Questions and Answers

Questions and Answers

What is the benefit of having a Strategic Focus?

One of the fundamental problems that many companies face is a lack of focus. They try to deploy their limited resources across too wide a front and fail to achieve significant advantage in any area. Strategic Focus is the most basic focus a business can have. It is a description of what you intend to sell and who your target customers will be. It gets at the very heart of deciding what you will or will not do in your business. While a new entrepreneurial business often gets its start by throwing a bunch of stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks, an ongoing business cannot rely on that approach. Competencies must be developed and resources must be deployed to sustain long-term competitive advantage. This is unlikely to happen unless there are some limitations or boundaries placed on the scope of the company's activities. A clear Strategic Focus is the appropriate way to define those boundaries.

Can we get better at making assumptions?

By their very nature assumptions carry a great deal of uncertainty and subjectivity. Even in the best case, the unknown can cause anxiety. Assumptions are however; essential to the planning process and you can continue to improve in the way you deal with them. The most basic starting point is to do everything you can to assure you are making all of the assumptions that you need to. This involves taking a comprehensive look at all of the elements you believe will affect the future environment in which your company will operate. The most critical assumption is often one you neglect to address. The Simplified Strategic Planning process devotes an entire section to prompting assumption development. While this should go a long way to assuring complete treatment of assumptions, it is always a good idea to ask your team if there are any additional factors requiring an assumption. A periodic review of your assumptions is also important. Reviewing assumptions together as a team serves two purposes. First, it is consistent with the definition of assumptions as temporary estimates. Frequent review will provide an early "heads up" should your assumptions not develop as you expected. In addition, the review process can uncover errors you made in formulating your assumptions so you can avoid these in the future. Though you will certainly be able to improve how you deal with assumptions, recognize that you will never be able to accurately predict the future. Only by continually challenging your assumptions will you avoid the risk of letting assumptions become fact in your mind.

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