Strategizing Outside of Your Comfort Zone

Posted August 24, 2016

The whole point of having a focused strategy is to make everyone feel safe, secure and know what direction the organization is going, right? Wrong! In an article that challenges that thinking (Harvard Business Review, The Big Lie of Strategic Planning, Jan-Feb 2014), the author, Roger L. Martin, states that instead it should placing bets and making hard choices. The objective is not to eliminate risk but to increase the odds of success.

He offers three rules:

Keep it simple (a one-pager addressing where you will play and how you will win)

Don’t look for perfection (place bets and shorten your odds)

Make the logic explicit (be clear about what must change for you to achieve your strategic goal)

Comfort level strategic planning usually results in adopting one of a number of standard processes, which means the strategy is based entirely around what the company can control. However, your marketplace is not fixed – it is changing rapidly. That means your strategy has to be flexible to address changes in the competitive environment and make course corrections along the way. That goes way beyond strategic planning and is so much more realistic!

Clients, Leadership, strategic planning

Ann Banning - Wright

CLIENT:	Large Engineering Firm
CHALLENGE:	Extend and secure new contracts in the area of Data Centers for telecommunication, finance and media industries.
RESEARCH:	Designed face-to-face interviews that reveal the challenges and the breakdowns that cause the most pain in data centers.
DISCOVERY OF UNTAPPED POTENTIAL:	Identified “downtime” as the most critical concern evidenced by a financial institution losing $260 million dollars a minute when their check processing centers went off line. A variety of well- intentioned vendors, designers, departments and process operators were responsible for getting back online but we discovered they were often working independently in silo’s – a cumbersome and inefficient response to an expensive problem.
HARNESS POTENTIAL:	Plucked individuals from across departments and disciplines to assemble a team dedicated to “Collaborative Design and Operations for Data Center Uptime. Newly formed team collaboratively built and marketed a unique practice promising result. Data Center Uptime Named the Offer > OnlinEnivronments. Specified all the moving parts of the OnlineEnvironments Design Solution and the cost benefit. Geography of Facility – Architecture and Engineering of Facility – IT Infrastructure and Facilities Management – Process Design and Outage Prevention Management
RESULTS:	Out-of-the-gate this untapped potential accelerated growth and generated 14million dollars of new revenue. This success demonstrates how a distinctive solution accelerates a company’s capacity to become market leaders, to choose their clients and to charge more for it. The optimum result of working with Bright Operations is the creation of a structural and operational eco-system that is sustainable over time, producing preferred transactions and smart market extensions over and over again. In other words, “Wow, we’ve done it again!”

Strategizing Outside of Your Comfort Zone

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Did you know… An experiment reveals that elephants not only cooperate but that they understand the logic behind teamwork. Now that’s a smart human lesson learned from the animal kingdom!

In his book, The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything, Stephen M. R. Covey writes that trust is an essential element in business: “When trust goes up, speed goes up while costs come down.” Conversely, “When trust goes down, speed goes down and costs come up.”

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Strategizing Outside of Your Comfort Zone

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