execution and identifying insights
  • Develop a robust process for prioritizing and executing on strategic initiatives and moving them into the operations flow quickly.  As strategic initiatives move from extraordinary and new to “something we are doing,” it’s time to identify and develop new strategic initiatives.  Focus on execution and speed of refreshing the strategic initiatives are key components of the “Burst” approach.
  • It’s OK to have strategic initiatives that are slightly tactical. (Yes, I used strategic and tactical to describe the same activity!)  Create digestible activities, smaller projects in support of larger strategic goals, and execute.  Identify, act, learn, adapt.
  • Beware the natural tendency of functional heads to resist constant assessment and focus on strategy.  An effective “Strategy Burst” approach provides little time for traditional silo building that is often a key emphasis of functional heads.  It keeps everything that everyone is doing out in the open, where the BS factor is quickly visible and capable of being shot-down.
  • Evaluate your top managers on their performance for driving the strategy process.  Accountability, particularly at this level is a must.
  • Apply formal project management practices to the "Strategy Burst" program, but don’t let the activity lose energy and become routine.  It’s a key leadership challenge to manage the “atmosphere” around strategy.  Celebrate victories, reward results and begin building new stories and ultimately legends that are important to feeding a culture of constant strategy refresh and relentless execution.

The bottom-line:

Managing strategy as the slow, plodding and periodic process of years past is less and less of an option in our emerging world.  A “Strategy Burst” approach helps fuel rapid cultural change and an emphasis on winning, growing and building value. A great Burst program is a bit like organized chaos teetering on the brink of greatness and the abyss of disaster.  The alternative is organizational death by slow decay.  Instead of fighting the forces of speed, complexity and change, use judo on them to win. Of course, it means you have to change your ways.  Now is a good time.