It Is Time To Re-Assess Your Strategic Assumptions
Gaining A Deeper Understanding
When you are operating in a complex economic
environment, a deeper understanding is required of
the complexity of issues that affect your decision
making. Re-assessing your assumptions encourages
you to ask the hard questions about the market
forces influencing your enterprise. It also reexamines
your assumptions about your customers in terms of
both their decision criteria and what triggers their
purchasing behavior.
Reviewing your assumptions also ensures that
the most critical questions about your future are
discussed well in advance of them impacting
your bottom line. This requires your ability to
realistically assess the influence of how these other
factors impact your situation. This effort provides
opportunities to deepen your value to your current
and prospective customers.
It is imperative to consider how the assumptions
you are currently using may be distorting your
situation and undermining your ability to make
better long-range decisions. Re-evaluating your
assumptions with an objective perspective will help
you identify the shifts you need to make and in turn,
the insight you need to obtain to move your decision
making forward in the most effective manner.
Developing Better Assumptions
Good assumptions are based on accurate
information and this information needs to be
continually updated. The most critical factor that
determines how rapidly you can get clarity is
grounded in the quality of the assumptions that you
use to evaluate your decision options.
We must become even more observant to stay on
top of evolving trends. Those shifts and changes can
fundamentally alter the viability of our assumptions.
As a result, we need to continually update our
understanding of what is impacting the decisions we
make.
Good business decision makers are always willing to
assess how changing assumptions can benefit their
bottom line or create new revenue streams. You have
to monitor data to shake out the evolving changes
that are not obvious on a macro view. This takes
discipline and effort.
Final Thoughts
Reassessing your assumptions about the future
will make you a better strategic thinker and give you
deeper insight into how your marketplace needs are
likely to change. Encourage your trusted advisors
and key employees to help you challenge the
assumptions you currently use in your organization
for decision-making. Be on the lookout for emerging
trends and how they may affect your enterprise.
Those emerging concerns or challenges that are
on the horizon might affect your decision-making
approaches. It is always safe to assume that
something is going to change.
Jill J. Johnson, MBA, is the President and Founder of Johnson Consulting Services, a highly
accomplished speaker, an award-winning management consultant, and author of the bestselling book
Compounding Your Confidence. Jill helps her clients make critical business decisions and develop
market-based strategic plans for turnarounds or growth. Her consulting work has impacted more than
$4 billion worth of decisions. She has a proven track record of dealing with complex business issues
and getting results.
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