The challenge:

In their digital change journey, many organisations aimed to deliver technology better. It was the initial attractiveness of Agile. It was also the distorted perspective that operating using Agile methods would result in business agility.

For business agility, organizations need the ability to adjust course as they go along. They also need to consider the constraints of digital capabilities, team alignment, and continuous adaptation on the inside to ensure the fitness of the business on the outside. This calls for establishing a balance of inside-out and outside-in strategies and for iterating more often, enabling a distributed, emergent, iterative, yet always coherent strategy.

Organisations need to rethink their approach to strategy. It should no longer be a cascade of set decisions from the top but a mix of emergent perspectives from the teams and the market responses, coherently held and focused to drive business impact. 

Henko's differentiated approach:

We have designed the Continuous Strategy Operating Model, which is the means to build better business adaptability in the changing landscape:

• Continuous Strategy Elaboration: Organisation of diverse groups (across scopes and scales of the organisation) to periodically work on the strategy together. Organisation of the Live mapping workshops and creation of briefings for strategy refreshes, 

• Quarterly Strategy Refreshes: Organisation of large-scale quarterly regroups on the strategy at a Business Unit level or C-Leadership level, facilitating coordinated discussions and adjustments to the strategy and reprioritising its deployment, 

• Deployment Flow: We work with your teams to enable a suitable deployment Flow, requiring frequent and cadenced synchronisation across connected teams,

• Continuous monitoring with an Enterprise tool: Capture of the strategic lineage from aspirations to strategies, their measures, execution deployment and teams involved across the multiple levels of an organisation—monitoring of outcomes and regrouped discussions on business (as opposed to just delivery) progress made.

We work with your people to progress in parallel: 

• Training/education for people to recalibrate their understanding of strategy as a dynamic flowing activity and how to use the relevant tools, 

• Dedicated assistance to pilot and support change in relevant areas, including relevant coaching of leaders and teams and facilitating the workshops at all levels, 

• Strategy leadership to help the cross-functional leadership teams own their strategy and participate in the elaboration of the collaborative strategy across scopes. 

Deploying the Continuous Strategy Operating Model is a very challenging endeavour for organisations that have mostly focused on synchronising the teams through delivery planning. Such a change generally requires multiple iterations, starting from one aspect of the strategy (e.g. the change strategy) or establishing flow in the organisation and progressing to working more from the strategy. We would help you design the change readiness of the organisation as well as facilitate the strategic activities.

Expected outcomes: 

Once organisations progress to the Continuous Strategy Operating Model, you can expect to see a more successful realisation of your strategy and strong adaptability to the evolving landscape:

• Visibility of the constraints in the strategy, making space to account for resolving those,

• Engagement from all for a stronger alignment to outcomes and, with it, ownership, autonomy, and initiative leadership from the teams, 

• Aligned coherent focus of direction, which allows balancing the effort and prevents the overloading of the teams, 

• Better Flow of the strategy into execution and, with it, the ability to reassess and pivot more efficiently, enabling business agility,

• Better understanding and alignment across the system of work,

• Serendipitous emergence of ideas for innovation and radical repurposing to explore adjacent business potentials,

• Monitoring of landscape changes and anticipation of plays in the evolution.

Your next steps: 

Moving to a Continuous Strategy Operating Model is not trivial and comes with from operational prerequisites. Unless the flow of delivery is in place and running well, it is difficult to progress attention to the strategy. Yet, progressing a change strategy and merging it with the business strategy is often a great starting point.

Deploying a the Continuous Strategy Operating Model is a highly complex change programme. Please get in touch to start shaping it. We also offer more specific offerings on strategy, which can offer stepping stones.

We always welcome corporate keynotes talks on strategy, introducing new techniques such as xMatrix, Continuous Strategy and Wardley Maps.