The 10 minute 3 year strategy

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Strategy is good. Right?

As ever, the answer is….it depends! We can be under a lot of pressure to know exactly what our strategy is for each area of our business – and overall knowing where you are heading is a very good idea. But…. spending huge amounts of time developing, writing and refining strategies can be a massive distraction from just “doing” and too often we simply don’t have enough information to develop a fully comprehensive strategy which we can live by. That’s why we are a fan of the 10 minute strategy approach, we use this a lot for ourselves and for our clients – in situations where strategic direction is important, but full strategy development isn’t justified. It’s a particularly useful approach when you want to test something new, or pilot a new approach.

In the example below we’ve used a three year strategy, but you can do it for 3 months, 10 years or any time period that’s sensible. Start by marking a central point and then drawing concentric circles to represent the key time milestones (for example, year 1, year 2 and year 3). Then draw straight lines from the centre to the edge for each thematic element of your strategy, and wherever it intersects one of the circles note where you want to be up to on that theme by that point. For some of your lines this will immediately suggest other lines which need to be added- so for example if you want to achieve a turnover of £X you may then want to add lines for the value of the average order, and the number of orders which you need to achieve.

Give it a try and let us know how you get on.