Creating Adaptive Business Strategies
With the business landscape becoming more volatile and uncertain, strategic planning can quickly become irrelevant, preventing an organization from moving forward. Businesses must create an adaptive business strategy that can accommodate disruptions to long-term strategies.
Strategy and Strategic Planning
Strategy allows for organizations to create a common understanding of what goals need to be achieved and what is needed to achieve them. Creating a strategic plan will bridge the gap between high-level strategic thinking to daily actions that will execute the strategy itself.
If a strategic plan is carried out properly, there will be a clear roadmap of initiatives and actions required to meet defined business goals.
Adaptive Strategy
Taking an adaptive strategy approach will ensure an organization can quickly identify new opportunities and respond more quickly than competitors, allowing more success in an ever-evolving digital world. There are four practices an organization needs in order to successfully implement an adaptive strategy.
Begin Early:
As fast as the world moves, it’s imperative to implement a strategic plan as quickly as possible. Adaptive strategy does not require complete information and does not have to be perfect to launch – just use available information to identify which actions need to be taken first to have success.
Respond to Change:
A truly adaptive business will review their strategy consistently, completing reviews whenever new information becomes available, but the strategic vision should remain unchanged.
Embrace Uncertainty
Taking risks creates opportunity, and responding quickly to events as they’re happening often leads to success. Implementing adaptive strategy helps accomplish and mitigate risk.
Have Everyone Participate
Receiving input from people inside and outside of the organization will provide an engaging and collaborative environment, allowing new ideas to come through for higher quality output.
A truly adaptive approach will not be rigid and will be event-based. It requires strategy to be reviewed when new information becomes available and must adjust in response to those changes.