When was the last time you questioned if what you are doing is working? How often do you hold an honest check-up session on the fruitfulness of your efforts?
It could be that an approach you have been trying to push through is not yielding the expected results, or something has changed in the environment that makes your current efforts less and less relevant. The pace of environmental changes, the speed of innovation, the ever-increasing importance to react quickly to what you learn from your experiments – all these are solid reasons why once in a while you’d be facing the need to stop what you are doing and plan the Strategic Pivoting.
The stress is on the word “Strategic”. While pivoting is certainly a common practice, pivoting without a strategy continues to undermine the efforts of big and small organizations, even some highly experienced ones.
What IS NOT a “strategic” pivoting?
A chase for
- the latest competition move
- the latest shiny technology
- the latest well-pitched idea
is NOT a “strategic” pivoting.
We can distinguish this type of initiated change as a “delusional pivoting”. We all probably have some examples of “delusional pivoting” from our past experience and remember the caused frustration.
What IS a “strategic” pivoting?
Strategic pivoting is a response to re-evaluation of market conditions, discoveries made from customers’ feedback, and lessons learned from value creation experiments. This response consists of a set of changes to the existing strategy while keeping sight on the original vision.
And as there are various components to every strategy, tuning might need to be required to one or a series of these components. Eric Ries explored the types of pivoting at length: customer segment, customer need, value capture, the engine of growth, channel, and several others might be your candidates for the strategic pivoting consideration. The more defined your existing strategy is and the more you understand how the aspects of your strategy are interdependent, the easier it would be to assess and plan for your strategic pivoting.
The initiation of your strategic pivoting should go through these stages:
1.Confirm the vision
First and foremost, confirm that the vision stays true. The changes apply to the path towards the vision. The destination stays, and you’d better know what it is!
2.Evaluate the options
Some helpful questions to ask when evaluating your course correction options:
- Why is this change considered? What is it aiming to accomplish or validate?
- Is the strategy you are arriving at by introducing the correction still a legitimate strategy? To be more specific,
- Does it still support your vision?
- Is it still aiming to provide a unique value to your customers?
- Are its corrected components still aligned (remember the inter-dependencies between the strategy components!)?
- Can you execute on the corrected strategy?
- What is the measurement of success of the correction?
3.Plan your pivoting
Planning for pivoting is similar to strategy implementation planning. Similar aspects should be reviewed, and depending on the scale of the change and the size of the organization this can be a significant undertake (the range can go from a startup tweaking its product offering to a multinational organization changing its business model). Regardless of the scale of the pivot, planning should consider the timing of the change, internal and external communication of the change (this is where the answer to “Why is this change considered?” becomes very handy), change management, metrics for change evaluation, and risks.
Example:
There are plenty of successful pivoting illustrations. But the strategy also applies to a personal career path, as does the need for periodic strategic pivoting. Here is how I used it.
For over a decade, my vision has been to help improve product development outcomes by strategizing what and why is being produced. I had this vision more than 10 years ago, and I am still driven by it. My venues of delivering on this vision have been evolving through the years in a search of a more productive and further-reaching solution. It is through the series of pivoting that I went from product managing a large product line for the software enterprise to the current set of business management services and the consulting business model. Every pivot through this evolution had gone through the phases we lined up above:
- an evaluation of results, progress towards the vision, and market conditions,
- an assessment of pivoting options,
- planning with the necessary goals setting, metrics, and timelines. With time I learned to also list the channels of feedback collection for further corrections.
This approach has served me well in several ways:
- It ensured that I am not stuck in any low-productive state for too long.
- It ensured that lessons learned are continuously feeding into the next cycle of corrections.
- It serves as a framework and provides confidence that the corrections are not some random attempts with hopes for the best, but rather are a strategic pivoting leading to a steadily improving path towards a bigger goal.
Either out of a habit, or extreme cases of perseverance, or reluctance to challenge the status quo, it is strikingly common to continue doing what we have settled to do, even when it is obviously not working. Let’s say we admitted the need to reconsider. What are the other common pivoting mistakes to be aware of?
Too rushed pivoting. If no prompt evaluation is done, no strategy is developed, no plan of execution is considered, you are increasing the risk of having to do another pivot right away, losing trust with your strategy implementers and anyone affected by the pivot (including customers!).
Too slow pivoting. There is a risk of getting stuck in crafting the perfect pivot or in a non-decisive state. Eric Ries refers to this state as “analysis paralysis”. If your course needs correction, it is better to validate an imperfect pivot than to continue to execute on a strategy that is calling for immediate improvement. There is only one way to confirm the quality of the correction, and it is through its validation with real customers.
There is a room for solid strategy experimentation in between these extremes. Find your balance and keep your sight on that vision that propels your venture forward.