Do you know what busy business life is like? Life rushes by: phones, ideas, clients, team matters, successes, references, business networking, pressure, problems, stress, overworking, complaints, board meetings, finding customers, ensuring that our organisation can generate and deliver value, and capture profit. Where and how can you find the time to think about strategy?

 

 

 

How can you find time to avoid concentrating only on making a profit today, but ensure your company will be able to create profit tomorrow? How can you protect time to explore a business model that will still work in future years?

 

Why strategy gets squeezed by operations

 

In larger organisations, it is much easier. Senior managers are less involved in the operational parts of the business. In larger, more profitable companies, there is space to build a new structure, where new business models are generated and tested (in parallel to the operational side of the business). Sometimes there might be a need to run an interface between these two structures, which will serve as a point of contact. The board, in this case, can be close enough to understand what the potential future business models are (and what evidence supports them). At the same time, they can be close enough to understand the current operations.

 

“How can you find time, to avoid concentrating on making a profit today, but ensure your company will be able to create profit tomorrow (how can you find a vital business model for future years)?”

 

Smaller companies don’t have this luxury. In many cases, in smaller organisations, an owner (or a group of owners) not only manages the operations directly, but also takes an active part in the process.

 

These types of companies don’t have huge resources to spend on building strategy awareness. This means that the same people who work in a company (by managing directly or working in an operational position) need to work on a company. They need to ask strategic questions, recognise assumptions, build hypotheses, and run lean experimentation to obtain evidence through real-user feedback cycles. This is business design in practice: customer discovery, value proposition validation, and business model validation before you bet the company.

 

What’s more, SMEs, directors, and owners are often the most appropriate people to conduct strategy activities. They need to build business awareness to make the right decisions (because they are the decision makers and they are directly responsible for the results of the company).

 

“The operational part of the business is noisier and often more urgent than strategy creation. Urgency can win with importance, and pressing problems can distract you during strategy work.”

 

The challenge in a smaller company is that the operational part of the business has eaten the strategy creation part. The operational part is noisier and often more urgent. Imagine this: you get a call from your main customer with a complaint on the day when you planned a strategy workshop. What are you going to do?

 

This means that urgency can win with importance, and pressing problems generated by the operational part can become distractors during strategy creation processes. In this case, the owner’s ability to create a vital strategy can be impaired.

 

This is one of the reasons why SMEs need a strategy partner. Somebody who will help to facilitate and support the strategy building process, and who can bring structure into strategy exploration. A good partner helps you set up validation loops and keep evidence-based experimentation alive when operational urgency tries to kill it. Sometimes the value is simple: protecting the space for thinking, and helping the team move from opinions to evidence-based decision making.

 

How to escape the “working in the business” trap

 

How can we run away from the “working in a business” trap?

 

This can happen, but only if management is aware of the necessity of separating these parts of the company: operations and strategy building processes. It also requires recognising that each process needs resources (financial, time and others) to produce results.

 

This can be done by allocation of resources. In the case of SMEs, this can be, for example, Strategy Wednesday (or “Half-day Strategy Wednesday”, “Every two weeks strategy day”, etc.), where company directors work only on the company. It is not perfect. It also requires a compromise (it limits resources available for the operational part of the business), but it allows for the achievement of measurable results in the longer term. Use that time to design a small experiment, run customer discovery calls, and capture learning fast.

 

You might say now: “Come on Witold, it’s common sense.” Yes, I agree. It is not rocket science. It is a simple solution. But at the same time I don’t know many SMEs where senior managers have clearly separated and put aside regular time just for strategy exercises.

 

They need to have time when they sit down and talk in a structured way about their current and future strategy. This is where they can ask themselves what needs to be done to verify the basic assumptions, and when they plan (and possibly undertake actions) to verify these plans. In business design terms: set up validation loops, learn fast, and adjust before you commit resources.

 

And yes, I’m aware that it can be my cognitive error (the fact that I don’t know many of these enterprises doesn’t mean there are not many of them). So, let me ask you: if you are a senior manager or company owner, do you have separated and regular time reserved just for strategy exercises? Is the operational part of your business disturbing your strategy thinking in any way?

 

What to pay special attention to

 

What to pay special attention to:

  • Personal productivity and self-organisation (including recognising excess responsibilities and delegating tasks to other people).

  • Be able to recognise the types of tasks and assign them to the appropriate levels: strategic, middle management, and execution.

  • Recognise and allocate resources to strategic processes.

  • Build a collective capacity for constructive discussion and systematic implementation of chosen solutions.

  • Develop the ability of critical reflection. Find time to summarise and draw conclusions.

  • Notice the organisational culture signals: do people feel safe to challenge assumptions, share real customer feedback, and change course?

When we have a new business model and decide to develop it, we should not give up strategic activities. A strategy building process should be a permanent process. We should test the current market and look for alternatives all the time, ideally both for the new model and for the improvement of the current one. Strategy becomes a rhythm of business model validation: test, learn, adjust, repeat.

If operations keep eating strategy, the fix is not more motivation. It is structure, protected time, and disciplined learning.

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