Mapping a Winning Strategy. Developing and Executing a Successful Strategy in Turbulent Markets.

Challenges for business leaders Developing and executing a winning strategy poses large challenges for business leaders: - Complexity regarding your firm's situation: too many moving and interconnected parts. - Uncertainty about the future: there's no crystal ball. - Bounded rationality of you and stakeholders: no mind is big enough. - Opportunism of stakeholders: hidden agendas and political games. An integrated approach to st rategy development and execut ion To better handle these challenges, we propose the Mapping Method, which is an integrated approach for the four intertwined processes of strategy. - Engaging your stakeholderswithin and outside your firm to align them and get their support for your processes of strategy development and execution. - Exploring your firm?spresent and future strategic issues (both problems and opportunities) by means of foresight development, hypothesis development, and testing to develop superior insight into these issues. - Developing strategic options and making winning choices by means of hypothesis development and testing to address, or even better anticipate, your firm?s strategic issues. You map strategy as a configuration of four components: arena, value propositions, value creation model, and value capture model. - Executing your chosen strategy, and adapting that strategy whenever required, deconstructing your strategy into concrete execution actions. You also anticipate roadblocks related to stakeholders: lack of awareness, lack of alignment, and lack of ability to execute your strategy. Simple to apply and adapt Maps for each process help you to organize your thoughts and simplify complex matters. The Mapping Method is not a linear approach but incorporates important feedback loops at two levels. The first level is feedback from issues, strategy hypothesis development, and testing. The second level is feedback loops from strategy execution back to strategy development and issue exploration. Mapping Method is designed as a rigorous approach. But you may also revert to a ?quick?approach if you do not want to spend the time and resources to apply the method by the book. St rong foundat ions The Mapping Method builds on best practices in strategy. We draw on insights from leading strategic thinkers. The method also builds on the valuable ?structured problem solving?method as successfully introduced in management consultancy by McKinsey & Company.We also use the scientific method, among others hypothesis development and testing. The use of issue hypotheses and strategy hypotheses offers a smart way to experiment and learn under uncertainty.