As we round the corner and start down the final stretch to the last half of 2020, there’s never been a more important time to position your organization for the future. In fact, I’ve always advocated doing a mid-year check-in on your strategy and making needed adjustments to ensure you reach your goals.
This year, this is an especially critical exercise for every organization. After all, the world has changed – and it's highly likely that the strategy you put in place at the beginning of 2020 doesn’t reflect your current situation.
Perhaps you’ve made some adjustments and changes over the past four months to reflect the new normal, and those changes may have helped you survive and put out fires. While that’s great, it's not a solution to longer-term strategy.
I’ve been advising my clients to take a thorough, honest and pragmatic approach to this work. This requires them to think about what they’ve learned in the first half of the year and apply that learning to the remainder of the year.
I know that in times of uncertainty it can be hard to have the discipline to commit a plan to paper and align resources and effort around the priorities. I would argue, however, that now is exactly the time to do this.
Discipline and focus may mean the difference between struggling to stay alive and emerging as a thriving organization.
The strategy you create for your organization now must address trouble areas and build on strengths, and will require being brutally honest about the external environment, your customers and the amount of uncertainty that still exists.
ACTION STEPS
Here is an approach to help you get started with this planning process:
Address Trouble Areas. There’s never been a more important time to address areas of your organization that aren’t working. In better times, you might be able to scrape by with poor customer service, or lackluster products and services or operational inefficiencies. But in today’s climate, organizations that are going to sustain themselves during the next 12 months and thrive in 2021, can’t afford to leave problems unaddressed. Be honest about these challenges and creative in your solutions.
Build on Strengths. Most organizations do a few things really well. So spend some time with your team figuring out what your core competencies are and how to build on them. Look for strengths that present competitive advantages and which give you a springboard to grow, scale and improve. If you can build on those strengths, you will increase your momentum and improve your chances of reaching your goals.
Look Outside. Creating a strategy shouldn’t be done in isolation. Once you have looked internally you need to scan the external environment. This is especially important during COVID-19 because competitors, customers and the market have shifted so dramatically. Align the changes you are making to fix problems with the current conditions and realities of the external environment.
