Strategy Re-calibration: When, Why, and How to Redefine Your Path to Growth

Is your Strategy delivering results?

Did you know that 70% of chief strategists have little confidence they can bridge the strategy-execution gap? But what if the real issue lies in the strategy itself? Even the most well-crafted growth strategies can fail to deliver the desired results. When this happens, the reflexive response often focuses on execution—adjusting tactics, reallocating resources, or intensifying efforts. However, underperformance often signifies a deeper issue: the need for strategy re-calibration.

Re-calibrating your strategy isn’t about starting from a blank page; it’s about stepping back and challenging the foundational assumptions on which the strategy was built to check its validity and robustness. This process is essential for businesses that aim to regain momentum, address shifts in their competitive landscape, re-mobilize employees, and uncover new growth opportunities.

When and why is strategy re-calibration necessary?

The need for strategy re-calibration typically arises under three key circumstances:

1. External Disruption: technological changes, customer behavior, or market dynamics can render existing strategies obsolete. For example, the rise of AI is rapidly changing how we can engage with customers and offer more personalized solutions.
2. Persistent Underperformance: if a strategy consistently falls short of its objectives, it signals the stretch between the company’s aspirations and its current capabilities are beyond what it can deliver.
3. Missed Opportunities: if competitors are consistently outpacing you or entering markets that your organization failed to anticipate, it may indicate blind spots in your strategic framework and assumptions about your ability to differentiate in the eyes of your customers.

In each of these scenarios, a re-calibration allows course-correcting your current strategy by reassessing the assumptions, priorities, and capabilities underpinning your growth efforts.

Failing to do so can cause serious problems. Nokia once dominated the mobile phone market but was slow to adapt to new technologies that enabled smartphones with more advanced operating systems. Blockbuster’s failure to recognize the shifts in consumer preferences for online streaming and mail-order rental services (and the reliance on late fees in their business model), led to its downfall. The company remained focused on its brick-and-mortar stores, missing the opportunity to innovate in digital distribution.

Recovering from taking action too late is more challenging than re-calibrating in time. When companies fail to recalibrate the results can be significant, such as market share loss, declining innovation pipelines, or even talent attrition.

A quick way to start strategy re-calibration?

Re-calibrating strategy requires a disciplined approach to identifying the root causes of underperformance and designing a more resilient path forward. The process can be broken into four phases:

1. Revisit Strategic Assumptions

Start by critically examining the assumptions that informed your current strategy’s development. This phase requires a thorough, data-driven exploration of internal and external factors to identify any shifts that may impact your current direction. Key questions to guide this analysis include:

• Are customer preferences evolving? Identify unexpected trends or behaviors that could disrupt your existing value proposition or open new opportunities.
• Has the competitive landscape changed? Identify new entrants, shifts in market dynamics, or competitor strategies that could alter your position.
• Do emerging technologies or macroeconomic factors pose challenges? Assess how emerging technologies, regulatory changes, or economic shifts could impact your offerings or open new avenues for growth.
• Have you overestimated your competitive strenghts? Examine whether your core competencies are truly unique, products or services truly stand out in new markets or if adjustments are needed.

2. Recalibrate your strategy

Adjust Your Point of View

Rewrite the leadership team’s perspective based on insights gained from revisiting the strategic assumptions. Challenge existing mindsets by integrating new data, market trends, and evolving customer needs to ensure the team’s outlook aligns with current reality and future probabilities. This step helps foster a forward-looking and adaptive strategic mindset.

Update the Assumptions

Create a clearly defined, updated list of assumptions about your market, customers, and competitive landscape. Regularly validate these assumptions with fresh data and insights to maintain relevance. Establish a process for continuous monitoring to promptly address changes that may impact your strategy. This helps to increase the resilience of the organization.

Adjust Goals and Objectives

Recalibrate your organization’s goals and objectives to reflect the revised perspective and updated assumptions. Ensure they are specific, measurable, and aligned with both short-term priorities and long-term ambitions to provide the right balance between extending the core business and creating options for the future. This adjustment drives progress that is both impactful and sustainable.

Update KPI’s

Evolve your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to align with the recalibrated goals and objectives. Focus on metrics that provide actionable insights and reflect expectations in key areas of strategic focus. Continuously review and refine these KPIs to adapt to shifting priorities and external conditions, ensuring decision-making is data-driven and responsive.

Encourage Participation

Facilitate stakeholder alignment through collaborative workshops or strategy meetings, ensuring a shared vision for the remaining years of the current strategic cycle. This shared perspective is essential for setting clear priorities and efficiently allocating resources, enabling your organization to navigate change with confidence and clarity.

3. Drive Innovation and Growth

With updated insights into the external and internal environment, realign your organization’s strategic priorities to reflect new opportunities and challenges. This stage combines creativity with pragmatism, ensuring innovation is balanced with achievable outcomes.

Key steps include:

• Optimizing the Innovation Portfolio: Assess and prioritize opportunities that provide a balance between short-term gains and long-term strategic growth. Use data-driven evaluations to identify high-value initiatives and eliminate redundant or low-impact efforts.
• Clarifying High-Potential Opportunities: Determine which opportunities align most closely with your organizational strengths and market trends. Focus resources on those that offer the greatest potential to drive sustainable growth.
• Identifying Capability Gaps: Map the skills, resources, and infrastructure required to capture value in the new context. Develop a clear plan to build, acquire, or enhance these capabilities to position your organization for success.

By refining the portfolio of opportunities, you not only stimulate innovation and engagement but also highlight critical areas where your core competencies must evolve. This ensures your organization is prepared to seize opportunities and adapt to changing conditions effectively.

4. Rebuild Strategic Coherence

A successful re-calibration ensures that all components of your strategy—resources, processes, and goals—are harmonized to achieve the desired outcomes. This includes:

• Aligning leadership around the recalibrated strategy to ensure clarity and commitment.
• Developing an adaptive execution plan that allows for ongoing learning and iteration.
• Communicating the updated strategy effectively to stakeholders, ensuring buy-in across the organization.
• Ensure every employee understands their role and how they can contribute in driving the strategy forward.

Start the Process

If you’re doubting whether your strategy is working the way it should and think re-calibrating is required, initiating a structured strategy audit is the first step. This involves:

• Create a core team: assemble a team that includes leaders, subject matter experts from a variety of departments, and customer-facing roles. Their diverse perspectives are crucial to uncovering hidden insights and challenging assumptions.
• Conducting external and internal analysis: leverage proven tools such as the Strategos lenses to gain a comprehensive view of the forces influencing your business and develop new perspectives.
• Facilitating creative workshops: use innovation techniques that bring together all the insights and generate bold ideas for growth.
• Engaging an external partner: organizations often benefit from an outside, independent perspective to identify blind spots and navigate complex trade-offs. A partner with expertise in strategic re-calibration can bring fresh ideas and proven frameworks to the process.

Repeat regularly

Examining your point of view and the most critical assumptions should not be a one off exercise but institutionalized as part of the leadership agenda. The most critical assumptions for a strategy should be monitored continuously and if they turn out to be invalid the leadership needs to re-calibrate and course correct.