There's a storm coming...

There's a storm coming...

Today there is cold wind blowing through the world of business, and it’s called digitalisation. This refers to a confluence of rapid changes in market behaviour, technological imperatives and the resulting need for companies to reshape how they work to be able to compete successfully. Depending on how prepared your company is to meet this challenge, it is either an invigorating or chilling wind!

Digitalization means transformation. And at the heart of any successful transformation is a vision of the future, together with a strategy to achieve that vision. How this strategy is formulated differs from organisation to organisation, based on the personalities involved and the context of the business.

I see three ways of defining strategy, i.e.:

  1. Myopic Strategy: this is common in very operationally-focused companies, where strategy is made by simply extending the current way of working into the future.
  2. Intellectualised Strategy: often found in companies with big headquarters, or where a large part of strategy formulation is outsourced to research companies and consultancies.
  3. Goldilocks Strategy: these companies got the balance 'just right', between the operational abilities and strategic needs of the company. This allows them to effectively drive their business towards their vision.

Most companies tend to be in the first two categories, which often accounts for, at best, unremarkable performance over time. Digitalisation poses a direct threat to them.

Strategically myopic companies focus on delivering short term results, until external factors force them to react and try to correct a new problem. This creates a reactive culture, which may be agile and involve everyone, but which is usually inefficient and unsustainable in the long term.

The intellectually strategic companies focus on defining a ‘Big Strategy’. To achieve this, they invest heavily in external resources such as strategy and other consultants, simply because top managers do not believe they can achieve the ‘Big Strategy’ with the existing workforce. These companies count on big strategic implementation initiatives, despite the well-documented disappointing track record of such top-down programs.

The digitalization challenge is a ‘perfect storm’ in which companies need to have ‘all hands on deck’ to be successful. They need to focus both on their operations and their Big Strategy, ensuring that new learnings and insights are constantly informing how they work today and where they are aiming to go. Companies unable to achieve this, are in real risk of sinking.

So how can you get into the ‘Goldilocks’ zone, where excellent incremental execution is firmly connected with an evolving, relevant ‘Big Strategy’? I believe the key factor of success is how good you can become in using a ‘co-creational’ approach … to almost everything you do.

I define ‘co-creation’ as a way of working with three core pillars:

  1. Collaboration: no matter how good your initial idea is, it can be made better by collaborating with internal and external partners.
  2. Context: this is critical. Solutions are only practically useful when they work within a relevant business context. The 'dots' need to connect.
  3. Execution: a contextualised, creative approach is a pre-requisite for subsequent excellent execution. It means working with a commitment to a common goal, and an end to tolerance of ‘over the fence’ or ‘not invented here’ dysfunctional behaviour.

With a co-creational approach, ‘Big Strategy’ becomes an ongoing, creative process with constant constructive challenge from everyone involved in the business. This should include external partners, who will need to work in the same way. 

Adopting a ‘co-creational’ approach will allow you to combine your organisation’s own ‘native’ strengths with those of your business partners in a flexible, creative and deeply satisfying way of working. It will help you firmly connect today’s operational requirements with those required for tomorrow, including a commonly supported and understood ‘Big Strategy’.

It just might help you weather the digitalisation storm that is coming.

The only thing I'd add is that the storm is not coming. It's already here. Just hitting different companies/industries in different ways at different times. Hit bookshops and photography years ago... hit print years ago...hit how we book holidays and travel years ago... hit taxis and public services more recently. Some great points about strategy and co-creation in this article; make use of all talent, young and old, and utilise and stretch that talent to come up with new and better ways of doing business, competing, delivering service.... it just so happens that our current 'paradigm change' is digital. Another one will follow it too - but we don't know what that is yet. Change is constant

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Antimo Fiorillo

Accelerating Site Activation and Patient Enrolment for CROs and SMOs with our Modular Digital Solutions I Co-Founder @Allyfe

9y

It is really going to be complex for most companies to deal with digitization and big data considering the lack of competent resources on the market.The strategy should be really adapted to the level of maturity of each organization. Most companies should first understand what infrastructure they need to build to tackle those challenges in order to avoid to sink. They better start acting now.

Mag Rajasekaran

The B4B Guy ✦ Helping Minfy tell a human story that embraces technology.

9y

Bang on and meaningful.

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