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Does your strategy have the right strategy? Boston Consulting Group (BCG) consultants Martin Reeves, Claire Love, and Philipp Tillmanns asked this in their Harvard Business Review article “Your Strategy Needs a Strategy.” Later, Reeves, together with BCG colleagues Knut Haanaes and Janmejaya Sinha, presented the comprehensive framework below in another HBR article: https://hbr.org/2015/06/navigating-the-dozens-of-different-strategy-options
The message is simple: adapt your approach to strategy to the circumstances you’re in.
To decide which approach to strategy is best for you, you need to look at three conditions in your market, displayed on the scheme above as three dimensions:
1. Predictability: if your market is stable and predictable, you can rely on analysis and planning.
2. Malleability: if your market can be influenced, you can rely on your ability to change it.
3. Harshness: if your market is too tough to survive for you, it is time to reboot.
Combining these conditions leads to five approaches to strategy from which you can choose:
1. Classical: analyze, predict and plan. Aim at growing your company to become big.
2. Adaptive: experiment, learn and adapt to circumstances, and do so as quickly as possible.
3. Visionary: envision, build, and persist in creating your company as you see it. Be the first to do so.
4. Shaping: collaborate, orchestrate, and develop a shared new ecosystem, market, or industry.
5. Renewal: decisively change course, reinvent yourself to revitalize your business.