Further information on:
“How do I get a compelling growth strategy?”
Option 2 is Poor: Make some templates and hold an
off-site session where everyone can brainstorm.
By far, this is the most common approach. Let’s face it executives feel
that they have to do something about strategy and somewhere in everyone’s
career, they get involved in just such an activity. Yet if you ask people what
actually happened in these sessions, the vast majority will agree that it was
an exercise in futility. We brainstormed some interesting ideas, but virtually
none of them got implemented.
The primary problem either of two things, sometimes both. If you want it done
in a couple of days, then many templates are sent out asking everyone to fill
them. Usually the data are just people’s guesses because the real data
would require disciplines that are missing from most organizations.
The second problem is that filling templates is not a thinking process. There is no discover, no creativity, no insight into the organization’s potential outside of the templates.
Thus the templates provide more than consistency, they demand a subliminal conformity that precludes the very ideas upon which actual growth can be built.
If Option #2 is a process, it is the process of poor
guessing.