Is your strategy feasible?

Your strategy is more likely to be feasible if your key strategic goals are well-resolved – that means they are:

• Recognised AND
• Understood AND
• Realistic AND
• Aligned.

Discover below:

• Key advice and actions to ensure your strategy is feasible.
• Questions to ask to prompt deeper conversations on the feasibility of your strategy across your organisation.
• Strategy models relating to feasibility.
• Strategy workshops.
• Links to our full range of resources, including ‘The Strategy Manual’, our Strategy Glossary and links to articles and posts by Mike Baxter.
• We also offer consultancy and advice on all aspects of strategy.

Key advice and actions

Your strategy will be feasible if your strategic goals are clearly recognised as such, readily understood, realistic and aligned.

1. Recognising strategic goals

A strategy is the sum of its strategic goals. Those goals upon which strategic success depends need to be recognised as ‘strategic goals’ so they can be managed appropriately. They need to stand apart from all the other, more operational goals. Strategy doesn’t have a great deal of value for managing business-as-usual. There are policies, processes, standard operating procedures and accepted ways of working for this. Effective business-as-usual needs competent management and efficient administration more than it needs strategy.

Strategy is about the future; it is about change. Strategic goals, and the initiatives to support them, are what you spend a minority of your organisation’s time and resources on, in order to provide the high-risk, high-return element of how your organisation invests for its long-term future. So, deciding how much to invest in business transformation, as opposed to the maintenance of business-as-usual is to decide how much you are investing in strategy. This is the essence of the Boundary Model of Strategy.

2. Ensuring strategic goals are understood, realistic and aligned

Clear, realistic and aligned strategic goals result from a strategy that is well-resolved. This means it has been designed to be fit-for-purpose, has been effectively validated and is widely communicated. For strategic goals to be well-contextualised, your strategy needs to be informed by research and analysis in three key areas: customers, competitors and capabilities. For strategic goals to be realistic, they need to be stretching yet achievable within the timescale of your strategy.

There are eight elements that ensure your strategy is fit-for-purpose:

1. A clear destination;
2. A handful of critical core methods;
3. Alignment providing the logic connecting actions to outcomes;
4. Innovation and the cultivation of new ways of thinking and working;
5. The identification of what really matters through priority;
   
6. Performance measurement using data indicative of meaningful progress;
   
7. Adaptability combining resilience and agility;
   
8. Adoption through active engagement and willing commitment.

A checklist of these eight elements is given in the Strategy Design Checklist, and they form the basis of the Strategy Design Model.

A further way to ensure that a new or existing strategy is fit-for-purpose is to validate it against the five ‘hallmarks’ of a good strategy:

1. Strategy is about change;
2. Strategy is about choice;
3. Strategy is about coherence;
4. Strategy is about challenge;
5. Strategy is about cascade.

The Hallmarks of Good Strategy model describes these hallmarks in further detail and provides a framework for validating your strategy ideas against each hallmark. It can be used to judge whether one strategy idea is better or worse than another in a structured, systematic way.

Strategic goals need to be aligned so that they work well together. Aligning strategic goals can be effectively achieved through strategy mapping, a technique that can also be used to clearly communicate the interconnected nature of strategic goals. This gives everyone a clear sense of strategic purpose by seeing how their individual achievements connect directly to overall strategic success.

The SaNity Check Model validates a strategy map by considering, for each goal, whether the purposes identified for that goal are sufficient and necessary to justify it, and then whether the methods identified are sufficient and necessary to achieve it. This ensures that the achievement of strategic goals is feasible.

Let’s talk about… the feasibility of your strategy

Use these questions to prompt deeper conversations* on the feasibility of your strategy across your organisation:

• How well-resolved is your strategy? Is it fit-for-purpose, effectively validated and widely communicated? Are your strategic goals readily understood?
  
• Do you clearly differentiate between strategic goals and operational goals? What are the boundaries on your strategy?
  
• How do you inform your strategic goals? How do you get data? How do you know when you have got enough data? When do you stop research and analysis?
  
• Are your strategic goals stretching enough? Too stretching? Are they achievable within the timescale of your strategy?
  
• Will the achievement of all your strategic goals add up to overall strategic success? Do you have too many strategic goals? Too few?

*Download a pdf with some helpful rules (suggested by Ed Morrison and colleagues in their book Strategic Doing) to ensure successful conversations about strategy.

Want to know more?

Discover below the strategy models and workshops that can improve the feasibility of your strategy, or see our full range of resources, including ‘The Strategy Manual‘, our Strategy Glossary and links to articles and posts by Mike Baxter.

We also offer consultancy and advice on all aspects of strategy – find out more about how we work.

Our strategy workshops and models are colour-coded  under the following themes:

Strategy models to ensure your strategy is feasible:

Strategy workshops to ensure your strategy is feasible:

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