Each year, businesses spend time and money to gather information about their customers. For some, this is through purchasing data from market research firms. For others, it’s through conducting studies or using data to understand their audience. These avenues may be helpful in some regards, but the companies that stay ahead and differentiate from the competition have found ways of gaining unique and relevant insights about their customers.
Tarek Saadi, an experienced business consultant who has performed consulting work in organizational strategy, knows that companies need to be adaptive in the modern landscape and capable of understanding the rapidly changing environment and quickly translating the insights garnered into action. For business leaders in such an environment, the challenge is to create and constantly adapt winning strategies.
Strategic Learning
In a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) environment, a business leader uses strategic learning to continually adapt. Successfully applying this requires considering the following aspects:
- Discover Great Questions: Coming up with the right strategy requires knowledge of some of the “right” things to do, aspects that can only be uncovered by asking great questions. These questions challenge assumptions and push people to think broadly.
- Keeping Things Simple: Coming up with a compelling-yet-simple message that rallies everyone around it is anything but easy. To do so requires focusing on the most important issues.
- “Outside-in” Thinking: While it’s common for businesses to use internal resources to strategize and plan, strategic learning calls for inviting those who view the business from the “outside-in” to share in the process. Their objective views are valuable in shaping the company’s agility in a changing environment.
- Everyone is Involved: The traditional view of strategy was that it was the preserve of an organization’s top leadership. However, senior leadership has a role in ensuring every level in the organization adapts the overall strategy.
- Strategy and Leadership Work Together: These elements are inseparable and should work in tandem for success.
How does this all translate into building a system for collecting insights?
At the heart of strategy should be an understanding of how to reach, deliver to, and maintain customers. This has to come with knowing how to earn their trust and the value they gain by interacting with the business. It’s this foundation of trust that ensures a business ultimately becomes one that customers are willing to exchange unique information and insight with.
