What are strategic themes?
By now you have established your foundations (your purpose and your values). You have also created your vision for the business – where you want to go. It’s time to get into the building your strategy. Before you move on we encourage you and your team to watch/read Fundamentals of strategic planning.
Before you can get into the planning piece in strategic planning, you need to answer the question – “how will you succeed?”.
Determining your strategy can feel messy and somewhat uncomfortable. It is not a linear process that if followed to the letter will guarantee your success. At best, strategy is your best guess, a hypothesis if you will. ‘With all our insights and experience we believe our best strategy for success is ……’
This hypothesis will need to be tried, tested, and adapted.
The starting point is to agree on some strategic themes.
These themes are a way to organise your thoughts and ideas into some kind of coherent framework. We suggest you use our 4-zone framework (see diagram below) as you consider your strategic themes. This will help to ensure you are taking a whole of system approach to your strategy formation.
You are going to take your vision and unpick it. As you deep dive into your vision, you start to consider what this means for the various parts of your business.
What do we think what are the important things that need to be considered if we are to meet our vision?
Quality check
- Remember to keep it high level
- Pick the big themes
4-zone framework
Strategic themes pathway - walkthrough
Interesting resources
📚 Fundamentals of strategic planning by Suzanne McGrechan
🎥 Systems Thinking is not optional: Lessons from a pandemic by Steve Woodsmall
🎥 Systems Thinking by Russ Ackoff