Over the last 3 months, I’ve been working on a fantastic project with Food South Australia, to help them develop their 5-year export strategy.

During the course of the project, I’ve discovered some fascinating facts about South Australia, all of which contribute to its uniqueness and ability to provide a rich diversity of food and beverage offerings to the rest of Australia and the world!

Three fun facts I didn’t know before I started the project:

1. South Australia is the only State that convicts weren’t sent to – people willingly settled there!

2. There are around 200 different nationalities that live in South Australia.

3. SA is divided into 3 biomes (areas with similar climates and ecosystems). Two of these are land (arid and Mediterranean) and the third is a marine biome. 

I am delighted to be involved in presenting the export opportunities we have identified at ‘The Annual Food South Australia Summit’ on June 1^st 2022. This year’s program is firmly focused on ‘What’s next? What is Tomorrow’s New Normal? 

The summit brings together experts from across a variety of industries to discuss this topic from their perspective and promises to be an enlightening and entertaining day.

Click the link below for more information and to book Early Bird Tickets.

SA Food Summit Tickets

This event is live and virtual.

Way back in 1538 English Playwright John Heywood said “Rome was not built in a day”. You can be sure though, that every hour of every day there were bricks being laid – helping form the structure that would eventually become the centre of the Roman Empire.

This is how great strategy is built – block by block. Sure, building a strategy is not as grand an undertaking as building an empire but like an empire, it will crumble and fail miserably if the foundations aren’t strong (and this takes time).

Here are the five building blocks of great strategy to master:

1/Identify the Challenge: Create a powerful Challenge Statement

Create a powerful challenge statement that sets an extraordinary business challenge. What is it that you and your organisation seek to achieve by developing and successfully implementing this strategy?

Your challenge statement needs to be:

• Substantial– big enough to have significant implications for the organisation, business unit, department or brand. 
• Motivating – make it emotive. Stakeholders must care about it & want it to come to life. 
• Uncomfortable – stretch the organisation: the solution shouldn’t be obvious or too easy so people feel excited to work on the strategy and want to get stuck in.

2/ Market & Business Analysis: Get the right information

Ensure you collect the right information from the get go! It is important to have all the information on the table at the same time to distinguish between fact-based insights and commonly held beliefs and myths. There are many sources of info:

• Internal – including financial & non-financial quantitative data  and qualitative info collected through interviews with employees.
• External – Other data sources include industry reports, future forecasts etc. Interview external stakeholders – suppliers, customers, shareholders etc. to gain a more qualitative assessment and a rich source of info.

3/ Issues &   Opportunities Prioritisation: Focus on what is critical

Identify and focus on the critical – ensure you uncover the root cause of problems, don’t just address the symptoms. There are a number of tools that can be used for the preliminary analysis, including:

• SWOT/TOWS – Strengths, weakness, opporunities, threats
• PESTEL – political, economic, social, technological, environmental, legal
• Porter’s Five Competitive Forces: competitive rivalry, supplier power, buyer power, subsitution threat, new entry thereat. 
• Value chain– analysis of each activity required to create a product or service to reach the end customer including costs & profit margins.
• Gap Analysis– compares the gap between the ideal state of how your business needs to operate and how you are operating today.
• VRIO– value, rarity, imitability, organisation – assess your organisation’s resources to ascertain their potential competitive advantage.

4/ Vision & Strategy Development & Alignment: Get alignment on all key issues

Once you have identified and prioritised the issues and opportunities the next stage is to align on the vision and strategic elements.

These are a few of the tools to assist you in doing this:

• The balanced scorecard framework, created and made famous by Dr. Robert Kaplan and Dr. David Norton, focuses on identifying the critical measures for areas of business performance beyond just short-term financial metrics. It’s also a valuable guide for what areas your strategy should cover, and to help you get alignment on all key issues.

KISS – keep, improve, stop, start. It’s the KISS of life or death on the activities, initiative behaviours, and attitudes needed to bring each strategic element to life. The exercise is done as as team not in isolation by a leader.

5/ Implementation Plan: Embed implementation and mobilisation into a high-level plan

Embed implementation and mobilisation into a high-level plan. It is essential to include the high-level action plan into strategy. You need to consider the organisation’s capability to implement any strategy from the outset.

While implementation incorporates elements unique to each organisation, its specific challenges, and strategy, the one consistent element is the need to mobilise the people responsible for making it happen. 

Mobilisation is a critical enabler for successful strategy implementation.

