Do You Have a Strategy? Don’t Know?

How a little strategy quiz can help you find out.

When designing strategy workshops and processes for our clients, we often experience disagreement among executives whether the company has a strategy or not. While at first one might be puzzled by this finding, digging a bit deeper, usually in 1:1 interview as a preparation for the first meeting or workshop, we often discover that the problem lies with the definitions individual managers have of what a strategy is.

Some might say, “We have a strategy”, but really what they mean is that strategic objectives or priorities, say “Grow in North America” or “Defend our position in Europe”, have been defined. Others might counter to this, “We don’t have a strategy” because to them it’s unclear how to achieve such objectives.

What can you do to solve the mystery?

To help executives, and us, make sense of these seemingly contradictory positions, we developed a very short survey, called “The Strategy Quiz”. We do this assessment either during interviews or workshops to quickly surface what parts of the strategy are clear and which ones need to be worked on.

Here are the five statements we have executives evaluate on a scale from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”.

1. Do we have a clear and common understanding of the current situation, e.g. SWOT, competitive landscape, we have identified the strategic challenges we face, …
2. Do we have a compelling vision for where to take our company in the next 5–10 years?
3. Do we have a clear and common understanding of the strategic directions & goals for the next 3 years? i.e. Where to play? How to win? What products & services to offer? How to create value for customers? What to achieve in terms of clients, revenues, etc.
4. Do we have a clear and common understanding as to how to achieve our strategic goals? Do we have defined steps or a sequence of strategic moves?
5. We have a clear plan on how to implement our strategy. The company strategy is broken down into functional strategies. Who does what when with which result, …

The statements are pretty straightforward and people can easily relate to them. You probably noticed how they address various steps in a typical strategy process.

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