Digital Business Strategies
The essence of Strategy is how to change when environments are complex and dynamic. Strategy is about adaptability.
Understanding The Challenge
A fundamental assumption underlying traditional approaches to strategy is that industry boundaries and economics remain broadly stable over time. This assumption is no longer realistic especially given the Covid pandemic. Digital technologies and other factors have caused the average age of the companies in the S&P 500 to decline from more than 60 years in 1958 to less than 20 years today. Everyone is looking for their next.
A second dimension making strategy development more complex is the requirement that companies show that they are actively contributing to the broader society. The current emphasis on organisational purpose, environmental, social and corporate governance are manifestations of the immense pressure to demonstrate social legitimacy, sustainability and ensure survival.
Some questions to ponder
- Do you have the need to grow an agility capability and culture to move across verticals?
- Have you, or are you building Capability to move beyond your lane, up and across value chains to innovate?
- Do you have a thinking partner who challenges you and your teams to think, design and implement truly innovative strategies and solutions?
- Do you understand how combinations of disruptive technologies could enable you to expand and extend beyond your industry?
- Have you prepared your Leadership teams (at various levels) with an understanding of Digital Terminologies and created opportunities to ideate?
- Do you have a solid digital business strategy that utilises various combinations of digital technologies that are powered by Talent?
- Have you identified your business future-fit Capabilities?
- Are your people onboard and engaged with your Purpose? Are they preparing the future e.g. collaborating with bots, AI, Cloud, RPA etc?
- Are you architecting a culture & Human Capital model that leads to sustainability?
- Are you adopting a Systems approach?
Evolve Strategic Thinking
Business leaders need to evolve how they think about strategy in two important ways to be relevant in today’s dynamic and complex environments:
- First, their focus needs to shift from “what is stable to what is changing” — and specifically how these changes may neutralise historical sources of advantage and how they may give rise to new opportunities.
- Second, they need to broaden the number of stakeholders whose needs and potential contributions are evaluated during the strategic planning engagement, review, and refinement process.
In changing how we think about change and strategy we need to ask:
- “Do we need to strengthen our execution of the current path.”
- “Do we need to adopt new ways of pursuing the current path.”
- “Or do we need to take a different path.”
Two perspectives help us to determine what form of change (magnitude, activity, or direction) is appropriate in a given context:
- Fit to purpose evaluates your market context and involves assessing the closeness of fit between your offering and the needs of customers (both now and in the foreseeable future), and how your business model also delivers value for other stakeholders.
- What are the outcomes that you enable your customers and stakeholders to achieve?
- What wider social value does your business generate?
- Who are you different for? Why?
- Relative advantage involves assessing your capabilities relative to alternatives, not just direct competitors. In which areas can you claim to offer a distinctive advantage to customers and other key stakeholders? How are your offerings valuably different from those of others?
Once a company has established the nature of the change that it should be considering, and its Why, the task becomes that of identifying the actions that will be most effective in improving their fit to Purpose and/or their relative advantage.
Our approach in assisting clients to prepare and grow into the future world involves embracing digital; preparing for the world beyond as we are propelled towards the era of Singularity. Our holistic framework explores digital strategies through seven domains and combinations thereof.
Utilising The Singularity Company’s structured approach, frameworks, diagnostic tools, toolkit, engaging workshops, deep and meaningful conversations, we help clients and craft their Digital Business Strategies and business journey maps – not just for “digital transformation” but beyond. These strategies prepare to build future fit capabilities, models and cultures that engage and win the hearts and minds of all stakeholders to confidently innovate, build and grow purposeful futures.
We then move beyond the “design” and assist clients as both thinking and implementation partners of choice (Refer to our Business Technologies).