You need to make strategic plans and tackle big challenges. But there are too many moving parts. External issues like new players in the market. Internal constraints like the pressure on customer support or limited staff experience.
Our method integrates all such factors, enabling you to test your plans with numerical evidence. So you know your decisions are the best they can be.
"We used Kim’s courses to map everything we did in marketing. Our mapped departments included market research, customer acquisition, and customer relationship management. Euler Hermes gained the best new business inquiry rates and conversion from marketing the company had ever seen! All this when the world was struck by a pandemic."
JON SWABY
Former Head of Market Management, Euler Hermes
(now managing Director, Salus Restaurants Ltd.)
Find the few big levers in your business that dominate how your results turn out
SCENARIO PLANNING
Strategies evolve. You need joined-up decisions to manage your strategy, continually. But bad decisions undermine your strategy. What if you could test your plans in a safe space? And what if you could see how alternative plans would work out - in a range of scenarios?
Strategy Dynamics gives you a living, visual model of your business that plays out how all its key elements - and its performance - change over time. With this digital twin, you can change key assumptions and test alternative decisions across the business instantly. All without risking your real business. Decision-making can’t get more powerful.
VISUAL MAPPING
Your business is a complex, interconnected system. So even small decisions can have big, unexpected consequences. But you cannot escape the need to make those decisions.
That's why we need a visual working model of how the business system actually works, how it develops, how it performs. The one-time process helps you and your team see your business like never before. So you can build more robust plans and make better decisions with total confidence.
SILICO SOFTWARE
We need to make proactive, evidence-based plans and decisions. But a spreadsheet's rows and columns can't capture the connectedness of a real business system. So how to understand the future impacts of today's decisions?
By using the Silico app. Because Silico captures how your business works and simulates the outcomes of your plans and decisions with forward-looking data.
Full-scale corporate solutions
Fast, reliable modeling for plans and challenges - large or small
The easiest - free - software to learn dynamic modeling (user-guide)
Using these models in both Sun Microsystems and Microsoft, the results speak for themselves. It is a key tool for senior managers.
John Kapson
Now: Sr. Director, Analytics & Data Science, Toyota Motors N America
This class fundamentally changed how I think about our company’s future, so I will use what I have learned for the challenges we face.
Mark Holman
Manager Regional Coordination, PJM Interconnection
These business models provided just what we need to explore scenarios for competition in the global tax-technology sector and test our strategies.
Kevin Boettcher
Director, Emerging Business; Vertex, Inc
THE FRAMEWORK
"I still recall sitting in the Boston hotel lobby with that piece of paper"
In 1742, the Whitbread company started brewing beer. Over 250 years, the company grew to be one of the UK’s top brewing companies.
But in the 1980s, the company faced existential challenges. International beer brands were taking over. And competition authorities would soon force the decoupling of beer production from distribution and retailing. Whitbread was in trouble. Their business model was about to get broken.
However, people in the UK were increasingly eating out, away from home. And Whitbread had the real estate and cash flow to open up that opportunity – and to exploit it.
It was the mid-1980s when I joined Whitbread as director of Retail Strategy. So what was my job? To design the strategy for creating a powerful new corporation.
And we certainly delivered on that strategy! Over the next decade, we developed ten powerful restaurant and hotel chains, creating new markets and pushing competitors aside as we went. One of those came from acquiring the tiny Costa Coffee store chain - later sold to Coca-Cola for over $3 billion.
Taking that experience, I then taught strategy at London Business School. But everything I knew about strategy was about to change.
The strategy tools I started teaching at LBS were OK, but they fell short of what the team and I at Whitbread had actually done. We didn’t just say, “That’s the place in the market we want” – we had comprehensive, joined-up plans, continually updated, to make that happen.
Luckily, my LBS colleague John Morecroft showed me what “system dynamics” could do. A straightforward method developed at MIT in the 1960s that captures how the real world works (not just for business but for any economic, social or environmental field).
At the time, Strategy academics were interested in how “resources” enabled a business to perform. However, they misunderstood what those resources are, and how they work together, like a machine, to drive sales and profits.
But that was precisely what system dynamics could do! All I needed was to specify those resources correctly and figure out how they were connected, then build the system model and kick it into life.
I can still recall sitting in that Boston hotel lobby, trying to figure it out. An hour later, I had drawn this picture - a visual structure for how any business works.
The logic of this structure is simple, but unavoidable ...
Customers drive sales and revenue
Products, marketing and price win and retain customers
Staff and capacity provide the means to satisfy customers' needs
Staff, capacity and marketing drive costs
Take those costs from revenue to get profit, which grows our cash
Some cash we re-invest; some pays tax and interest; the rest goes to the owners
Certain cases need small adaptations, such as for cost-of-goods and gross margin, or for intermediaries like retailers. But this is essentially the “strategic architecture” of any business, and indeed many non-business organisations.
Add the numbers to everything on that picture and how those numbers depend on each other. Suddenly, your business model is not some stone statue, but a living entity - a "digital twin" that matches the real business. So you can simulate your plans against any range of scenarios with real-world data, helping you make bulletproof, joined-up decisions.
And this doesn’t just work for the overall plan. It works for any function or team - a Marketing strategy or HR plan for example. It works for any challenge or opportunity that your business faces.
Seeing your business this way transforms how you develop plans, tackle challenges, and make decisions. Because instead of looking at isolated, static numbers, you will look at how the whole system works. You can see the few key levers and how to use them to steer that system.
Ever since I drew this picture, I've taught this method at business schools worldwide. Written books. Built models to solve business challenges. Developed simulation-based learning games. Created courses for leaders and analysts.
Senior leaders and analysts across diverse industries have used the method. From banking to software. Consumer brands to transport.
Leaders and analysts use this framework to make strong plans and big decisions. From optimising marketing impact to averting business collapse; fixing service quality to raising finance for new ventures.
Today, I would like to share this with you.
Your planning and decision-making are about to get a whole lot better.
These courses from Strategy Dynamics are fantastic. They are so good that we are looking to hire people with these skills. Thanks!
Bob Lamb
Founder and CEO, Foundation for Inclusion
The approach exceeded my expectations. The material is very powerful and provides rich and deep concepts and insights for the future.
Ahmad Waleed
Strategy Director, ELM Saudi Arabia
You lay out the material so well that we can easily internalize the approach. The model almost had a mind of its own, totally changing my understanding of our challenge.
Stephen Green
Director, Continental Mills