Adaptive Strategy
Understanding The Landscape
The first task is to define what the current landscape looks like and where the interlocking and often opposing dynamics are located. A good way to do this is to use Causal Loop Diagrams that can help to map out the causes and effects of performing an action or implementing an initiative. This mapping helps to test the initial assumptions and explores the landscape to find areas of interest, unexpected or unknown dynamics in the wider system that may encourage or discourage the action or initiative.
When mapping out the causes and effects, it is generally good practice to look at both positive influencers as well as negative influencers to the initiative or action, and that to unwittingly introduce a bias by only using one of these perceptions will not show the opposing and balancing dynamics that may be present in the system.
Being aware of the opposing and balancing dynamics will help to define some guiding principles, for example: using a single point of contact as an account manager for a client service gives great customer service, but this might also introduce a bottleneck to the process, which if left unchecked could generate an opposing negative perception from the customer if their needs are not met.
Deriving Guiding Principles
After mapping out the causes and effects of a wider landscape and complex system of balancing and opposing dynamics, some guiding principles might be identified such as delivering more software to a client provides a great customer experience, but now the support overhead has increased limiting the number of budget and staff available to deliver anything more, for example. In this situation, a guiding principle may well be to deliver more to the customer, but also to reduce the support overhead through increased quality and automated processes etc.
Deriving the guiding principles and being aware of the opposing and balancing dynamics in a landscape will help to determine where to focus the efforts and temper the initiatives with a more in depth treatment and provisions.
From Principles To Strategic Goals
Having defined some guiding principles and being aware of the opposing and balancing dynamics in the system, goals can be derived to form up the strategy and intentions. These may be a mix of reactive goals such as improving a customer service that has received some negative customer feedback for example, as well as proactive goals to determine a direction of where to position the organisation with respect to the dynamics at play in the landscape.
Being too focussed on feedback and, in a sense, being too reactive to customer needs may well provide a service that is wanted by the customers, but there may not be the market differentiator to guarantee long term success and growth. There may be a risk of long term stagnation of the organisation that is too reactive rather than making provision to be more proactive to uncover customer desires.
The goals and guiding principles could be recorded in an A3 or Business Model Canvas for future verification.
Exploring The Hypotheses
Blending in the use of the Lean Startup movement, the strategic goals may well evolve into growth and value hypotheses that will need to be tested with validated learning. An Agile team could be used to determine experiments to test the hypotheses and produce solutions in an iterative approach that can then be used in customer testing for example. (See Incorporating Agile Teams Within A Lean Startup Approach.) This validated learning from obtaining feedback to an evolved solution can then be used to determine if the initial assumptions behind the strategic goals and the guiding principles still hold or if they need to be adjusted.
Pivot or Persevere
As per the Lean Startup movement, a regular pivot or persevere evaluation should be done with the results of the validated learning to either refine or abandon the hypotheses that were tested. This may be done on a regular basis that makes sense to the organisation, i.e. how often does the organisation obtain enough feedback data to be able to make a strategic decision? This may be half yearly or quarterly for example.
The A3 or Business Model Canvas that recorded the goals and guiding principles can also be used to record the results of the experiments as a record of the intent and the results found.
It would be a mistake to presume that the initial exercise of drawing out the causal loop diagram still holds after a short duration, as the competing and opposing dynamics may well evolve in a complex system, and effectively, the goals posts have moved on. Hence, it is probably prudent to repeat the exercise on a regular basis or to fine tune the diagram as changes in the dynamics are detected. The problem is a non-linear problem space, in that, all of the complex interrelationships between the dynamics may be constantly moving and evolving, and so a strategy based upon the findings may only be valid for a finite time period.