Strategy work falls into three phases: overview, development and execution. Most people skip the first, because it does not feel decisive, and pay for it in the third. Each phase has its own output, and skipping one leaves the next resting on guesswork.
Most strategy work starts wrong.
You agree you need to be more focused. You make a plan. You gather people to carry it out. Three months later the plan has changed, people are tired of it, and nobody is quite sure what went wrong.
The problem is that you jumped from "we need to be better" straight to "here is what we do". The first phase got skipped.
That phase is not popular. It does not feel decisive, and it produces nothing that can start on Monday. But without it, everything later rests on guesswork.
The three phases
Overview. See the whole landscape before choosing a direction.
Development. Design the possible directions from that landscape.
Execution. Make it concrete who does what, and why.
It looks simple. The difficulty is that the phases demand completely different ways of working, and most companies blend them. You cannot be open and investigative while also deciding, and you cannot execute while the basis is still being argued.
Phase 1: Overview
Overview means seeing the strategic landscape before anyone decides anything about direction. It is not about becoming perfectly informed, but about spotting the patterns that matter.
In practice you look at the company and its surroundings through a set of systematic lenses: the business model, your capabilities, culture, competitors, customers, digitalisation, regulation, risk. The full set, and how to choose the relevant ones, is described in the 16 strategic lenses.
Each lens is a structured pass. Not what do we think, but what do the numbers and sources point at.
Once you have been through them, you do not just have information. You have patterns:
- Several lenses independently point at the same problem.
- One lens says something that contradicts what you believed.
- One thing never comes up at all, though you expected it to.
The third is often the most interesting.
Output from phase 1: a picture of the landscape, plus a list of the assumptions carrying the most risk.
What skipping it costs
A manufacturer was convinced their problem was price. They skipped the overview and went straight to development, where the conclusion was automation, and on to execution, where they bought new equipment.
Six months later costs had fallen by around 8%. Revenue had fallen further. Their most important customers did not want cheaper, they wanted different, and a competitor had seen it first.
Six weeks of overview and the customers would have told them themselves. The decision would have been another one, and the investment would have gone somewhere else.
Phase 2: Development
Development means formulating the possible directions from what you now know. The question is: if the landscape looks like this, what choices do we have?
Typically you land on three to five directions that are all logical given the overview. For instance going deep on a narrow segment you know well, building a part of the value chain others come to depend on, or a combination.
For each direction, four things have to surface:
- What do we need to get better at?
- What do we need to stop doing, in order to manage that?
- What does it require in investment and in people?
- What is the risk, and what is the worst outcome?
The second question is the hard one. A direction without a trade-off is not a strategy, it is a wish list.
In this phase it helps to draw both the current and the intended state. The gap between them is the work to be done, and the method is described in AS IS to TO BE.
Output from phase 2: two or three possible strategies that each hold together. Not one. The choice belongs to people, and it belongs in the next phase.
What skipping it costs
Jump from overview straight to action and you end up in three places: everyone should be more innovative without anyone knowing what that means, there is a thirty-page strategy document nobody reads, and employees carry on from their old understanding, because they never got a new one.
Phase 3: Execution
Execution means making it concrete who does what.
Not "we need to be more innovative", but: this person starts a team with two full-time equivalents, the budget is this, and the target is that a defined share of next year's revenue comes from products under two years old.
Each part of the leadership room has a job. The owner confirms the direction fits the values and vision. The board accepts the risk. The chief executive makes sure everyone understands their part. The management team executes and holds each other to it. The split is developed in the leadership room.
This is also where most failures originate, and they nearly always have the same three causes: somebody did not read the work from phase 2, somebody reads the direction differently from the others, and somebody carries on as though the old one still applies.
Which is why the whole process has to be visible and open to challenge. Not so that everyone agrees, but because disagreement that does not surface, surfaces later as slow execution.
Output from phase 3: concrete tasks with an owner, a deadline and a success criterion.
One process end to end
A manufacturer with 80 employees needed a direction for three years.
Overview, six weeks. Data on market, competitors and customer preferences, seen through the lenses. The conclusion was that product quality was high, that the culture was tired of change, and that the market was splitting into a cheap end and a precision end. The company sat in the middle, where the margin was thinnest.
Development, four weeks. Three directions: pursue the cheap end, requiring automation and fewer people. Pursue the precision end, requiring investment and higher salaries but yielding markedly better margin. Or a combination with a precision arm and a volume arm.
Execution, ten weeks. The choice was precision. The sales lead was tasked with finding the hundred customers who pay for precision and talking to them. The operations lead was to establish which investments were needed. HR was to work out what salary level would attract specialists. Each task had an owner, a deadline and a criterion.
Three months later the strategy was in operation rather than on paper.
Why the chain works
Each phase does one piece of work. Phase 1 makes sure the choice rests on something. Phase 2 makes sure the consequences are thought through. Phase 3 makes sure somebody owns it.
Skip a phase and it reappears later, only more expensive. Why the method works as a way of working at all is covered in strategic intelligence as a working method.
Why the chain is built into the order
A chain that exists only as a drawing on a whiteboard turns into three parallel tracks the moment anyone gets busy.
In 360° Sprint the connections between nodes on the board determine the order the analysis runs in. A node inherits context from the ones upstream, so the development work genuinely knows the conclusions from the overview instead of repeating them.
The handovers are built as gates: approving a gate marks that layer's models complete, and who may approve is a setting on the organisation. That is the mechanical reason a phase can end rather than blur into the next.
Phase 1 is still the one that gets skipped. It is also the only one that cannot be caught up afterwards.
To simply get started, the short version is in strategic planning for owner-managers.