Agile strategy development

Developing a strategy: self and agile

Agile strategy development kills three birds with one stone.

• The most important result: the new or updated strategy - with all the trimmings that go with a strategy. That remains as it was.

• The in-house creation of the strategy adds a great deal of depth to the paper. This is because a lot of knowledge (e.g. justifications, decisions and backgrounds) is created during the strategy work, which is only written down in its essence. If you create the strategy internally, this deep knowledge remains in the organization and you can use it afterwards for the concrete implementation. 

• Agile techniques bring cross-divisional thinking, interdisciplinary teams and speed to the process. Quite often, many stakeholders also take agile techniques into their daily lives. This guerrilla-like multiplication was your plan all along anyway? Then it fits.

In detail: the agile strategy process with wibas

In addition to the "classic" business management techniques of a strategy (e.g. SWOT analysis), we deliberately use procedures from the agile toolbox in agile strategy development. The goal is to bring interdisciplinarity, self-organization, prioritization, early results and flow to strategy work - while delivering all that is expected from a normal strategy.

Typical elements:

• Kanban system as a central means of visualizing the strategy development process, agreeing on outcome expectations, and collaboratively managing progress

• Multidisciplinary self-organized teams for different perspectives, multidisciplinary thinking and holistic results

• Regular PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) to continuously deliver results, adjust and improve the process as needed

• Prioritize and focus at every step of the work for a constant focus on the essentials and room for new ideas

• A team that is empowered to make final directional decisions and makes sure all the pieces of the strategy fit together

• Another team - consisting of your employees and wibas consultants - that designs and moderates the process

Why is it worth going this route? That's what our customers say.

• Through the PDCA cycles, there are early results that we can inspect and improve at any time.

• The employees' knowledge of the market and customer needs is incorporated directly. The strategy is born in the minds of the later implementers and multipliers.

• The strategic measures are already effective during the development process and have a high level of acceptance among employees.

• All those involved - in the case of strategy work, especially the managers - experience first-hand what it can mean to work in an agile manner.

• The participants multiply agility already during the process. This leads to agility spreading throughout the company "by the way".

• By learning agility during strategy development, the people involved automatically think about how the implementation can also be agile. The best prerequisite to act dynamically and responsively on the market as a company instead of following a rigid 5-year plan.

• Agile strategy development strengthens self-management and organization as well as entrepreneurial thinking at all levels.