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Many Strategic Plans just aren’t that strategic. They are at best simply a plan to do some obvious things to reach some predictable outcomes. The word strategy should evoke notions of surprise, subterfuge, counter move or gambit. A Strategic Plan for that reason should be a highly classified document, whose performance is closely monitored. Instead, Strategic Plans are often simply an internal communications or marketing tool for the Board and executive to convey what they w

I’m not sure of the exact numbers, but after consulting Claude and others, and reflecting on lived experience I reckon you could safely say that around 75% of strategic plans fail to deliver. That is an extraordinarily high number given that a strategic plan is meant to be the primary mechanism for achieving and driving change and business transformation. That after all is why businesses invest time and money into developing one – right? So where does it all go so wrong? The

Market Place Design answers the following design questions: Where in the market do we want to position our business? ... and How will we differentiate our business in the minds of customers? Market Place design connects your purpose, brand, market positioning and value proposition. The design process requires you to define the following: Market offerings – i.e., the product and service categories your business will deliver Customer segments – sized and categorised according t

Service Portfolio Design is two things. Although it certainly includes 'traditional' service design and service blueprinting, it's scope is much wider. And while the term 'Portfolio' does sound geeky, there is specific intent in using it. Service Portfolio Design asks the following two design questions: What services do we need to best meet customer need (i.e., the customer job to be done), customer experience expectations and convey our intended market differentiating brand

Sustainability Design is the less-talked-about but equally existential partner to Purpose Design. Sustainability Design, like Purpose Design, asks an equally important macro-level question about a business: "How can we design a business that is financially, environmentally and socially viable in equal measure?" Answering that question requires clarity about the Purpose, Brand, Operating Model ecosystem and Financial Model. The answer is inextricably linked to your stated purp

Purpose design is a business design process that addresses the question "What problem does your business exist to solve?". Behind the answer to this question sits another that also needs to be addressed and that is "What is your testable hypothesis regarding your ability to solve this problem better than anyone else in the market?" Purpose design is usually undertaken by executive management teams, and the more enlightened of these also include others from across the organisa