Developing agile, timely, and quick strategies is the key component to any successful business, not just to keep it afloat but also to keep it thriving and growing. The key to any good strategy relies on principles that you should carry at all times.
When you have good strategic agility, it ensures that you will survive any economic crisis that can affect industries. While these principles aren’t a guideline for you to follow, they can be excellent baselines to develop your strategies around.
Here are just some of the principles you should follow to become more strategically agile.
Put Speed Over Perfection
When it comes to making business decisions, it’s important to be quick to make them. With the chances of your business being involved in a crisis being more plausible than ever, it’s important that you are quick to act on things.
Speedy actions are far more rewarded than those that are perfectly planned but slow to execute. If you want to be successful, you must be willing to sacrifice quality over the speed of your responses.
Efficient Slack is Better than Optimisation
Rather than spending more time fine-tuning your existing campaigns and strategies, it’s better to innovate to keep up with the times. For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic whittled down business industries to only those who were able to keep up with modern demands.
As such, it is crucial that companies know when to diversify and create “efficient slack” so that they do not fall behind.
Prioritise Empowerment, Not Hierarchy
For most conglomerates, following a hierarchy is almost second nature. But businesses that prioritise hierarchy over equal empowerment of human resources fail to recognise that following a hierarchy puts the topmost vulnerable.
Whereas equal empowerment means that everything is decentralised, meaning a single crisis cannot topple you over. By having open information flows and being completely transparent with the team, they will fortify.
Push to Learn, Not to Blame
Should any crisis strike, it’s always in good practice that you prioritise learning from any mistakes rather than shifting the blame to other members of the company. If you cannot move past your mistakes, then it will stunt your growth in the long run.
Additionally, those who are criticised for failing become less likely to take on risks, which is counterproductive when dealing with a crisis.
Be Open to Sudden Changes
Flexibility is crucial when making good business decisions. You never know what will come around the corner, so sticking to a plan that is set in stone isn’t always ideal. You have to leave room in your plans for any sudden changes that might arise.
Because strategic planning involves months and years of approval, it’s best to simply devise a plan that accommodates any changes. Although it’s important to be flexible, it is still crucial to have a solid strategy that anchors you down.
Conclusion
When developing strategies and action plans, it’s always best to keep these principles in mind. Many businesses have tested and tried these practices, and it had saved them from ruin when the time called for it.
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