Execute Strategy Faster in a VUCA World

To be able to execute strategy faster in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous VUCA world will give you a competitive advantage. Using a simple approach you can beat your competition by getting new marketing initiatives out faster, efficiences introduced sooner and new products/services to market and so keep in sync with what your customers need and want.

Transcript:

Hi welcome to this video on how to execute your strategy faster in a VUCA world.

My name is Peter Dickinson, Managing Director, KUB Ltd and today I am going to go through why you need to take a more effective approach to growing your business in today’s fast moving, complex and uncertain world and what you can do about it.

Kevin Roberts, Saatchi & Saatchi described the VUCA World as volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.

The pace of competition continues to increase, technology is driving ever increasing disruptive change and customers and employees are demanding more.

So how do you stay competitive and profitable in the face of such change?

The answer is to become better at executing your strategy. This means quickly identifying the winning projects and quickly terminating the inevitable failures that go with innovation and implementing new ideas without killing off good ideas too early.

So how can you execute your strategy more effectively?

Rockefeller introduced the concept of the Rockefeller habits which has helped to transform many businesses both large and small. Google Mastering The Rockefeller Habits which was written by Verne Harnish for more information.

Essentially, one of the Rockefeller habits encapsulates the idea of a 3 year vision, 12 month and 90 day objectives. The idea being that by chunking down the objectives to projects that can be implemented within 90 days you set a rhythm to the business and over a 12 month period you will have 4 times more opportunities to move the business significantly forward. When the pace of change was slower in the past then this process worked very well.

However, these days waiting 90 days for a project to fail can be too long.

So how do you benefit from the Rockefeller habits but terminate failing projects earlier so that you fail fast projects that aren’t going to make it?

In software development there is a project methodology called Agile and within that approach there is the concept of sprints, reviews and retrospectives.

In essence a Sprint is a mini-project of up to 30 days with either daily scrums which are 10 minute stand up meetings or weekly 30 minute meetings. Detailed planning is done at the start of the sprint, and daily or weekly scrums are carried out during the project and then reviewed at the end to ensure the goals have been met before starting on the next sprint.

This means you can do a minimum of 3 sprints in a quarter, more if they are less than 30 days.

This means that if there are problems during the sprint which will impact on achieving the objective for the quarter then action can be taken sooner before valuable time and resources are wasted.

At the end of a quarter there should be a short retrospective meeting to reflect on what went well and what can be improved upon and the learning incorporated into improved systems or training.

So what can you take away today to apply to your business?

If you are not already doing so then you need to:

• Define the purpose behind your business. In other words, what are you passionate about?
• Agree the 3 year objectives of the business with the team
• Agree the next 12 month objectives
• Agree how those objectives are going to be achieved and identify quarterly projects for each of the four quarters of the year.
• For the first quarter identify specific short projects or tasks that can form a series of sprints that if completed successfully will achieve your 90 day objectives.
• Setup regular short weekly meetings to plan and review the sprints or clearly defined tasks that will move you towards meeting your 90 day objectives.
• Setup 5 minute daily standup meetings to ensure priorities for the day are aligned to the goals

Thank you for watching this video. If you would like more information on KUB please email growth@kub-uk.com or call 0345 053 7417