Reading the landscape
Strategic thinking and strategic analysis.
Two and a half hours on reading the strategic landscape: strategy versus planning, Cynefin and wicked problems, Porter's Five Forces for public service and telling strategy from a wish list.
- Level
- Focus
- Learning time
- 2 hours 30 minutes
- Where
- Strategic Thinking
- Price
- £69
When you step up to a higher level, what you paid in the last 12 months for lower-level courses inside the bigger course comes off its price, in proportion to how much of each is inside it, whichever topic it's from. Courses at the same or a lower level don't give credit against each other. A Focus course or above always costs at least £15. Read the full terms
Certificate of Completion, or Certificate of Completion and Assessment with a short assessment
Overview and Outcomes.
Who It's For
Public service leaders reading their operating environment
Overview
Strategy is often confused with planning, and the confusion changes what organisations do under pressure. Reading the landscape starts by defining strategy as a plan to create value, drawing on Oberholzer-Gee and Horwath, with Kodak and Fujifilm showing why planning cannot replace strategic thinking. It then helps you name your situation before acting, through VUCA, BANI, Snowden's Cynefin and wicked problems, with homelessness strategy as a worked example. It translates Porter's Five Forces into public service, and closes with Blue Ocean Strategy, Rumelt's strategy kernel and the McKinsey Seven S model.
Aims
This programme aims to sharpen the strategic thinking of public service leaders, helping them read their operating environment accurately, choose tools that fit the kind of problem they face, and tell genuine strategy apart from a wish list of priorities.
In summary, you will be able to:
- Distinguish strategic thinking from strategic planning and management, and explain why the difference matters for public service organisations.
- Use Cynefin, wicked problems and the Five Forces to diagnose your organisation's operating environment before choosing a response.
- Apply Blue Ocean, Rumelt's kernel and the Seven S model to test whether a strategy is coherent and the organisation can deliver it.
What you'll develop
Through this Focus course, you will build the ability to:
- Distinguish strategic thinking from strategic planning, strategic management and strategic leadership, and apply the test of value and real choice to a strategy document.
- Describe Horwath's three disciplines and the three habits of strategic thinkers, and identify which failure each habit guards against in your own organisation.
- Distinguish the five Cynefin domains and describe the decision-making approach each one calls for.
- Identify whether a challenge is tame or wicked using Rittel and Webber's four key properties, and explain what that means for how a strategy is written.
- Distinguish operational effectiveness from strategic positioning and apply that distinction to your own improvement programme.
- Apply the eliminate, reduce, raise and create moves to a service you lead, explaining how the first two fund the second two.
Built from 2 parts.
2 hours 30 minutes of learning.
- 01Seeing the bigger pictureStrategic thinking and environmental scanningBitesize2 modules
- 02Knowing where you standStrategic analysis: context, position and choiceBitesize2 modules
Keep going.
Part of the Strategic Thinking topic, also sold whole as The strategic mind.
Go deeper, and pay only the difference
- You are hereFocus, 2 hours 30 minutes, £69
- Next stepExplore, Thinking strategically, 4 hours, £129. Already own the Focus? You pay £60.
- The whole topicImmerse, The strategic mind, 7 hours 30 minutes, £249. Already own the Focus? You pay £180.
When you step up to a higher level, what you paid in the last 12 months for lower-level courses inside the bigger course comes off its price, in proportion to how much of each is inside it, whichever topic it's from. Courses at the same or a lower level don't give credit against each other. A Focus course or above always costs at least £15. Prices per person. Read the full terms