Developing a Strategy and Vision (part 1)
In my previous post on Strategy and Vision I discussed what they are and what the differences are. But of course what is far more interesting is how to develop a good vision and strategy. If you already have a vision you are in a luxury position and you ‘only’ need to find the best strategy. If you don’t have a vision yet, you have a lot of work ahead of you. However, it is not as bad as it seems because even if you have a vision there is still a lot to do. Let’s assume for now that you already have a vision.
Preparing for a strategy
A good strategy doesn’t fall out of the air by itself. You’ll want to have several strategies on the table later on so that you can choose the best one. So first we need to create some basis for creating strategies. Basically what you need to know is:
- What are your strengths/competences/skills/assets? What do you bring to the table? What are the basic elements you can work with?
- What are you not so good at? Knowing yourself also means knowing your weaknesses.
- What is the competition doing? Are they ahead of you or are you leading them? Which ones are posing a threat to your business? What is the competition doing or planning?
- What is going on in the market? What are the trends? Where are you in your product lifecycle?
Basically what it comes down to is: know yourself and know you competitor. Or in warfare terms, know your army and know the enemy! As some of you will have guessed already that this is basically what a SWOT analysis provides. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. The Strengths en Weaknesses are about you, the Opportunities and Threats are about the competition and market. A SWOT analysis is a simple technique that helps you list these. However, don’t underestimate a SWOT analysis. It takes practise and a lot of research to make one. It will be the basis of your strategy so it is not to be taken lightly. If you make a crappy SWOT analysis you’ll likely end up with a crappy strategy.
Using a SWOT analysis to develop strategies
A SWOT analysis is just an overview of you and your enemy. So now you need to look for some ‘hooks’ to start building your strategy. So if you have a strong cavalry and your enemy doesn’t you may want to use that in your strategy! The way you do this is as follows:
- See if you have strengths that you can use to seize an opportunity
- See if you have strengths to defend yourself against a threat
- See if you can overcome a weakness by seizing an opportunity
- See if you can improve a weakness so you don’t suffer from a threat
- See if you can improve a weakness so you can seize an opportunity
- See if you should develop new strengths so that you seize an opportunity or fence of a threat
From strategic hooks to strategies
- Prepare 5 traps today
- Place the traps close together in one area that is know to contain wild boars before nightfall
- Mark the traps on a map
- Come back in the morning to inspect traps and hopefully find at least some boars in the traps.
In practice it is often far from obvious how to build a strategy using the hooks you found. There is some ‘creativity’ needed to go from hooks to strategies. There is no magic tip I can give you here other than ‘be creative’. But there are plenty of books written on creative techniques by people such as Edward de Bono that may help you generate ideas for your strategies. But for those that are not so creative you can often see that people like to use ‘pre-fab’ strategies. For example:
- If you have a lot of money you may want to buy your competitor and hence get rid of his threat and at the same time acquire his market share and people.
- If you have seen there is a niche where no may companies are active and you think it will boom, you may want to focus on penetrating that market aggressively.
- If you need to grow really fast you may temporarily lower your prices to undercut you competitor.The idea is that you will recuperate the costs on the long term.
- …and so on.
October 19th, 2010 at 2:01 am
[...] Thoughts on Interaction Design – Welie.com » Blog Archive » Developing a Strategy …In my previous post on Strategy and Vision I discussed what they are and what the differences are. But of course what is far more interesting is how to develop a good vision and strategy. If you already have a vision you are in a luxury position and you ‘only’ need to find the best strategy. If you don’t have a vision yet, you have a lot of work ahead of you. However, it is not as bad as it seems because even if you have a vision there is still a lot to do. Let’s assume for now that you already have a vision. [...]