Sunday, October 24, 2010

How to formulate your strategy through co-creation?

Strategy work is often done by senior executives based on their point-of-view. While their view is often correct, it does not involve all perspectives from not just the internal stakeholders. Especially external stakeholders are left out. We think of them and their needs, but they are seldom involved. How can we then know that their needs are met?
Especially true is this about our friends in the value-chain. Based on Porter's Five Forces we try to create a strategy that gives us the largest bargaining power enabling us to carve out the largest share of profits.
What if you involved inside and outside perspectives in you strategy creation? How would such a process be like? Who would it involve? What results could come out from it? Which tools to use?
Based on a recent article in HBR October 2010 I will try to add something on tools to use. For further background, please read the article.
Challenges with traditional strategy processes are:

  • Focused on economics of the firm and its industry
    • Internally focused on the firm and an inside-out perspective on the industry. 
  • It fails to allow for the possibility of co-creating an ecosystem whose members all win
    • Growing the pie before the fight for shares begin
  • Assumes that a strategy can be defined on the outset, though uncertainties often make that impossible
    • Incremental approach that allows for learning and engaging outside and inside stakeholders
While thinking on how to co-create a strategy, I started to think on which tools are available to counter the issues listed above. Here are some of the tools you would need:
  • Appreciate Inquiry
    • Appreciative Inquiry focuses on the affirmative topic chosen. The set of questions defining the topic will enable everyone to focus their energies and ideas towards this topic. Involving many people will get them to work towards this topic and thus not go in all possible directions. Based on the topic the co-creation process is led towards a solution to that topic in an affirmative way. 
  • Collaborative IT platforms
    • Involving many stakeholders from throughout the organization and from external organizations requires each individual to collaborate and interact individually. A comprehensible IT platform enabling groups of people to collaborate together will drive results between opportunities of face-to-face meetings. The collaborative IT platform need to answer questions like: How spread out are your people? Which bandwidths do they have access to? What type of problems are we working with, numbers, visual, text, etc.
  • Goal-hierarchy
    • A Goal-hierarchy is a  very powerful way of illustrating where we should end-up. The top goal is related to the set of affirmative questions identified through Appreciative Inquiry. A goal-hierarchy answers questions like: Which goals reside in each organization or group? Which activities lead to that goal? Who are doing the activity?
  • Experimentation
    • The results from Appreciative Inquiry are based on co-creation involving internal and external stakeholder. They are still not validated in reality and for that you need to start small through experimentation. Which are the minimal features you need to test before you can say whether this will work or not? What result is the most critical? Create and execute experiments for these parameters to validate their legibility. Then grow the size of roll-out, risk and commitment to the new strategy. 
Which other tools are useful co-creating a strategy?


More to read:
HBR Octorber 2010: Building the Co-Creative Enterprise

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