Strategy 2025- Symptoms of failure and success.
Time to update your method?
Stuff I’ve been doing:
Fighting the Russians
A few years ago, I wrote the wine strategy for Georgia. The worlds oldest wine-making nation. The strategy focused on building market momentum to shift away from the economic and social control imposed by their big aggressive neighbor on the other side of the Caucasus Mountains. That work seems even more important in today’s political turmoil.
Board and Exec briefings
I’ve created a series of Board and Executive briefings for busy people who might be a little out of touch with cutting-edge management thinking. These are short, sharp, fun, challenging, and deliberately provocative. Email Liz@aglx.com if you want to refresh your perspective.
Sneaky Cyber Stuff
I’ve been advising on Cyber Security strategy. As part of that work, we borrowed some ideas on deception and asymmetric warfare from a former FBI profiler and cyber specialist at Walmart – Tim Pappa. Brian Rivera and I then interviewed Tim on the AGLX -No Way Out Podcast. Tim is an amazing guy. I’ll post the link when its available.
https://www.captechu.edu/faculty-staff/timothy-pappa
Sport – Winning is not an authentic objective
I have been advising a globally renowned sporting body on adaptive strategy. This isn’t just how to create a sustainable winning ratio at the elite level but also how to engage supporters, sponsors, junior grades and the wider community. When faced with increasingly diverse options for hearts minds and eyeballs, increasingly lethargic children, global competition and stretched sponsors being adaptive is the only option. Winning on the field is nice but it’s not a helpful objective at the strategic level. Focus on the things you can control, amplify the positive, dampen the negative, learn form both. Winning will come.
Symptoms of Failure and Signs of Success
We are now ¼ of the way through the century. Change is accelerating, and uncertainty dominates our strategic horizon. Many of the strategy techniques employed by organizations are designed for a world that changes slowly, and where tomorrow will be a slight variation of today.
It's time to update the way you think about strategy.
Here’s one you might like :)
In this part of the world, people are ready to get back to work after a lazy summer holiday.
Thoughts turn to strategy, and many will return to the office with anticipation and excitement, others with dread as the world is changing so fast.
Organizations will be starting the strategic planning process. Most will be confronted by a strategic landscape that is changing quickly and cannot be relied upon to stabilize. The rapid rise of AI and the recent shock to the market for Deepseek are examples of how the ground can shift quickly and how even new businesses can be quickly disrupted.
In the last year, I have seen companies create viable businesses by utilizing the ChatGPT platform to provide bespoke services—only to have it rendered obsolete with the release of other generative AI. Their first-mover competitive advantage lasted about eight months.
Companies that use strategy models that rely on analyzing the past to predict the future are doomed to constantly lurch from action to reaction. Some of the symptoms of an ineffective strategy are listed below. Consultants love these because they get to work on the symptoms, not the root cause.
Revision, transformation, and restructuring make execs feel busy, consultants feel important, and staff feel disillusioned and burnt out.
Symptoms of the Failure
The organisational symptoms of an ineffective strategy are seen as follows:
Ignoring the strategy
No one knows the strategy or how it relates to their work. The strategy is never discussed at the operational, executive, or board level. We are too focused on what is changing and how we will react to that change. End-of-year reporting against the strategy becomes a series of retrospective explanations about why the strategy needed to be modified or how unexpected events led to unplanned activity.
Updating the update
“We have a three-year strategy with a one-year review” has become the get-out-of-jail-free card for those who cannot break the cycle of continuous strategic drift. I have heard some consultants advise their clients to update every quarter to accommodate the pace of change. Doing the wrong thing faster does not make it the right thing.
Prioritizing
Priorities fluctuate with the rate of change in the strategic environment. This creates confusion, burnout and unhealthy internal competition
Restructuring
Regularly shifting teams, reporting lines, role descriptions and structure to accommodate the needs of the current market. Restructures are time-consuming and stressful, preventing the organization from focusing on value creation.
Transformation
This is an insidious sign of failure. Transformation assumes that shifting from one paradigm to another (do people still want to ‘go agile’?) or one operating model to another will solve a problem or create value. It feels like it could be true, but in reality, it trades a lot of resources for some vague future return.
The Pivot
Shifting toward some perceived value and away from our current business. This is usually an act of desperation to avoid failure and is a sign that your strategy has been shite for a long time. Most organizations will pivot into a market where first movers or incumbents have more experience, opportunity and profit. Small companies can pivot; big companies usually fail before they change.
[Even the most famous big company pivot – IBM in the early 2000s remains an outlier in the world of companies that are ‘too big to fail’]
The Implementation Plan.
A sign of a low-value strategy is one where, once it is completed, the organization has no idea what to do next. This is where strategy is written as a lofty expectation with little or no grounding in reality. Many consultancies claim to specialize in “strategy execution,” but this activity is mostly a band-aid for poor strategy.
Unhealthy internal competition.
A culture of internal competition for resources, fiefdoms and isolated silos. People hoard information and resources to fend off the next restructuring or react to the next emergency. A lack of coherence, teamwork and a shared understanding of success creates the conditions where internal competition becomes a survival mechanism.
Signs of the Success
Shared Understanding
If your team has a common operating picture, a clear direction of travel, and a focus on the main effort, decisions around prioritization become easier as the trade-offs become more apparent. A shared understanding will guide people in allocating resources to innovation and new business development.
Utility
The strategy guides big strategic decisions such as mergers and acquisitions, investment, divestment, and expansion. It also guides operational choices such as product and service development, market penetration, and marketing. The quality of being self-similar at different scales is called fractality. It is the most beneficial quality of an adaptive strategy, but it is often completely misunderstood. I'll expand on fractals at some point.
Resilience in the face of change
The organization can face opportunity, risk, change, surprise, and shock without refreshing its strategy. Adaptive strategy provides the basis for a shared understanding of intent and focus so that people can interpret this in their context. A direction of travel provides more opportunity to move than the rigidity of fixed objectives.
Organic curiosity
Adaptive strategy allows individuals, teams, and business units to express genuine curiosity about exploring and experimenting with new ideas. Curious exploration becomes a mode of operation that drives innovation and increases resilience in the face of change.
Flow
The signs of success above are evidence of Flow. I’ll steal the definition from my colleagues who write “The Flow System®.”
“Achieving a state of flow occurs when organizations/institutions produce outcomes in which their constraints (e.g., structure, processes, environmental effects) are shaped in a way that enables employees to concentrate on their interactions with one another and the customer. Flow ultimately results in employees focusing on the act of doing rather than combating or succumbing to organisational friction.”
Clearly, all of the above is a shameless pitch for Adaptive Strategy. We built this method as the shortest distance between intention and action. Strategic Intent is expressed as the direction of travel and main effort, and action is expressed as a mode of operation where the organization rapidly tests ideas, scales success, shifts away from failure and learns from both.