Strategy & Strategic Thinking
Tools for strategic analysis and direction-setting
26 tools in this category
- 9-Point Strategy — Dale Williams' nine-question sequence for turning a raw idea into a working strategy and a first action.
- Benchmarking — Build a rubric from your best performers' observable behaviours, then measure and close the gap.
- Blue Ocean Strategy — Redesign what you offer, using the ERRC grid, to compete in uncontested market space rather than head-on.
- Brands — Map brand equity from awareness to resonance to find where intended and perceived brand diverge.
- Business Model You — The Business Model Canvas applied to a career - nine blocks mapping what you offer, to whom, and how you're resourced.
- Capability Maturity Model — Rate process maturity from ad hoc to self-optimising, then climb one level at a time rather than jumping to best practice.
- Clem Sunter Scenarios — Build a High Road and Low Road future, name the flags that signal which one is happening, and watch them.
- Gartner One Page Strategy — Fit vision and goals, key initiatives and metrics onto one page - if it needs explaining, simplify further.
- Good Strategy Bad Strategy — Test any strategy against Rumelt's kernel: a real diagnosis, a guiding policy, coherent actions.
- Good Strategy Bad Strategy Examples — Apply Rumelt's kernel test to real strategic failures like Kodak and Mxit to make the difference concrete.
- Jobs to be Done (JTBD) — Find the job customers are hiring your product to do, then redesign around that job, not the product.
- Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP) — Mine your positive and negative fuel first, then draft a purpose statement brief enough to survive being said aloud.
- Rockefeller Habits / Scaling Up — Ten execution habits that keep a growing company disciplined once it's too big to run on instinct.
- Scenario Planning — Build several plausible futures around your biggest uncertainties and pressure-test your strategy against each.
- Scenario Planning for Coaches — Bring scenario planning into a coaching conversation so a client tests plans against several futures, not one guess.
- Scientific Model for Business — Run the scientific method on a business assumption: observe, hypothesise, test, measure, iterate.
- Shell Scenarios — Shell's scenario planning history and real cases, Mont Fleur and Dinokeng, showing the method applied for real.
- Strategic Thinking — Test a strategy against real trade-offs and the biases that shaped it, not just the stated goals.
- Strategy Hacks — A collection of small, sharp strategy interventions for when a conversation is stuck, not a full framework.
- The Heart of the Strategy — Collapse strategic analysis into one core insight simple enough to pass the 3am Test.
- Value Discipline — Pick one of operational excellence, product leadership, or customer intimacy to lead in; be adequate at the rest.
- altMBA - Business Model Navigator — 55 proven business model patterns to test against your resources and redesign how you make money.
- altMBA - Decision Tree — Map a branching decision, weight each outcome by probability and payoff, and pick the highest expected value.
- altMBA - Reimagining Models — Name the assumption everyone treats as fixed, ask what if the opposite were true, and prototype an alternative.
- altMBA - Scenario Canvas — Build four plausible futures from your two biggest uncertainties, then pressure-test your strategy against each.
- altMBA - Strategy Canvas — Plot your value curve against competitors, then use eliminate/reduce/raise/create to design a different one.