Good Strategy Accelerator

Are you struggling to get real alignment and clarity amongst your senior leadership team on where to invest discretionary resources and effort? Are you struggling to unite your organisation or function around a clear set of objectives that inform what your organisation should be focusing on (and what it shouldn’t be distracted by).

This may feel like an intractable problem to solve but a particularly pressing one given the need to position your business for economic recovery. We have an answer that could help you develop a good business strategy within a matter of weeks. 

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Good Strategy Accelerator

Our “Good Strategy Accelerator” has been developed to support New Zealand businesses develop a cohesive response to the challenges they face. Refined over three years, we facilitate a “Good Strategy” process based on Rumelt’s tried and proven approach: 

1. Get the leadership team aligned on the key challenges/opportunities and the ones that will be critical to business success.
2. Explore options and align the leadership team on the organisation’s high-level response to the critical challenges - of all the things you could do, what is it that you're going to do that will create some form of competitive advantage and market power.
3. Develop a coherent plan that defines your big strategic objectives, what you're actually going to do to make progress with these objectives and what outcomes will be delivered as a result of these actions.

We have condensed these three steps into a facilitated, workshop-based approach that is pragmatic and highly structured. Each workshop aligns to the steps above with key leadership inputs informing each workshop. The workshops are staggered over a series of weeks to provide enough time for leaders to conduct their assignments and for the Purple Shirt team to synthesise the workshop inputs and outputs. At the end of the process, you’ll have strong leadership alignment on where to focus your efforts and why.

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Key benefits of this approach

• Purple Shirt facilitates this process, we don’t develop your strategy - the strategy must be your strategy not one developed by external consultants who don’t understand the intricacies of your business or the markets in which you compete. 
• We guide you through each step of the process and ensure your outputs are aligned with a good strategy process
• You do much of the heavy lifting but we're driving the process and facilitating the difficult choices that will need to be made to drive leadership alignment.
• A good strategy is developed in weeks rather than months 
• The process is affordable for most New Zealand businesses particularly in times of economic hardship and resource scarcity.
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Why it works 

Strategy has for too long been confused with developing aspirational vision and mission statements that provide no clarity on what an organisation is going to do, how it's going to do it and, as importantly, what it's not going to do.

As Rumelt identified, Good Strategy is about formulating a cohesive response to an important challenge. Unlike a stand-alone decision or a goal, a strategy is a way through a difficulty, an approach to overcoming an obstacle, a response to a challenge. As a result, a Good Strategy should combine three important elements:

1. A diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge. A good diagnosis simplifies the often overwhelming complexity of reality by identifying certain aspects of the situation as critical. 
2. A guiding policy for dealing with the challenge. This is an overall approach chosen to cope with or overcome the obstacles identified in the diagnosis. 
3. A set of coherent actions that are designed to carry out the guiding policy. These are steps that are coordinated with one another to work together in accomplishing the guiding policy.

These core elements have anchored all the strategy work we’ve done with many New Zealand businesses over the last 5 years as we’ve developed and refined our approach for facilitating organisations through a ‘good strategy’ development process.