Strategic Thinking Questionaire

Here is a questionnaire for small businesses and startups to test their strategic thinking

10 points you should think about:

1. Customer

• Who is your Customer?
• Why people buy from you? How did you find that out? from customer surveys, consultant or internally ?
• Do you focus on Customer Experience or your product? E.g. Apple store
• Do you interact with your Customer Networks or aim to build them? E.g. Harley Davidson
• What is your value proposition to the customer? Is it defined by your products and your industry or is it defined by changing customer needs
• What is your first priority? Maximizing shareholder return or creating value for customers.

2. Market and Competitors

• Do you constantly scan the market for new competitor & substitutes?
• Do you monitor Market for trends?
• Do you focus on Customer’s changing needs?
• Is your competitive Focus to beat your rivals or are you open to Cooperating with rivals and competing with partners to provide best value proposition to the customer

3. Technology

• Do you assess new technologies by how they will impact your current business? What are the parameters you check?
• Do you assess new technologies by how they could create new value for your customers?

4. Decision Making

• How are decisions made in your organisation? By analysis, debate, and seniority. Or through experiments and testing.
• Do you have Information-gathering systems for your organisation? What kind of information do you get?

5. Strategic Initiatives

• How responsive is your organisation to direction setting and strategic initiatives?
• Are there conversations around new strategy/ initiative in the organisation before and after the decision?

6. Business Model

• Do you have your business model defined with Customer Value Proposition; Profit Formula and its scalability; Key resources & Processes, capabilities, people, culture that help you provide CVP

7. Organisational Agility

• How easily can you allocate Resources to different divisions or is it more or less same each year?

8. Key Performance Metrics

• Do you have KPIs that you monitor as management? What are they? Are they mostly financial or operational or sales?
• Are the Key performance metrics related only to sustaining your existing businesses? Or your business metrics adapt to suit changes in strategy and the maturity of a line of business.

9. Failures

• You try to avoid failure in new ventures at all costs or do you accept failure in new ventures but look to reduce cost and increase learning.

10. HR Related

• Are the Managers accountable and rewarded for immediate results on past objectives or for long-term goals and new strategies. Or does it change year to year
• Can you affect Cultural Changes? Or is it organically developed and you have no control?
• Are there Skill Development programs? What has been the result?
• Is Talent-management aligned with your strategic initiatives?
• Can you change structure of your organisation according to the need? Roles and responsibilities are well defined or arbitrary?

References

These two sources provide excellent self-assessment questionnaires on digital preparedness.

1. “The Digital Transformation Playbook” — self-assessment: are you ready for digital transformation? — David Rogers

2. “Leading Digital” — Digital Mastery Self-Assessment — George Westerman, Didier Bonnet, Andrew McAfee

This questionnaire is available as a google form below. If you would like a free analysis, please fill the form, and we would get back to you