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Laureen Knudsen is its Chief Transformation Officer Broadcom softwareMember of Power50, Top 100 Women in Tech.
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In years past, it was not uncommon for business leadership to draw up five-year plans and then remain focused on execution throughout. Apparently, those days are over.
Today’s leaders face the specter of a persistent pandemic, wars, inflation, changing trade dynamics, digital transformation, and potential recession—and these are just the issues we face now. The reality is that for globally connected businesses, these disruptions continue at an accelerated pace.
The aftershocks of the pandemic revealed that some organizations were much better equipped to adapt than others. Many companies have implemented agile practices, created DevOps organizations, and strengthened value streams to improve workflow across the organization. These businesses have made strides in enhancing flexibility and value.
However, in general, a significant proportion of leadership teams still lacked the skills and systems needed to deal with all the strategic uncertainty presented in recent years.
Introduction to Strategic Optionality
The ability to pivot quickly—and intelligently—in response to unfolding opportunities or competitive threats continues to become more critical. More than ever, thriving in disruption is how wealth is created. When you look at the great success stories that have emerged in recent months, they are the businesses that reacted quickly and smartly when market drivers were disrupted.
In times of turmoil, leaders are forced to make consequential bets. When they bet correctly, they can achieve huge rewards. However, when they bet wrong, the penalties can be devastating. Given these high stakes, an emerging discipline has begun to gain increasing attention: strategic choice.
Strategic choice offers leaders a way to make these bets with increased rigor and intelligence. In this way, teams can begin to embrace the uncertainty of what the future business environment will look like. Strategic optionality is a practical concept that managers can easily apply to their businesses.
Another way of framing this concept is the fundamental nature of this approach. Rather than simply using traditional risk management approaches to protect current business models, teams implementing strategic optionality are beginning to embrace more significant changes in how they deliver value, whether it’s creating new offerings or establishing new business models.
Basic Approaches
There are extensive requirements and implications of using strategic optionality. Here are some of the key areas to address.
1. Culture: In many organizations, teams have long been accustomed to adopting a plan and sticking to it. Now, across the organization, teams must constantly monitor progress and adapt to evolving dynamics. It’s vital to build an organization with people who are willing to make course corrections and start entirely new paths, even in mid-flight. Through advanced value stream management (VSM) and strategic optional practices, teams can begin to support this cultural change.
2. Leadership Approach: To successfully use strategic choice, leaders must have a mixture of courage, optimism, and realism. These features are crucial for promoting team and stakeholder engagement and engagement. Leaders must listen to multiple perspectives, engaging with as wide a range of stakeholders as possible. It is also important that they keep an open mind, particularly in reviewing previous approaches and decision-making processes.
3. Smart planning and data-driven decision making: Strategic optionality represents a process of generating numerous strategic options and applying greater rigor to how those strategic options are evaluated and selected. To work effectively, teams must leverage data to gain improved insights into opportunities and threats and how to respond. Leaders need intelligence to gain a clearer picture of available options and choose between those options based on concrete data rather than guesswork. In addition, here are some integral supporting elements:
• Agile Funding: Funding needs to be distributed more flexibly, which is key to rapidly turning teams and resources around.
• OKRs and metrics: Teams need to be given clear priorities and goals and key results (OKRs) so they can focus on the right work. In addition, mechanisms must be in place to ensure that there is consistent clarity, even when iterations occur.
• Multidimensional investment plans: Investments in money, time and personnel must be organized around product lines so that these investments can be tracked and mapped to key business results. This is key to enabling teams to prioritize based on a clear picture of business outcomes, market realities, and available financial and human resources.
• Strategic Road Maps: Teams need capabilities to evaluate current roadmaps and evaluate product performance. These roadmaps should also support what-if exercises to enable leaders to intelligently evaluate the trade-offs of potential changes.
The Payoff: Optimized Value Streams
Strategic selection can play a symbiotic role in a firm’s larger VSM initiatives. By successfully adopting strategic choice, teams can create the discipline that optimizes value streams. Over time, these benefits become a virtuous circle: Teams make more informed pivots, and through an optimized VSM, they can move faster from initial concept design to delivering real customer value.
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