Or, if not for your business, for your competitors. Staying up-to-date with technology trends is important for all businesses, and understanding those trends can help shape and inform your strategy.įor example, consider what big data could do for your business. As the younger generations come into the workplace, their expectations of work come with them: how are you placed for attracting and retaining the best talent? What are your customers going to expect in 5 years? Thinking about the answers to these questions now can future-proof your business for the years to come.Īgain, make sure that your mindmap has space for all the social factors that are affecting and could continue to affect your business strategy. You can also think about the kind of people involved in your business: both employees and customers. If this societal trend continues, what impact is it going to have on your business model? For example, we’re seeing a growth of apps, and more websites being accessed by mobile users instead of desktop users. This area relates to the societal changes that might influence where your business is going. Add economic factors to your mindmap to get all those areas covered. You’ll want your business analysts and Finance team involved in the discussion, along with anyone responsible for investor relations or city liaison. This has all to do with what is happening in the markets that might affect share price or consumer purchasing or interest rates and so on. The economic context is probably the one that your Exec team will spend the most time thinking about. Being aware of the wider commercial context is a good way to make sure that you can be agile enough to react to it. Start a file to record all the things that might affect your strategy. IMindQ is a great way to capture all these possibilities, for the political context and the other points that we’ll come on to.

Policy changes can generate new strategic initiatives as businesses try to keep up, and in turn, that means some of the other initiatives and projects we want to work on have to take a back seat. Different people bring different opinions to the top jobs of leading our countries, and you may find that the business environment looks quite different with a different set of leaders in charge. These are all areas to consider when looking at the environment in which your organization operates.Ī change of government can bring about policy changes that might influence your strategy. So what is this amazing framework that I’m going to share with you today? It’s PESTLE (which you might also see as STEEPLE). It’s really important because without an awareness of these things you might implement the wrong strategy or find that some initiatives fail because they simply can’t thrive in the business context. You might think it sounds a bit like identifying the project risks from your strategic initiatives, but it isn’t: this exercise is about understanding the factors outside the organization that you can’t control. This prompt list is helpful for mind mapping the factors that might influence the success or failure of your strategic initiatives.

Whether your business is big or small, knowing where you are going is key to success, and your strategy is a big part of that. A prompt list is a shortcut to remembering certain items and today I’ve got a prompt list for you to help you understand the external context of your business strategy.

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