WHITE PAPERS
Winning in uncertain futures
Big bets strategy
During the last six months we have had to learn to live with major disruptions and the need to revise many previous plans. While the need to design strategies for resilience and success in different future scenarios is broadly recognised, comprehensive redesign might not be feasible. One way out of this dilemma is to first focus on your “big bets”.
Learning from the pandemic
The coronavirus breakout and great lockdown provide important learning for business, in terms of biases, how to avoid these, and what leaders need to do. These uncertain times call for avoidance of overly optimistic time expectations, falsely comforting base case projections, and too simplified questions and remedies. Instead, businesses need a regional understanding of how the pandemic might play out, through lenses of pandemic patterns, economic and social impacts, and market implications.
How to prepare your business for climate-related risk
There is growing recognition and scientific understanding of the physical and transitional impacts that climate change will have on society and businesses. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) recommends using a scenario planning based approach for assessing risk and opportunities but does not specify how best to do this for this purpose. NormannPartners designed an approach and applied it to Rolls-Royce. This article by Sarah Sandle of Rolls-Royce, and Steve Churchhouse and Gerard Drenth of NormannPartners illustrates how the assessment was conducted easily, quickly, and effectively.
Post Covid-19 Strategy design
In a world that has become increasingly networked and complex, society and business are all of a sudden faced with a pandemic that puts enormous pressure on existing models and activities. With the vulnerabilities that have surfaced it also seems unlikely that we will return to business as usual once the crisis is over. History shows that winners use the crisis to prepare themselves for the world after, while losers tend to wait and see, hence losing not only momentum in their current business but also relative market position.
Some thoughts on “Dilemma Thinking”
If what appears at first to be a straight choice can be framed as a dilemma between two equally worthwhile values to be pursued, then it changes the strategic dialogue from “either-or”, to a synergistic “best of both”. How can a conflict be creative, and become a driver for innovation and learning, enabling the creation of a pathway to resolution?
Why it might be impossible for Amazon to do well in the Industrial Internet
Platform or technology led strategies like that pursued by General Electric with Predix, and now by the digital natives, like Amazon, as they enter B2B internet commerce, demonstrate a limitation of the technology industry. Our view is that successful companies have a very different construct of digital strategy; one not led by technology but rather one focused on enhancing relationships in Value Creating Systems (VCS) by following a ‘Networked Strategy’ approach.
This is the age of Networked Strategy
The world is increasingly networked. The connections these net-works foster are radically transforming business, making it richer as well as more turbulent, uncertain, fast changing and ambigu-ous. Networks are blurring the traditional industry sectors, geo-graphical regions and profit and not-for-profit sectors. This is the age of Networked Strategy.
Engaging with Uncertain Futures
“How SWFs Engage with Uncertainty” is a summary of the findings captured in the work NormannPartners performed for the International Forum of Sovereign Wealth Funds (IFSWF), when designing and running an interactive scenario seminar at the annual meeting of the IFSWF in Astana, Kazakhstan.
Scenario Based Wargaming
NormannPartners offers a next generation of gaming, suited for contexts in which the ground moves – and where collaborative as well as competitive strategy may be essential to consider.
Intellectual Property Rights
Innovation is increasingly in the merging of different technologies, the creation of novel value constellations and in the establishment of new relationships within a given eco-system. What emerges, is a veritable mosaic of IPR and digital rights.
Internet of Things
As the digitisation trend sweeps through the realms of manufacturing and infrastructure, it raises fundamental questions for companies in these sectors regarding the very notion of value and how it is created.