Questions and Answers of Exploring Strategy

How would customers say (if at all) that they got distinctive value from your business? LO1
How important is it to them – and what value do they get? LO1
How certain are you that there aren’t competitors who could do more or less the same? LO1
Are there any areas in which you feel that you have distinctively low costs and that these are areas that competitors can’t match? LO1
What have been the breakthroughs in your organization that have founded its current competitive position? LO1
Were these deliberate and planned, largely accidental, or somewhere in between? LO1
What do you think the merits of having a more deliberate process might be? LO1
What future breakthroughs – in your imagination – might take your organization to another level? LO1
How might you set about developing these embryonic ideas in an imaginative way? LO1
What are the key strategic options?
What is the most cunning way of implementing them?
What are their scores on the strategic option grid?
How can these scores still be improved?
What do you see as being their resilience?
What is the significance of the scores?
Should we weight them, and if so, how?
For the exercise that you just did above, what relative importance do you place on each of the criteria?
Were you to weight your criteria as we discussed, would the overall score and evaluation shift significantly?
For a number of business units, where would you position these on the strategic option grid – in the different columns?
What do the resulting positions show you about the strategic attractiveness of your business?
What are the key external assumptions?
What are the key internal assumptions?
How do these break down into sub-assumptions?
How important are these?
How uncertain are these?
Where these are both ‘very important’ and ‘very uncertain’, are these so closely and mutually dependent that the uncertainty effect could be magnified?
What might you do to counter, avoid or minimize the effects of those most volatile assumptions?
Taking each strand of the optopus in turn, what are the options that you can generate?
Now, using the ‘pick and mix’ approach, what bundles of very plausible option groupings exist?
Also, taking some implausible options and the same ‘pick and mix’ approach, what potentially interesting possibilities of an unlikely nature come to light?For a number of these ideas, how do they
Using the optopus, what lines of enquiry can you generate for your business?
What further combination that might be interesting can you come up with via a ‘pick and mix’ approach?
What were the strengths and weaknesses of each phase of the implementation process, particularly:– diagnosis;– cunning options;– planning;– implementation;– learning and control?
What ‘dos and don’ts’ can you distil for the future? Look at some tools for diagnosis, for creating cunning options, for planning, implementation, and learning and control
What is the key symptom?
What are the root causes (level 1)?
What are the root causes behind these (level 2)?
What options can you see from this analysis to start to build a strategy around?
What is the implementation vision?
What are the alignment factors?
Are these both necessary and sufficient to achieve that goal?
Is there a ‘one big thing’ or a ‘two big things’ we’ve forgotten?
For one or more of the wishbones, what do you see when you go down another level?
How do all these level 1 alignment factors appear on the uncertainty grid?
What are the key dimensions that you are trying to shift?
What are the extremes of these shifts (from left to right), ie where have you started from originally, and where would you like to end up ultimately?
Where you are actually now? (Note: this does not have to be a 1.)
Where do you want to be as a result of this strategic project? (Note: this does not have to be a 5.)
What specific actions or interventions might make each shift feasible?
For a particular strategy, what does it entail?
How do these elements appear on the AID analysis?
How are these positionings underpinned by the value and cost drivers, and the difficulty-over-time curves etc?
How might these implementation actions shift autonomously on the grid over time?
What are the key enablers and constraints currently (represented as a vector picture)?
What’s the ‘one big thing’ that we have forgotten?
How difficult does this look overall?
How can these be reshaped with a better, or even a cunning implementation plan?
How difficult does this now look?
Who are the key stakeholders?
Who is the one big stakeholder that you have forgotten?
What is on their agendas about this implementation plan?
Where are they positioned on the grid?
What is your most cunning implementation plan and how difficult, given their new positions, is it likely to be?
What is the implementation difficulty (force field/difficultyover-time curves) for some or all of these?
What is the stakeholder support? Stakeholder analysis.
Why is there a problem? (Diagnosis – fishbone analysis)
What do I ‘really-really-really want?’ (Your vision)
How attractive and difficult are these? (AID analysis)
What is the basis of that difficulty? (Difficulty-over-time curve or force field analysis)
Who are the stakeholders and what is their pattern of influence? (Stakeholder analysis)
What are the current strategic issues that we are facing externally and internally?
Where do we want to be in the future and what do we think is our underlying ‘strategic gap’?
What is distinctive – from our customers’ perspective – about what we do?
What are our competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, and how do we compare against these?
Where are the biggest areas of market growth, and what is driving these?
How is the competitive nature of the industry changing and what are the CSFs?
What opportunities do we have in this context?
What do the deep-dive techniques tell us about their attractiveness?
What are our capability gaps and what internal strategic options do we need to consider?
How attractive are these on the strategic option grid?
What further questions do we now need to address and what data might we need to collect?
Who might be the best person to ask to get this data?
If we don’t know, who is the best person to ask as to who we should talk to?
Has someone, somewhere, actually got this data already?
If we now know what to do, what is the most efficient and effective way of getting that data out?
If we were to set about collecting data in a certain way, then given that process and those questions, what sorts of answers are likely to come out?
What were the key strategic projects that delivered it?
What were their key interdependencies?
How well were these managed?
For one project that didn’t quite work out as planned, why was this (fishbone analysis)?
For that project that didn’t quite work out as planned, how could this be project managed in a better way?
For a project or decision in your own company, what would an outline business case look like using the above headings?
What value is being targeted and how might that be improved with the cunning plan?
What do the value and cost driver tools reveal, and the value-over-time curve?
What are the most critical assumptions (using the uncertainty grid) and what might be their impact in broad terms on the numbers?
What are the issues that it should focus on?
What are the likely dilemmas and options?
What are the really key strategic questions it should address?
Who might get involved in providing input to it?
How would a workshop be useful?

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