CORE PRACTICE AREAS

STRATEGY:

It’s time for a better approach.

We get it. Your current strategic management framework – whether it’s Balanced Scorecard, Hoshin Kanri, or something else – just isn’t driving the results it’s supposed to. Every year it’s the same thing; spend weeks debating new fiscal year objectives with your boss, and then wish you had more time to work on them… until the end of each business quarter when you scramble because you owe updates on your progress. In parallel, you’re getting pressured into taking on one Agile project after another, and that approach is starting to seem less and less “agile” with massive teams and rigid processes.

None of this feels like strategy. And it’s certainly not creating the impact an authentic strategy should.

Instead, this year’s objectives are (once again) largely seeking incremental gains, because as it’s often said – “nobody gets fired for delivering modest year-over-year growth.”

This seems palatable until competitors introduce new breakthroughs. Then genuine panic ensues. In response, more Agile projects are launched under duress, fueled by these new market threats and led by discouraged teams who soon realize the most they can hope to accomplish is a “me too” offering to put your company at parity with the first-movers. It’s a vicious cycle that produces lackluster results and widespread burnout.

Woman Draw a Light bulb in White Board

Are you ready to get serious about strategy?
We can help.

Your team can do better on the strategy front, and you don’t need a management consultancy to do it for you. Sequent can help you build a better go-to-market approach in FOUR STEPS:

Does your team spend most of its time developing reports (documenting history), trying to reconcile reports across teams to see whose numbers are most accurate (debating history), or using reports to decide on next steps (looking ahead)?

If your data isn’t integrated across functional areas, you’re probably working without a common understanding of each team’s impact as customers move through their journey with you – and spending WAY too much time reliving the past.

An ETL/ELT process and End-to-End Measurement dashboards can help reduce the time your team is spending on report development, put the debates to rest, and shift everyone’s focus on the future. Whether this is achieved through a SAAS provider or using a custom analytics stack, this is the first crucial enabler for any strategy program.

It’s equally important to conduct some basic research, to put your data into context. Our Essential Insights© framework will help your leaders develop a shared “map” of the market landscape, and ensure your conversations about results are aligned and productive.

In many organizations, one group dominates the strategy development process. Whether it’s the Corporate Strategy team, Marketing, Product, or Sales, these companies have one thing in common – they struggle to execute on their game plans.

One obvious part of the problem is lack of buy-in from the leaders who weren’t given a chance to weigh in on the strategy. But the larger issue is that no single team has enough visibility across the business to anticipate potential failure points, or capitalize on tailwinds that might have supported their efforts.

So why do leaders avoid a more collaborative process? One major hurdle is the differing worldviews of each team, driven by disjointed analytics (described previously.) The other challenge is a failure of many strategic management frameworks, which don’t account for the timing to conduct much-needed research which would anchor productive conversations across functions.

Our Tractometry© framework will help orchestrate all of the activities that feed into strategy (including research) and guide your team through the decision making processes that are central to strategy formulation.

At an executive level, our own development focus is often on leadership – or specific to our “craft.” As a result, even veteran leaders with world-class domain expertise (and arguably at the top of their field) may still need a foundation in strategy.

Our SERIOUS Strategy© class will ensure that everyone on your leadership team has a common foundation to work from. It includes a brief history of strategy, an overview of the predominant strategy schools, an in-depth discussion of the individual capabilities that are needed by strategic leaders, and an introduction to our Tractometry© framework for bringing strategy to life.

By equipping all of your key leaders to contribute meaningfully to strategy, you’ll ensure that strategic decisions reflect the insight and knowledge of the entire business, and are supported across the enterprise.

Your organization may already have a strategic management PROCESS. If that process isn’t encouraging the PRACTICE of strategy, then it’s not going to produce results.

Strategy isn’t something we formulate once a year and discuss quarterly. It’s also not a declaration that “our strategy is to stay agile,” followed by a perpetual game of corporate whack-a-mole.

Strategy IS a combination of a perspective, positioning, plan, pattern, and ploy. (Hat tip to Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, and Lampel, who literally wrote the book on the different schools of strategy.) It involves calculated bets, anxiety-inspiring decisions, resource tradeoffs, and teamwork.

These activities won’t operationalize themselves. We need to carve out time and resources to practice them, at an enterprise level. This is where Tractometry© comes in.

Contact Sequent today to learn how Tractometry© can help your organization get measurable traction on market leadership.

It’s time to get you out in front of your competition.

Strategy development is an art and a science. While there is no secret recipe or magic process for churning out a perfect approach every time, companies who make strategy a deliberate, ongoing practice increase their success rate significantly.

At Sequent, our goal is to help clients cultivate the courage they need to place strategic bets ahead of the market.

Interested in learning more? Use the form below to contact us today!

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We’d love to understand the challenges you are facing, to see if we can help.

Send us an email at info@sequent.solutions and we’ll figure it out!

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