Every successful business engages in long-term planning of some description but the success of any plan is, as every business knows, dependent on how well the planners have understood the changing objectives of the business and anticipated trends, changes in the market place, and the exigencies of external events. If a business wishes to contain the effects of these unknowns and the inadequacies of even the most careful predictions it must have a means of abstracting the plan into a more broadly applicable guide with an inbuilt mechanism for evolving and changing without losing sight of the ultimate goals and the best path towards them. What is required is a strategy.
A strategy sets out how the business should behave when confronted with problems and decisions. Specifically, it will provide a framework for decisions and changes that will continue to direct it towards its long-term objectives. As a result, each area of the business will deliver coherent changes in this regard and not frustrate and contradict the others. With a strategy the business managers will be able to measure progress and review efficacy of the plan. It is both an abstraction of planning and a pragmatic mechanism for managing and measuring the progress of all change in pursuing clearly understood benefits.
In order to deliver a strategy specialists must be put to task:
- Identifying the owners of the strategy - who is expecting the long-term benefits and providing the resources to obtain them?
- Establishing which people and organisational groups might impinge on delivery of the expected benefits?
- Enquiring who the individual stakeholders representing these groups are and which of them should be involved in the composition and maintenance of the strategy?
- Defining what principles and policies need to be observed when making decisions and changes, to ensure the delivery of expected benefits?
- Agreeing the plan that will deliver the expected benefits and highlighting currently unfunded investment that would be required.
- Analysing and providing progress metrics to the stakeholders, governing compliance with the strategy and managing exceptions to it through review and stakeholder approval.
In subsequent sections of this document we will define strategy and explore in more detail how a strategy might be developed, delivered, and maintained by a business.