Crafting Success: The Essential Elements of a Winning Strategy

A strategy is a plan that guides an organization in meeting its vision. Every organization works based on a plan, it could be a well-organized-strategic plan or an idea that the founder would like to implement. Strategies normally include a broad range of activities, and many firms and their members often define these practices quite differently.  Organizational strategy explicitly arranges a business’s resources with its long-term goals. It determines how resources—such as finances, staff, facilities, and inventory—are structured, allocated, and utilized to support business activities. They are all designed to help an organization fulfill its vision, whether it is hitting a certain profit target, scaling, or increasing market share. 

An ideal organizational strategy is a long-term strategic plan that maps out the path toward a company’s goals and visions.  It encompasses objectives for the next three to five years, providing enough time to implement plans and observe results, while also keeping all staff motivated to achieve these goals.  However, there or businesses that are quite young and in more volatile industries. This requires them to change and optimize their strategies to current market trends if they are to survive.  

So how do you create a perfect organizational strategy for your business? Here are some of the basic elements that you should consider when developing a strategy for your organization that can be customized to your needs and your industry while fulfilling your objectives and your greater vision. 

Data and research. The first step in any planning process should involve collecting information that will guide the process. This will involve attitude surveys, cost studies, feasibility studies, market surveys, or analyses of the competitive structure of an industry or business. The process involves looking at both external and internal information and how it affects your business. 

Making a diagnosis. This step might involve an external resource or professional to help you identify problems hindering the progress of your objectives. Are team members being part of the problem? Does your team lack collaboration? Does the business need more funding to run its activities?  They would then make recommendations based on the diagnosis.   

Developing the strategy. Now that you have information and have identified the problem, how do you solve it? Here are a couple of questions that can help. 

• Which solutions have been attempted in the past, with what results?  
• What untried steps toward a solution do you have in mind?  
• Which related aspects of the business are not going well?  
• If the problem is “solved,” how will the solution be applied?  
• What can be done to ensure that the solution wins wide acceptance?  

Implementation plan. What actions will help implement the new improved solutions? At this stage, we develop a work plan for our solutions. Depending on how long your strategy is, this stage can be passed out quarterly or annually with monitoring and evaluation at the end of each phase. This will check whether the mitigations in the strategy have the desired impact on the organization’s objectives. 

Organizational strategy development is more detailed and complex than this, however, this gives us an idea of the basic elements of the process, their importance, and how they affect your longer-term goals.