Key things to consider when resetting your strategy post COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented disruptions for a range of industries and business that will influence the ways in which companies operate in the future.
As businesses shift from response to recovery phase, they need to build resilience, and we believe the key things to consider when resetting your strategy are:
Be nimble – foster an agile approach to strategy setting
Digital transformation
Data and Analytics – enabling smarter, data-driven decisions
Rebalancing of activities
BE NIMBLE
Agile decision making and strategy setting during a highly disruptive environment will result in greater performance and create a lead over the competition. Companies should consider making a deliberate effort to look beyond the immediate challenges and issues that have arisen as a result of the pandemic and not only plan for the recovery period but also to renew their long-term plan for the “new normal”. There are three key phases to resetting your strategy during a disruptive environment.
Respond. During the initial phase of disruption focus immediate actions on keeping essential business functions operating.
Recover. Move focus to stabilising operations in a more organised and coordinated effort by creating a plan to restore to a scalable state and identifying capabilities that are required to strengthen, refactor, reopen, rehire, rebudget and resupply.
Renew. Shift focus to longer term strategy and durable execution by learning to conduct operations processes and workflows in new, repeatable, scalable ways and then take the learnings and patterns from prior phases to establish the new strategic plan.
Businesses should (if they haven’t already) create a minimum viable strategy and use adaptive tools and techniques to iterate as the new normal emerges. Leaders need to act now because the acceleration of trends are already underway, and businesses need to be faster, bolder, and more agile than ever before to succeed. Strategic planning should become a continual activity so businesses can respond quickly to unavoidable changes.
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Prior to COVID-19 digitisation was an area of interest for a lot of companies, but the impact of the pandemic has forced companies to adopt sooner - accelerating digitisation. All industries are impacted by the evolution of technology in some way and to avoid being left behind, companies must consider digital transformation when resetting their strategic plan. Consumers and customers have begun to alter their buying patterns and shift to digital channels, products, and services. In this context, businesses need to rethink their business model and how digitisation can enhance their customer experiences, value propositions, go-to-market strategies, and operations.
The benefits of digital transformation include:
Simplification of business processes
Reduce operating costs
Business growth
Enhance digital innovations
Accelerate speed to market
Enhance productivity
DATA AND ANALYTICS
The use of data and analytics should be considered when resetting your strategy, as it will become an essential navigation tool, enabling smarter, data-driven decisions in a timely manner. Those who embed artificial intelligence and analytics across the company will be in a superior position to divulge the value waiting to be unlocked. The use of data and analytics will need to be recalibrated to reflect the post-COVID-19 reality, this will involve validating models, creating new data sets, and enhancing modelling techniques.
REBALANCING OF ACTIVITIES
As part of resetting your strategy, you should also consider the rebalancing of activities between those that are performed in-house and those that are outsourced, with a focus on capitalising productivity and preventing any potential disruptions to supply chain.
Looking to build your own post-Covid strategy?
Let us help. To learn more about how to build your recovery strategy in this new landscape, contact us on whiteark@whiteark.com.au
