Strategic change - a journey, not a leap (85)
Kim Warren 
We need to migrate customers and staff from the old model to the new + build the new proposition and capacity ... it could go badly wrong!
The last few posts have been about strategic change - whether extending our strategic position, or transforming it if the current business model may cease to be viable.
Leaders need to know how to use dynamic model to test
strategy, including change, as this course explains.
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Here is the full list of those posts:
- Extend your strategy - don't reinvent it
- Modeling your extended strategy
... but if you have to transform (move from an old business model to a new one):
- Planning and managing full strategic change: A
- Strategic change: B - migrating customers from the old business model to the new
- Strategic change: C - transitioning the staffing, maintaining the old model while building the new
- Strategic change: D - building the new proposition and the capacities to deliver it
The journey takes time
In every case, the strategic extension or change will play out over time - usually many years.
And over that time, most if not all of the business system elements are continually changing, and all of those changes reflect the constant stream of decisions in every part of the business. We are not in the position of Captain Kirk on the Starship Enterprise who need only say "Make it so!" for the entire journey to just happen.
To illustrate ... in figure 1,
- we are both moving customers from an old proposition to a new one, and winning new customers to that new proposition.
- If we implement the new proposition too slowly, current customers are lost to rivals who move faster, and we lose the race for new customers.
- ... but we need enough staff throughout this journey, both to support the declining old business and to support the fast-growing new business.
In the blue scenario, we fail on both these needs - in the green scenario, we continue hiring to sustain the old-skill staff we need and to achieve the new-staff growth we need with rapid hiring to overcome fast staff turnover
Figure 1: Adequate staffing for both old and new business models to protect and grow revenue.
Model that journey !
The model behind figure 1 captures most of the customer-migration and staff transition issues discussed in post [B] and post [C] above. And the model can capture anything from a minimal extension of our strategy (simply adding new customers with a new proposition) to a total change of strategy, where (as in figure 1) customers switch away entirely from the old business model.
... and the success of any strategic journey depends on making good, quantified decisions throughout the years-long transition, which we can test in that model.
Surely, if your organisation will be going through some strategic change in coming years, you would want to explore that journey before setting off, and steer your path along that journey every step of the way?
Categories: : business modeling, related course, implementation, staffing & HR, strategy
