How’s your Strategic ability?
Business innovation and strategic planning are essential components of a business strategy to survive harsh economic climates. Does your business have the strategic flexibility to survive? Here’s the steps to building the strategic agility of your organisation.
What’s Strategic Agility?
Strategic Agility (SA) is the ability of a business to transform innovation into practical forms, to continually reinvent a business to meet certain financial situations and to rapidly adopt new business strategies.
Your business can never sit still, no matter how far ahead you are in your field. Everything degrades over time, and so you must strive continuously to hold your position. Any business must have innovation, and the strategic planning and flexibility to adapt to conditions and change whenever needed.
All modern well-known businesses have changed over the years. For a start, each one now has (or should have) an online presence.
Without SA, these changes would take a lot longer than they actually do. This is especially important today when world economies change with increasing regularity. Those that can react fastest last longest.
Change, growth and success
The best leaders are those that have learned to strategise and plan ahead for eventualities that might never happen. Good leaders have learned from years of experience in business that while Strategic Agility is fine, being prepared is finer.
They can formulate strategic plans for a number of potential consequences of situations such as booms, recessions, catastrophic loss of manufacturing capabilities and many more. However, solutions must be kept up to date with innovative thinking and strategic planning. When things happen, they are ready and their plan can be rapidly put into effect. Are you amongst them?
Here are 3 lessons:
- Change is always imminent, so go with it and learn from it.
- Growth and success comes from accepting change and being ready for it, and if you can learn from past mistakes then you will know that planning for change doesn’t always work – but is better than standing still.
- Organising your business to be able to effect innovation rapidly, that is, ensuring it has good strategic agility, is one of those steps you can take to prepare for change.
Speed and flexibility
Strategic agility involves speed and flexibility as well as innovation. The ability to reinvent a business quickly when external conditions are rapidly changing could help it to maintain its market share and profitability under the direst conditions. This form of strategic agility requires vision and knowledge and the ability to put innovation into practice rapidly.
- Innovation can involve creating new business rules to suit new conditions, and discarding the old ones.
- Strategic agility can involve employing staff able to act speedily and flexibly to create new business strategies that will keep the business in a winning situation.
Thinking strategically for agility
Strategic Agility is down to thinking. A key component of maintaining SA is to think better.
- Remain objective.
The ability to remain objective and to change your conclusions when facing unsatisfactory evidence is a key behavior for you to develop. It is easy to feel cornered or defeated. - Don’t be too optimistic
Maintaining some ‘slack’ in your system, such as cash buffers, is very important to maintaining strategic agility. Buffers need to be strategically placed in just the right spot to ensure you are really maintaining protective capacity. - Velocity
The speed of your business processes are of paramount importance. For example, how rapidly do your onboard a new client? What about your product or service development processes? The speed at which you can turn around key processes in your business is critical, as it means you need to maintain far less inventory in buffers. - People management
Agility can’t be achieved if only senior managers are able to make decisions. Empowering people to make decisions and act themselves is a critical aspect of strategic agility. To enable this it is important that internal communication is optimized. To make decisions correctly people must understand the strategic objectives of the business. Therefore it’s vital that managers explain personally to employees what the objectives of the business are and how each employee can play their part in helping the company achieve those objectives. - Focus on leadership
Leadership skills analysis and training is essential. It is important that a range of TODAY’S leadership skills are developed if strategic agility is to be nurtured and become useful as a business asset. Without good leadership, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve meaningful results.
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