Tactical agility is essential to ensure your business can react productively to change
Strategy can be related to the longer-term mission and vision you want your company to achieve. Tactics are shorter-term actions that keep you aligned with whatever the current trends may be or the immediate challenges and opportunities you might have. Pricing, positioning, and proposition can be tactically adjusted to make sure the overall strategy is running effectively.
Balancing structure and flexibility is a key concern when aiming to keep your business tactically agile. Having a structured approach will provide a reliable offering/service to your clients that will result in more consistent profits. This organised process should be extended to setting and measuring expectations, so progress is being monitored correctly.
These expectations or target points should be pre-set so that no time, money, or effort investment can cloud judgement, further down the line. As well as this, the method of measurement should also be pre-agreed so there can be no doubt as to whether a specific initiative is succeeding or failing. Cut-off points must be established so that waste is minimised if the plan is not running as anticipated.
Minimal viable products or services are a good way to keep your offering tactically agile. This means creating basic products/services that can be tested before substantial investment is sunk into their wider production/implementation. Features can be altered in line with the feedback received so that the most suitable offering can be produced.
Modern markets are ever evolving, and production cost and speed of release has been reduced. Consequently, businesses need to stay ahead of the curve by responding not only to the feedback from their initial adopters (or test group), but also to their competitors’ offerings. Utilising your most loyal customers as this test group can be effective because they are already familiar with your company identity and can also stimulate loyalty through involvement.
Changing one’s mind can sometimes be viewed as a negative, because of the lack of confidence or commitment this might suggest. However, an organisation’s ability to pivot can also be a positive; when things are not proceeding acceptably, transformations must be made. Pivoting your overall strategy should be rare as this dictates the wider processes of your company, but pivoting your shorter-term tactics can be the best way to adapt to developing trends.
As ever, this balance between flexibility and structure must be carefully maintained. If you pivot too regularly then this will result in confusion, and the values by which you operate will become unclear. Having reactive tactics can keep your business agile, but always consider your ultimate, more rigid, strategy.
Do you pre-set expectations before new initiatives are launched? Do you test your offerings before you have committed substantial resources into them? Have you considered that pivoting your approach might yield greater results?