3 Activities To Encourage Dynamic Strategic Thinking

The future of strategy and innovation will be incredibly dynamic. Leadership and companies will have to prepare for a world where businesses will constantly have to reinvent themselves. How can you prepare for this transformation? In this post, we share three activities that leaders and teams can regularly perform to become dynamic strategic thinkers.

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Last year Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur were recognized by Thinkers50 for their impact on strategy and innovation. Alex and Yves earned the #15 spot in what Financial Times considers the “Oscars of management thinking”.

In his thank you note to our audience, Alex mentioned sitting alongside other influential strategic thinkers like Rita McGrath, Steve Blank, and Eric Ries. Together, this group represents a new wave of dynamic strategic thinking that will encourage organizations to be agile and constantly reinvent themselves.

So how can companies prepare for a world where business models and value propositions will change regularly and dramatically? What can leadership do to tangibly discuss and capture where the company is now, and where the company needs to be?

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Columbia School of Business professor Rita McGrath spoke to us about the future of strategy and innovation. And in our chat, Rita shared her “portfolio model” which consists of three activities leadership can regularly conduct to evaluate strategic progress.

1. Start with looking at what you have got.

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You will want to assess what the company is working on that’s part of today’s business. What projects or areas of the organization can be a candidate that could fuel the next generation of growth? And what are you currently working on that are potential options for the future? Are there existing resources or assets that have been overlooked, but could be repositioned to create new value for customers or the company?

2. Discuss where you want to be.

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When you look out five or ten years, what are some of the things the organization wants to achieve? Where are you hoping to aim the company? From there you can work backwards and assess how it will apply to what the company is doing.

3. Then break it all down into day-to-day activities.

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This is where all areas of the organization will get involved, and it’s how your strategy can be implemented. You will have to translate your longer term strategy into day-to-day activities that will consist of experiments, learning, and iterations. These tasks will all move you toward validating or invalidating the future value your company hopes to create. You will be continually gathering evidence for the organization’s vision, and regularly need to assess how these new ideas or opportunities can get the company where it wants to be.

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