Hunt For Greatness
Milton Kamwendo
Imagine three businesses leaving a planning workshop with the same strategy planning template: a manufacturer with predictable orders, a digital venture testing an unfamiliar market and a retailer struggling to survive.
All three seek to produce detailed five-year plans. Their documents may look impressive. But should their approaches be identical?
Greatness is strategic movement. Before choosing your next move, choose how you will make your strategic choices. Your strategy should be more than familiar frameworks and targets. It needs an approach suited to the conditions you face.
In their book “Your Strategy Needs a Strategy” Messrs Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs and Janmejaya Sinha describe five strategy approaches: classical, adaptive, visionary, shaping and renewal.
Their key lesson is that it is important to match your strategy approach to your environment rather than force every challenge into one formula.
Read the conditions
Begin your strategy efforts with three questions: How predictable is our environment? How much can we influence or reshape it? How harsh are the conditions threatening our viability?
Do not just label the operating environment as “uncertain” and stop thinking.
A confirmed supply contract, an untested product and a distressed business present different strategic problems. Diagnose before prescribing. The method that served yesterday’s assignment may not fit today’s challenge.
Move classically: Plan and deliver
A classical approach suits relatively predictable conditions where the rules of competition are difficult to change. Analyse the market, choose an advantageous position and execute a coherent plan. Imagine a manufacturer with dependable demand and established production requirements. Its priority might be improving quality, building capacity and delivering consistently.
Here, strategy planning deserves depth. Set standards, allocate resources and monitor delivery.
Do not abandon disciplined execution simply because experimentation sounds fashionable. Where the conditions support planning, plan properly and honour the commitments.
Move adaptively: Test and learn
An adaptive approach suits conditions that are difficult to predict and difficult for you to shape. Instead of relying on detailed forecasts, run experiments, learn quickly and expand what works.
For an entrepreneur testing an unfamiliar service, begin with a manageable trial. Observe customer behaviour. Revise the offer before committing to a costly expansion.
Do not confuse adaptation with changing direction whenever somebody complains. Define what you are testing, what evidence matters and when you will decide.
Move quickly enough to learn, but carefully enough to survive the lesson.
Move visionarily: create the future
A visionary approach fits an opportunity you can foresee with sufficient confidence and have the power to create or reshape. It requires going beyond optimism. It requires building the future you envisage.
Suppose an entrepreneur identifies an unmet need and a credible way to serve it differently. The task is to assemble the capabilities, secure resources and turn the idea into a viable offering.
Do not call an unsupported wish a vision. Examine the evidence behind your conviction. Dream boldly, build deliberately and remain willing to improve the means.
Move collectively: Shape the market
A shaping approach fits an unpredictable environment that can nevertheless be influenced through collaboration. Rather than impose a finished blueprint, bring participants together to help develop the market.
Imagine growers, transporters, storage providers and buyers creating a new route to market. Their opportunity depends on coordinated participation, not one organisation’s effort alone.
Ask who must participate, why they would join and how responsibilities and benefits will be shared.
Do not mistake a roomful of partners for a functioning partnership. Agree on arrangements, build trust and adjust together as the opportunity develops.
Move through renewal: Restore viability
A renewal approach addresses conditions so harsh that survival is threatened.
First stabilise the organisation and release resources. Then redirect effort towards renewed growth.
For a struggling enterprise, opening another branch may be less urgent than understanding losses, protecting essential operations and addressing the causes of distress.
Do not mistake expansion for recovery. Equally, do not turn cost reduction into a permanent vision. Renewal must lead somewhere. Preserve what matters, correct what is broken and prepare a route forward.
Match the movement to the moment
You may need different approaches simultaneously or successively. The authors call this approach strategic ambidexterity. This calls for combining approaches rather than insisting that one method serves every situation.
A business might plan its established operations carefully while experimenting with a new service. Another might need renewal before pursuing expansion. Match your meetings, measures and decision-making to the approach. Do not assess an early experiment only against the predictable returns expected from an established operation.
Choose one priority in this period. Diagnose its conditions, select the appropriate approach and specify what your team must do differently.
Do not defend your favourite framework at the expense of your purpose. Make your approach serve the assignment, not the other way around.
Strategy must inform movement. Plan where you can. Experiment where you must. Create where you see possibility. Collaborate where others are essential. Renew where survival demands it.
Move by ensuring that your strategy has a strategy.
Milton Kamwendo is a leading international transformational and motivational speaker, and author of more than 15 books. He can be reached at: [email protected], WhatsApp: +263772422634.
