Creation and Implementation 

From over-arching corporate strategies to project level entry, partnering, or execution strategies, a stable uncertainty based approach that examines varied paths to achieve your objectives has been shown to create sustainable strategies. Strategies that stand the test of time. Strategies that take advantage of your organizational strengths and culture.

The Consultants at HCI work with your team to identify the pathway to achieve your strategic objectives and construct an implementation plan that makes sense for your company culture. An eye to implementation is present from the beginning. 

Investigating strategic options is fundamental to the creation of sound successful strategies. Modern decision analysis methods are applied by Decision Experts to identify the full range of potential outcomes, downside threats, and establish a truly hybrid solution to maximize your objective fulfillment. 

Our Method (briefly)
Always... Always... start qualitatively. Jumping to calculate brings bias and poor choices to the process. You cannot calculate a strategy. You cannot number-crunch your way to competitive advantage. Understanding the ultimate competitive positioning and degree of critical objective fulfillment is they key to sound strategy creation and implementation.

We use a consultative method that includes your staff and expertise. The process starts with Discovery and Framing which includes the identification of objectives and objective hierarchy. The strategic decisions are separated from the tactical decisions and Strategic Themes are created. You may think of a Strategic Theme as a pathway through the collection of possible solutions to the strategic questions). Strategic Themes are developed across your potential competitive positioning choices. Each Strategic Theme delivers a particular "flavor" of outcome. For example, Low Cost Producer, Innovator, or Control might be themes that would provide prioritized "flavors" of outcome derived from what you decide in your series of strategic decisions.

We then examine the pros and cons of each possible Strategic Theme to identify the associated advantages and threats. We examine the potential implementation advantages and difficulties concentrating on and building off of your existing competitive advantages.

Your in-house experts participate with us to look at each them from an external perspective. For each Theme we establish the external conditions that would have to exist in order for that particular theme to be the obvious best choice, and then to establish the Corporate Risk potential, we identify the context under which each Theme would deliver the worst performance.

This process allows us to create a Hybrid Theme, one that maintains high objective fulfillment and takes advantage of the paths to upside probability while mitigating the downside threats identified in the Strategic Theme options.

Strategic Modeling
The push to be quantitative will be strong, and yes, it is an important part of the assessment. However, it needs to occur after a significant amount of qualitative assessment has been completed. Why? Because we live in a world of uncertainty. Any quantitative effort needs to be able to take into consideration the uncertainties and chance elements discovered within the qualitative framing work. If we were to run quantitatively too early, we would miss synergies, dependencies and ultimately expose our company to significant risk. We would also lose the ability to identify and mitigate threats as a team due to an over-reliance on a "modeler" to flag issues in the competitive positioning.

When we select a particular path, we are in essence buying the entire outcome range. We don't get to choose to only have the expected outcome, or for that matter and subset of outcomes. As such, all modeling must take into account the uncertainties, dependencies, and correlations present in the system.

Important questions to ask of the model:
- What is the range of uncertainty?
- What elements cause us to be at the lower end?
- If we make a mistake, how badly can we be hurt? (Pain and Regret)
​- What are the major contributors to our success and potential causes of failure? Is there a way to influence them? (Value of Control)
- What do we still need to learn about? (Value of Information)
​- How far is our expected result from the point at which we would choose to do something different? (Indifference Assessment)

As an eye to implementation has been maintained throughout the project, the move to implement the chosen strategy is straight-forward. Modern Organizational Change Management techniques fit seamlessly with well supported strategic choices, thus minimizing one of the most common threats of strategy failure.