Your strategy needs a strategy

In an unpredictable marketplace with little flexibility and short-lived advantages, you win by adapting to change faster than others. An adaptive business strategy proposes that winning comes by changing faster than your competitors. With this approach, you should continuously experiment, identify new customer preferences, and serve those emerging needs. Rather than trying to achieve sustainable competitive advantage, adapters try to stitch together a series of temporary advantages.

When applying an adaptive business strategy, your planning process will likely involve deliberately varying your approach and generating a range of strategic options to test with real customers. You do this faster and more economically than your competitors. Based on the feedback received, you carefully select which of those options to commercially exploit for the next period. You scale up what is working presently but acknowledge it will evolve as the marketplace changes.

Visionary strategy is about attempting to apply a bold vision at the right moment to create or reshape an industry. It works best when you can clearly see an opportunity to be first to market with a revolutionary product or business model that disrupts an existing market or creates an entirely new segment. The key imperative is to exploit the first-mover advantage before others catch on. Visionaries imagine a new future and build attractive markets by introducing innovative technology that addresses customer needs.

To execute this strategy, you start by envisaging a megatrend or technological shift before others notice. You then build a solution and company to deliver it. Finally, you persist through obstacles to grow adoption. Like artists, visionaries visualize a vivid future and work tirelessly to make it a reality. However, timing is critical - you must jump at the right moment. Visionaries are always revolutionary, not evolutionary. They think big and aim to fundamentally transform industries. Tactical flexibility is essential to navigate unforeseen roadblocks.

When the marketplace is unpredictable but flexible, there is a great opportunity to take the lead and shape what subsequently happens. You need to collaborate with others to build a new market or platform and then compete for market dominance with a focus on the overall ecosystem to excel with this strategy. Orchestrators have the extraordinary opportunity to shape new industries before the rules have been set in stone.

To seize this opportunity and use the shaping strategy, the planning process will probably involve engaging other stakeholders and creating a shared vision of the future which everyone buys into. Armed with a common vision, you'll then collaborate with others to build a platform to orchestrate collaboration. As more stakeholders come onboard, evolve that platform in helpful ways and scale it for widespread participation. In other words, shaping is about building the entire ecosystem advantageously like painting a mural with other artists, explaining the overall vision and leveraging everyone's creativity by iterating and improving the results.

Emerging industries are often fragmented and dynamic with upside potential but unclear dominant business models or products. In applying the shaping strategy, you're assuming the mantle of market leader and convincing other players to actively follow your lead. The mobile phone app ecosystem exemplifies this with Google (Android) and Apple (iOS) ceding control of app creation early on to charge past early players like Symbian. Facebook then joined in with its own extensive web and app ecosystem. Eventually Nokia exited mobile phones to refocus on other areas.

In harsh business environments, firms must first focus on survival before restoring competitiveness. When circumstances make business-as-usual unsustainable, companies must change course to preserve resources and later redirect them towards growth. This two-phase approach characterizes the renewal strategy.

Once you comprehend the various strategic options and appropriate applications, you can adopt multiple approaches concurrently across business units (known as ambidexterity) and combine several strategies dynamically. Large firms use a multifaceted strategic mix matching approaches to individual markets, which evolve divergently.

This applies across regions, products, technologies, etc. To succeed, simultaneous strategy plurality is requisite. There are four ambidexterity modes: Firstly, separation allows discrete application per business, enabling specialized resource allocation, metrics, incentives and culture. However, synergy is limited. Secondly, switching entails resource pooling for alternating strategies as conditions dictate, e.g. across product life cycles, necessitating information sharing and collaboration. Thirdly, self-organization empowers individuals/teams to freely choose approaches, requiring individualized contracts and resource access rules.