No matter what the industry or type of business, every organization needs a sustainable advantage to continually thrive (or simply survive) in a hyper-competitive market.
In a fast-paced commercial environment, it’s difficult to predict or plan for the shifting tastes of a consumer or B2B audience. Additionally, you never know when new challengers will appear on your turf.
So why get stuck with a short-lived advantage? With all the constant changes in emerging technology, customer needs, and market trends, an adaptive approach gives you the freedom to adjust your tactics at a moment’s notice.
What is an adaptive strategy?
In many ways, an adaptive strategy can be defined taking advantage of a series of fleeting advantages that hold sway until a changing environment calls for a new marketing approach. Adaptive strategies are both dependent on and defined by these three traits:
Readiness: This is where a company anticipates shifts in the industry or begins to sense changes in the market. Five years after pioneering the streaming service revolution in 2007, Netflix started creating original content. And don’t forget, before Netflix jumped into streaming, their business model was based on shipping DVDs to your doorstep. Their adaptive approach helped them endure the arrival of competing services from studios that once licensed television shows and movies to Netflix.
Responsiveness: Agility is key to any adaptive strategy. Whereas a traditional approach to maintaining a competitive advantage is often static and predictable, an adaptive approach relies on fast turnarounds. This requires a decentralized approval process that lets different teams within an organization operate independently and react promptly.
Resiliency: Variation in strategy alone isn’t enough. The ability to quickly recover and shift gears is essential to an adaptive approach. At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, many retailers simply lacked the resources to survive a shutdown. Those that ultimately thrived made comebacks with curbside service, at-home delivery, and other solutions.
Extreme weather, power-grid outages, resource scarcity, and other catastrophic events demonstrate the viability and necessity for an adaptive strategy in today’s world. When introducing an adaptive approach to your business, visuals often play an important role.
The role of visuals in adaptive strategy
Even though an adaptive strategy is based on the premise of continuous experimentation and real-time adjustment, there is a certain level of analysis and planning involved in the adaptive approach. Graphs, charts, diagrams, and other visuals can be used to interpret adaptive strategy.
Adaptive planning
Charting out an adaptive strategy sounds counterintuitive. However, visuals allow you to outline a plan, make decisions on resource allocation, and guide its implementation so that you can remain nimble and responsive in the moment.
Built into our strategic planning template are prompts and questions to help guide your adaptive strategy planning and encourage team collaboration.
- Problems/opportunities to solve: What solutions do we seek? What challenges need to be overcome? Is there an opportunity you’re now ready for (or must) pursue to advance?
- Goals and objectives: What goals must be met to address or solve the problems you’ve identified? What’s the most important goal or objective that everyone should focus on?
- Capabilities: What are we capable of doing now to reach our goals? Do our capabilities allow us to meet our current objectives? Will those capabilities change anytime soon?
- Actions: What actions are required to meet our objectives? Which individuals or teams will be responsible for the actions needed? How will we prioritize each of the actions?
- Initiatives: What initiatives do we need to work on to meet our actions? What initiatives do we think are a priority? Will any initiatives require approval before moving forward?
