DESIGNING
STRATEGY
How can I lead change in transforming my business context? What should be my long-term strategic intent when current industry definitions become less relevant and new business fields emerge with new opportunities to create value, but also new threats? And what strategy will help me achieve my intent?
A good strategy is clear about your key challenges, preparing you for the different conditions your business may find itself in the near future. Our approach to strategy is centered on systems thinking, assumes that value is co-produced with stakeholders and focuses on collaboration as at least as decisive for success as competition. To this end, we often use scenarios, exploring change before it happens.
In today’s fast changing networked world, good strategy calls for this kind of thinking ahead, for collaborating in systems and designing offerings with interactions that enable stakeholders to co-create value.
Conventional strategy approaches based on forecasting or on positioning oneself in value chains within established industries are seldom helpful in uncertain business environments where winners define new fields that transcend traditional industrial borders. Our offering design approach to strategy enables you to reconsider a richer set of wider possibilities – and threats to be mitigated – than the narrow set that can be captured when only considering options within value chains and industries.
Let us help you prioritize your options into coherent strategies that can be realized to meet your main challenges – today and for your next stage of growth.
Offerings
Introduction to VCS strategy
What are the challenges and effective approaches for strategy in a networked world? 1/2 to 1 day to share strategic thinking based on systems thinking.
Next competition & collaboration
Scenarios-based wargaming to explore next competition and collaboration in systems as well as interactions that enable stakeholders to co-create value.
Strategy testing & new options
Using scenarios to effectively link exploration of trends and uncertainties in strategy cycle and business planning.
Strategy for new emerging fields
Identify next stages for your business and pathways with strategic initiatives, capabilities to build business models and identify partners to collaborate with.
Designing Strategy – Cases
Case: Next competition & collaboration
A technology group sought a second opinion on a new technology strategy. Together with NormannPartners, they used scenarios-based wargaming to understand how competitors would react to technology investments under different conditions, and how the investments would prepare them for changing collaboration and competition dynamics in the market. It also gave them a deepened risk and opportunity understanding of the investments and its elements. Finally, it also prepared them well for a major battle over a potential acquisition, which came suddenly six months after the work had been done.
Case: Strategic testing & new options
An international publishing group faced accelerating market disruptions caused by digitalization and new entrants, and it needed to review its business shape. As some members of the board were powerful heads of divisions within the group, the CEO’s challenge was to ensure these agreed on shared group level priorities. NormannPartners facilitated a board strategy day with scenario-based strategic option testing and risk assessment. The scenarios enabled the board to explore different speeds at which digitalization could develop and how it could transform their business, globally and regionally. The scenarios also defined strategic priorities to proactively transform to meet the change.
Case: Strategy for new emerging fields
A global transport company wanted to explore how its customer segments in a specific market type could be changing over the mid- to long-term. They mapped the value creating systems in the market segments, and their own role in these systems. They found that in two of three scenarios there would be significant pressure on the customers’ customers to change their buying behavior from products to outcomes. This led the client to set up an entirely new company outside its existing organisation, which offered outcomes solutions with a collaborative partner-based offering, creating a new market.
Case: Strategy for new emerging fields (2)
A leading national energy distribution company wanted to explore how its market could change if distributed energy production would really take flight. Working closely with NormannPartners the company mapped value-creating systems in the emerging fields and their own potential role in these systems. They identified an opportunity in the emerging field of ‘microgrids’ and founded a new company to develop this offering.