Draw two pictures: where you are now, and where you are going. The strategy is neither of them, it is the gap between. The division of labour is straightforward, because a thorough AS IS is data work, while TO BE is a choice only people can make.
An owner-manager had run her company for twelve years without ever drawing it out.
She knew the finances. She knew her people. She knew the market by feel. But she had never written down where the company was, where it was going, and what sat between.
The consequence was that every significant decision became hers alone. Not because she wanted it that way, but because nobody else had the basis. It worked until the day it did not.
The two pictures
AS IS is reality as it is. Not as you hope, and not as it is presented to the bank.
- The business model: what makes money, who pays, what is expensive?
- The position: where do you stand against competitors, who is pressing you, who can you press?
- The culture: how does work actually happen, what are people good at, what do they struggle with?
- The finances: what can you spend, and what has to go to the owners?
AS IS is not depressing once you accept it. It is simply the starting point, and a starting point is something you can act from.
TO BE is where you are going. Not wishful thinking either, but a target picture that is ambitious and possible at the same time.
A different business model? New customer segments? A different position, a different culture, different economics?
TO BE is what you can become, not what the largest players in the world are.
The gap is the strategy
The interesting part lies in neither AS IS nor TO BE. It lies between them.
The gap is where the hard questions live. How do we get there? What do we stop doing? What do we start? Who do we hire, and who no longer fits? Where do we invest, and what do we risk?
That gap is the strategy. Everything else is description.
For an electronics company it looked like this:
AS IS: high costs, high quality, a few large customers, and a decisive dependence on one purchasing manager who knew every customer personally.
TO BE: lower costs, same quality, many mid-sized customers, a sales process not resting on one person.
The gap: quality assurance had to move from living in one head to being a process. New systems were needed. Existing customers had to be renegotiated while the new setup was built. And the weakest point: current staff had only ever sold to one type of customer and had to learn to sell broadly.
That gap was three years of work. But once it was drawn clearly, management could act, because they knew what had to change and why.
Without the two pictures they would have been left with "we need to grow" and "we need to be more agile". Comfortable to say, impossible to act on.
The division of labour
Here is the most useful point in the whole model.
AS IS is data work. It requires somebody to read five years of numbers and establish exactly where the margin disappears. It requires somebody to work through competitors' public material and find patterns nobody was looking for. It takes stamina and a cold eye.
People are bad at this. We do not remember what happened three years ago, we are preoccupied with this year, and we prefer to see what fits the story we already tell.
That is precisely the work an analysis can do thoroughly in hours rather than weeks, and it is why it suddenly gets done at all.
TO BE is a choice. Here ambition, values and strategy meet, and there is no correct answer to calculate.
An analysis can certainly propose that given your strengths you could lead in a particular field. That is useful. But it does not answer the question that matters most: what do you want to be? How bold should it be? How much of the current identity should survive?
That comes from the owner, the chief executive and the management team. It comes from conversations like "we are good at service, can we build the whole business on that?" or "we are tired of competing on price, what if we became the most reliable instead?"
That is not an analysis. It is a decision. How the two sides work on it together is covered in hybrid intelligence.
From gap to roadmap
Once both pictures are drawn, the next step is simple. Four questions:
What has to come in? New capabilities, systems, customer types, markets.
What has to go? Which customer segments do we no longer pursue, which product lines have no future, where do we deliberately not invest?
What has to be different? Culture, leadership, processes, and how you measure whether it worked.
When? Year one, year two, year three.
The second question is what makes it a strategy. Without a trade-off it is a wish list, and a wish list costs nothing to agree with.
First steps
- Do AS IS thoroughly. Gather the numbers, sales, organisation and competitor information you have, and have it worked through systematically. A couple of hours, not a month.
- Draw TO BE with the management team. Without data on the table. With questions: who do we want to be in three years, what has to be different, what will we not risk?
- Write down the gap. What comes in, what goes, what changes.
- Spread it across three years. And be honest about what cannot be reached in year one.
The owner-manager from the start did exactly that. The most valuable part was not the plan. It was that her management team afterwards knew what had to change and why, so nothing had to be relitigated at every meeting.
Why the two pictures can sit side by side
The problem with AS IS and TO BE on a whiteboard is that one gets wiped to draw the other.
In 360° Sprint both states are nodes on the board, and every node is versioned automatically with a diff. An alternative TO BE can be played through and rolled back field by field without losing the original, and because the nodes are connected, the analyses downstream inherit whichever change is being tried.
That is what makes it practical to hold two target pictures at once, which is the whole precondition for choosing between them.
Who should be in the room when TO BE gets drawn is covered in the leadership room.
How the two pictures get used in an actual leadership meeting is in decision basis in leadership.