Agile strategy: Unleashing full potential through consistent goals and eliminating unnecessary friction

Agile working methods are currently on everyone's lips, but a problem often arises: Companies want to develop customer-centric, often digital business models and may have already introduced agile and customer-centric working methods in product development, but these lead to friction with the long-term oriented strategy process, which is strongly influenced by top management.

Then it's high time to make the strategy process more agile – "Agile Strategy": In our many years of experience working with and advising established and innovative companies, we have encountered numerous discrepancies caused by the conflict between management strategy and agile methods. This wastes energy, motivation, and credibility for the change process within the company!

From this need, we have developed (in collaboration with several clients) an agile strategy process that aligns long-term strategic horizons with the iterative thinking and working methods of the digital age. This allows you to take another step toward making your company more agile and avoid friction at the interfaces between strategy and product management. This is achieved by loosening the rigidity of top-down components and combining them with agile strategy sprints.

Who is Agile Strategy intended for?

For all managing directors or CEOs who have already introduced agile working methods in some areas of their company and now find that there is friction with their strategy processes – and that these are increasingly detached from the requirements of their markets.

Agile Strategy process

The process of an Agile Strategy project depends on the current situation within the company. Essentially, a distinction is made between:

Companies that (initially) only want to modernize their strategy process

Through the sound design of a new, agile strategy process, a playbook is developed for the application of this process in the following year – possibly preceded by some training sessions for the managers involved.

Companies that also want to develop their new strategy in an agile way

Through the direct implementation of an agile strategy process, new corporate and departmental strategies are determined in a customer-centric manner – applying the special laws of economics and taking into account the fast pace of the digital age.