Mobilising the people in your organisation means engaging with them to ensure their intellectual and emotional commitment to implementing the strategy

Understanding The Barriers

During periods of change, outstanding leadership is critical – many people crave trustworthy, courageous, transparent, unwavering, authentic guidance. As a leader, understanding that people respond in differing ways when faced with change is imperative.

As people process the changes, each stage has natural psychological barriers with basic needs to address: 

Stage 1 : DENIAL – Information 

Individuals go through withdrawal and focus on the past. There is activity but not much work gets done. Address this stage with information. 

Let people know change will happen and why the change is need. Wherever possible deliver in person not via email.

Stage 2 : RESISTANCE – Actively listen

In this stage you will see anger, blame, anxiety and depression. Use active listening to effectively deal with resistance. Encourage people to express their feelings without judgement. Be open and authentic about your own feelings about the changes.

Stage 3 : EXPLORATION – Short term goals 

There will be confusion, over-preparation, chaos, energy and potentially a lack of focus. To help people focus, set short term goals to channel their energy and achieve quick wins. 

Stage 4 : COMMITMENT – Long term goals

In this final phase of change, the staff will start working together. You will see better cooperation and improved focus. Once you’ve reached this stage, you can start setting long term goals and looking ahead to the benefits that will occur as a result of the changes. 

Achieving Successful Implementation 

In order to mobilise the people in your organisation to embrace change, you must ensure that the vast majority of those responsible for implementing the strategy possess the following attributes:

Belief

Do you believe that any change as a result of implementing the strategy is in your own, your colleagues, and the business’s best interest?

Clarity

Do you have clarity on your role and understand how success will be evaluated?

Capability

Do you feel you have the capabilities required to do the role you’re being asked to fill? If not, will you be supported to develop those capabilities?

Desire to Act

Are you willing to take action in line with the guidelines and timing outlined by the agreed plan?

Positivity

Will you demonstrate positive attitude and behaviour to support each other?

Fostering a collaborative environment for two-way communication between functions and different groups while also recognising the emotional turmoil that change creates will provide a more supportive environment. With greater transparency comes greater trust and reduced internal resistance to change.

‘To find where you are going, you must know where you are’ – John Steinbeck

In these uncertain times, having something to anchor you is more important than ever. 

Having a clear strategy – a pathway through the unpredictability can provide a measure of comfort, while what will one day become a historical event plays out.

You may have noticed  the growing day-to-day expectations placed on business leaders. Increased market volatility, more pressure from the competition, greater demands from employees and the community to ‘do the right thing’. And this pressure has only increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Too often, leaders abdicate their responsibility to set a longer-term strategic direction due to a focus on short-term results and a ‘who knows what’s around the corner?’ attitude.

But if your people don’t know the long-term destination of the business and its purpose:

• You’ll all go in different directions.
• You won’t build a competitive advantage.
• Decisions will be made on the fly with no consistency, or
• They will keep landing back on you, loading the pressure on you as a leader 

The conventional approach to strategy is based on the notion that by employing a set of sophisticated analytic tools, executives can reliably anticipate the future of any firm, allowing them to adopt a clear strategic course. That strategy has shown to be effective in generally steady firms.

However, it tends to fail when the environment is so unclear that no amount of solid analysis can forecast the future.

The future is always uncertain. 

However, by focusing on what you can control, being cognisant of what you can’t, and retaining a predisposition for action, you can succeed even in the most difficult circumstances.

‘Just because you make a good plan, doesn’t mean that’s what’s gonna happen.’ – Taylor Swift, singer and songwriter.

In a business, when a strategy’s implementation plan starts to go awry, the first inkling of a problem is often seen at the coalface, well away from the leader. Therefore, when putting an implementation plan together, be sure to build in flexibility and give people on the frontline the autonomy to make decisions so the implementation plan doesn’t become a straitjacket.

Make sure that everyone understands the ultimate goal, the decision-making guidelines, and the level of autonomy they have to get on and make things happen.

In his book ‘Drive’, Dan Pink asserts that science knows the answers to the secret for high performance and satisfaction for most people, which is often not followed in business. The three elements of motivation are:  autonomy, mastery and purpose. The first thing people crave is autonomy (not the same as flexibility), and there are four main ways it can be granted:

What people do – their task

When to do something – the timing

How to do it – the process

Who they do it with – the people

Rosemi Fitchett @Herman International Asia recognised that Dan Pink’s assertations fit neatly into the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument® (HBDI®) model, which identifies your preferred approach to emotional, analytical, structural, and strategic thinking. It also provides individuals with a significantly increased level of personal understanding.

Knowledge is power and the more we can empower people, the more autonomy they have, the more likely our plans will come to fruition!