Gone are the days of annual strategy reviews. Today, CXO’s need to embrace the reality that even strategy development & monitoring is a continuous undertaking. The digital era, along with all of its enabling technologies, has empowered nimble companies to pivot at a strategic level at any point in time – larger, established companies may not yet have felt the need, but they are only a surprise disruption away (and there are plenty of up-and-comers ready to serve it up).
The new rules of the game put a premium on staying nimble and acting with speed at all levels of the organization, being able to spot change before it happens and then optimizing the levers of execution to profit from disruption. Organizations that are able to do this well have adopted a new model for planning called Continuous Strategy: they learn by doing, adjusting the strategy as demanded by risks and opportunities as they emerge at every level of the organization, innovating as they go, hoping to fail fast and win big.
Although the concept of Continuous Strategy may be new for some, the need for this capability has been steadily increasing over the past decade. Unfortunately, the early responses to converging disruptive forces have happened mostly in tactical pockets around the organization, much like troops in the trenches will be the first to adapt to a change in battle. However, the sea of change is now so pervasive, companies that expect to survive (much less thrive) need to adapt across all levels on a continuous basis, even at the strategic level. Continuous strategy is not constantly planning while doing; rather, it is having the capability to make strategic adjustments in a rapid manner when warranted by changing circumstances. Actively monitoring trigger events coupled with predefined calls to action enable companies to efficiently handle strategic shifts. More importantly, it allows a company to fully align with the realities of today’s unpredictable business environment, from the top of the organization to the bottom.
Another critical change underway at the strategic level is to shift from a customer-focused to a consumer-driven strategy. Most companies take a customer-focused view of strategy development – this “customer” view is usually defined by the immediate payment periphery within the value chain ecosystem, and as such, a true consumer view is often the exclusive domain of the last 1-2 organizations in the value chain. The notion of a Consumer Value Network (CVN) approach transforms the traditional value chain & strategy development by placing the end customer (i.e. consumer) at the center of the ecosystem. Each company plays a role in the overall consumer value network, and that role is a choice, not just a victim of circumstance. The company closest to the center becomes a CVN platform owner, and has the largest amount of influence across the CVN (aside from the consumer). NOTE: every company within the CVN has the consumer at its core, but outer orbits have less pressures for ongoing consumer diligence and intimacy. Leading companies that fully embrace the consumer-driven strategy approach also recognize that consumer behavior is influenced across multiple, related CVN’s.