Page 79 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Developing a Strategy 69

Step 5. Assess options, engage stakeholders,
move toward decisions
As smart and hardworking as your strategy team may be, it won’t get
everything right the first time around, and you as the leader must set the
tone for your people to learn and adapt toward the best possible answers.
New information will appear, situations will change, bugs will surface that
will reveal flaws in your “where” and “how” choices. Good strategy making,
especially in today’s operating climate, is more of an ongoing process than
a decision that you make once and forever. The recognition of this reality
is why lean approaches are growing in popularity, shifting away from more
static strategy formulation and planning that presupposed completeness
once key senior leaders had spoken.
That’s not to say that developing strategy doesn’t require some final de-
cision making and, indeed, moving from analyzing and debating options to
real action. Knowing when to make that critical shift is where good lead-
ership makes a real difference. The boundary between such steps is more
blurred now, and strategy is generally more iterative—marked by testing,
learning, and continuous adjustment, not punctuated finality. In its own
simple way, the PBS KIDS 24/7 story, with a solution that slowly evolved
and improved over time, is one more example of the trend.
As you develop your own strategy, consider embracing at least two
learn-by-doing aspects of the lean startup approach. First, as you iden- tify
different options of where and how to compete, try out the ideas with key
stakeholders whom you identified earlier in the process and refine
accordingly.
Second, consider taking a further step to test your ideas—literally run
trials or experiments of your most promising options (e.g., building a pro-
totype, mock-up, or simulation of your product or service, and then sharing
it with stakeholders to observe usage, bugs, and operational challenges).
Such testing will reveal what works and what doesn’t, and you’ll doubt-
less gain insights to make your strategy even better. Testing can also break
the paralysis of uncertainty, as Ron and Logan Chandler wrote in their
HBR article “Four Tips for Better Strategic Planning.” Finally, testing and