Key 1: Get Clear On The Now

Before you can start to think about the future, you need to get clarity about where you are now. For larger organisations this probably means doing a lot of analysis of the different sectors or areas in which the business operates.

Key 2: Scan the Horizon

This is essentially about identifying what is lying ahead and how it might impact on the organisation or specific parts of the organisation. Look, for example, at the impact the internet has had on traditional areas like print advertising or even recruitment.

Key 3: Listen To Your People

It is often those closest to creating a product or delivering the service who get insights into what is possible. Too often this valuable asset is overlooked.

Key 4: Don’t Get Set In Stone

It’s a balancing act. You need to put a stake in the ground and avoid chopping and changing all of the time. At the same time you don’t want things so set in stone that you cannot adapt to changes in the marketplace or regulation.

Key 5: Break It Down

5 years is a long time in the life of a business. You will have your long term vision or direction of travel, but you need to break it down to smaller milestone or targets to be achieved along the way.

The truth is there is no magic formula to creating strategy but focusing on some key things can make a big difference.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to become highly effective leaders and managers. He invites you to take advantage of his free audio e-course Leadership Success at www.goalsandachievements.co.uk

Challenge 1: Spending sufficient time

As a leader or leadership team you are making major choices and decisions that have a impact on:

• The organisation
• You
• Employees
• Customers or service users
• Suppliers
• Shareholders and stakeholders

Yet often leadership teams spend far too little time on this vital area. You might be familiar with or even participated in a one or two day away day where you spend time looking at the future direction.  While this is a useful starting point, it has many limitations.

Solution: Schedule sufficient time to develop strategy and make it a rolling process where time is taken out at least every 2-3 months to keep the strategy relevant and up to date.

Challenge 2: Answering key questions

All organisations exist for some reason or other.  In developing strategy there is a great temptation for people to come up with aspirations that may or may not be linked to the core purpose.  This might be due to key questions not being identified and answered.

Solution:  Start any discussion around strategy by getting clear answers to the following key questions:

• What are we here to do as an organisation?

• Who are we doing it for?

• What results do we want to deliver for our stakeholders?
Challenge 3: Connecting strategies

There clearly needs to be an overall direction in which the organisation is heading and top level goals.  At the same time the sub-strategies for Finance, Marketing, IT, Customer Relationship Management, Production, etc need to be connected.

Solution:  As well as being crystal clear about the overall direction and goals, make sure that there are detailed sub-strategies to achieve the goals which are consistent and joined up.

Bottom Line – In theory creating and implementing effective strategy is simple but in practice is extremely challenging.  So what challenges do you need to address to develop and implementing even better strategies?