So, what you aim for in strategy, is that the gap between the aspired strategy and the realized strategy is minimized.
Short Cycle Strategy reconnects them and thereby resolves the notorious gap between strategy and execution.
It consists of nine steps—five for strategy generation, and four for strategy execution.
Together, they make strategy a highly adaptive, but still goal-oriented process.
1. Activating Key Stakeholders: Making key persons in the organization receptive to new strategy and mobilizing the resources needed for strategy generation.
2. Mapping strategy: Identifying the organization’s strategy by describing it on the basis of its ten core elements. (See Strategy Sketch)
3. Assessing strategy: Judging and testing the quality of the organization’s strategy against relevant criteria.
4. Innovating strategy: Renewing and redesigning the organization’s strategy through incremental or radical innovation.
5. Formulating strategy: Capturing the organization’s strategy in words and pictures that can be understood by the target audience.
6. Bridging gaps: Identifying the gaps between your current and your aspired strategy, and defining projects and tasks to bridge them.
7. Organizing strategy: Identifying the most important organizational deficiencies, and defining projects and tasks to solve them.
8. Planning strategy: Developing and committing to a dynamic, prioritized course of action and a way of working for closing the gap between the actual and the aspired strategy.
9. Realizing strategy: Effecting the aspired strategy by putting the execution plan into action and managing relevance, progress, and emotions over time.
Which step of the Short Cycle Strategy will you be focusing on?
