How many businesses slip or fall even though they have a great strategy? How much business potential has been lost because business leaders fail to convert a good strategy into productive actions? Our sense is that the number is embarrassingly high.

Developing a strategy is one of the big challenges for businesses. But it is all too common to hear managers say that they spend so much time developing it that implementation is either an afterthought or a half-hearted effort. What is needed is a process that condenses the business strategy into a one-page summary that forms a strategy grid.

This grid is a framework that summarises key initiatives and potential moves emerging from the strategy process. A good test of its quality is to ask how valuable it would be to a key competitor.

The process that we recommend follows parallel tracks: bottom-up and top-down. Having different starting points provides an opportunity to tease out important conclusions that might otherwise have remained hidden from view.

The bottom-up view starts with a detailed expression of the base case for the business; aspects such as business scope, marketing, sales and distribution, customer service and technology. The result will be a picture of what the business looks like if it acts according to present plans, constraints and intentions.

The top-down process starts by looking at the big picture rather than the fine detail. It teases out the fundamental assumptions about the business environment and should isolate the “Tina” (There is no alternative) factors, such as demographic evolution, economic growth, competitive intensity, industry regulation and entry into trade blocs such as the EU.

Once these two stages are complete, take a broad look at potential disruptions to the business, then turn to the strategy grid itself. This is where you will summarise the results of the previous process.

The X-axis of the grid should strike a balance between ways to exploit the core business and explore new opportunities. The Y-axis clarifies what future actions and objectives are included in the basic case versus those that need to be assessed further. Each initiative included in the grid should be actionable. If it’s not, change the formulation until it is possible to place a milestone against it.

The end result should be a grid that summarises strategy and lists planned initiatives and potential moves.

In the end, your real strategy is not what your management team thought; it’s what your company actually did.

This is an edited version of Developing Actionable Strategy, by Andreas Birnik and Richard Moat. The original was published in Business Strategy Review (Spring) london.edu/bsr

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