BCG’s Center for Growth and Innovation Analytics mines vast, unstructured datasets to help clients spot their next big opportunity. The center’s team of world-class data scientists, intellectual property experts, and network analysts—aided by leading-edge tools and proprietary algorithms—seek to answer the essential question at the heart of growth strategy and innovation strategy: how do we win tomorrow?
Our Approach to Strategic Planning
The most effective approaches emulate four strategic planning best practices and deliver strategies with four essential characteristics.
- Explore strategy at multiple time horizons. The long, medium, and short term need to be addressed individually. Each demands different goals, stakeholders, and rhythms—and none should be ignored.
- Reinvent and stimulate and strategic dialogue regularly. It’s easy for a strategic planning process to fall prey to the law of diminishing returns. With too much repetition, the exercise can become stale. Leading practitioners inject inspiration and drive results by focusing on a changing set of strategic questions—and by redesigning processes that no longer fit the pace of the strategic environment.
- Engage the broad organization and beyond. Going outside the central strategy team to business leads, board members, agile teams, customers, and even suppliers can help avoid groupthink, boost preparedness and responsiveness, and lead to better strategy execution.
- Invest in execution and monitoring. Clear communication is essential, but so is an action-oriented mindset supported by the right capital allocation, organization, and metrics. Priority strategic initiatives need to be protected from the day-to-day and tracked on a shared performance dashboard.
Strategic Planning in an Agile Environment
Organizations are embracing agile ways of working, which accelerate results by giving teams significant autonomy. But autonomy without alignment can lead to chaos. If strategy alignment is hard in traditional settings, rapid strategic planning and continuous strategy re-alignment in fast-changing markets is even harder. BCG’s Scan, Orient, Decide, Act approach can help ensure teams are rowing in the same direction and provide critical feedback on weak signals that may suggest the strategy needs to be rethought.
Scan
Systematically scan the environment for opportunities and risks. Explore key trends and their impact on the rest of the business: customers, competitors, technologies, regulators, and investors.
Orient
Develop a strategic perspective to orient management in the shifting landscape of competitive advantage. Distill key issues, uncertainties, and future scenarios into a shared perspective on current and future sources of competitiveness.
Decide
Decide on a strategy. Align on and communicate the plan for how to win.
Act
Translate the strategy into priority actions and explain the strategic intent and assumptions. Launch the key initiatives required to realize the strategic objectives. Communicate the key assumptions underlying the strategy to enable a feedback loop.
BCG’s Client Work in Strategic Planning
Helping clients enhance their processes for developing winning strategies is an important part of our practice. For example, we helped:
A major Asian financial institution rethought its strategy development approach in the context of the organization’s broader agile transformation. The new, always-on, agile planning process not only drove strategy capabilities and alignment deeper into the organization, but also significantly enhanced transparency and senior management and board alignment with the target strategy. At the same time, it enabled more rapid review of new strategic initiatives, leading to superior value growth.
A major global brewer, frustrated with its existing planning process, shifted from a financial budgeting focus to a more strategic approach. Together, we developed a new, more flexible approach that fostered real strategic dialogue among center, regions, and business units—and was more tightly linked to execution. In a postimplementation survey of important stakeholders, nearly 90% said they were highly satisfied with the new approach.
Our Centers of Excellence
BCG’s Center for Growth and Innovation Analytics
Strategy Enablement Center
BCG’s Strategy Enablement Center is helping companies enhance the strategic capabilities of their people and organization.
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