A plan involves convergent thinking while strategy is all about divergent thinking. We need to think outside our own business circle and consider our clients, our competitors, our own company, what is happening on our industry and finally what is happening around us outside of all these that can impact on our business.

If our team is aware of these realities and regularly updating them, we will have prepared minds to respond to changes and take opportunities when they arise.

Here’s a small example while I was a director of ECOsystems which was focused on saving energy. As part of our strategic thinking, we had identified there was a big opportunity for councils to reduce energy use in street lighting by moving to LED streetlights (currently councils are replacing 80 watt Sodium lamps with 23 watt LEDs). While ECOsystems was a major player in lighting control work in commercial buildings, we were not a lighting supplier and street lighting was a very different market in many ways. However we commissioned some initial research to interview a number of councils about their plans to move the LEDs.

With this information to hand, when we saw an opportunity, three years later, to take on the agency for Streetlight.Vision, a Central Management Software for controlling street lighting, we had prepared minds and were ready to take on the opportunity. Streetlight-Vision

We have now developed a practical strategic thinking process that allows businesses with 25 or less employees to prepare their business similarly.