How Strategic Is Your Current Approach?
Twelve honest answers. Your score tells you which chapters to read hardest.
Welcome to the Field Edition: ten consulting-grade frameworks cut down from the full 31-chapter playbook, one per step. Before the frameworks, take a baseline. Rate yourself on each dimension: 1 = rarely, 5 = consistently. The score updates live, and you'll see it again at the end.
The Golden Rule: Problem Before Solution
Most failed projects fail before they begin, because they solve the wrong problem.
Managers jump to solutions. It feels productive, it feels decisive, and it is the single most expensive habit in business. Organisations waste millions building solutions to problems nobody validated. The consulting discipline is the opposite: invest in problem definition before a penny goes near a solution.
A good problem statement is specific, measurable, and neutral about solutions. "We need a new CRM" is a solution in disguise. "Repeat booking rate has fallen from 34% to 26% in 18 months, concentrated in customers acquired via paid channels" is a problem you can actually attack.
Getting stakeholder buy-in early, before solutions are proposed, dramatically reduces costly late-stage changes. People support what they helped define.
- Write the problem as observed facts, not opinions or solutions
- Quantify it: how big, since when, trending which way?
- Name who feels the pain, and what it costs them
- List what you're assuming, and mark what's unverified
- Only then ask: what are the possible causes?
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Structured Thinking: The MECE Principle
Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive: no overlaps, no gaps.
MECE is how consultants break big, foggy problems into pieces that can each be owned, analysed, and solved. A breakdown is mutually exclusive when no item appears in two buckets, and collectively exhaustive when the buckets together cover everything.
"Revenue is down" becomes tractable when split MECE: revenue = customers × frequency × average order value. Each branch can fall independently, each can be measured, and nothing is counted twice and nothing is missed. Stack these splits and you have an issue tree: the workhorse of structured problem-solving.
- Put the problem statement at the top
- Split it into 2–4 MECE branches (formulas, process stages, or customer segments all work)
- Test each level: any overlaps? anything missing?
- Keep splitting until each leaf is a question data can answer
- Prioritise leaves by likely impact, and investigate those first
The value of MECE isn't elegance, it's coverage: it stops teams investigating the same cause twice whilst the real driver sits in a branch nobody drew.
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Framing Problems Clearly: SCQA
Situation, Complication, Question, Answer: the one-page structure executives actually read.
SCQA is Barbara Minto's framing device from McKinsey, and it works because it mirrors how attention operates. Situation: the stable context everyone agrees on. Complication: what changed, the reason we're talking. Question: the decision that follows naturally. Answer: your recommendation, up front, not buried on slide 40.
Lead with the answer. Executives are not reading a mystery novel; they want the recommendation first and the reasoning available beneath it. SCQA earns you the first thirty seconds of any meeting.
- Situation: 2–3 sentences of uncontested context
- Complication: the change or threat, with one number attached
- Question: the single decision this raises
- Answer: your recommendation in one sentence, then three supporting points
- Cut everything that doesn't serve those four beats
SCQA is particularly valuable in email and briefing notes: a leader who receives a correctly framed one-pager can make the decision in the first read.
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Looking Inward: SWOT Done Right
Four lists are worthless. Four lists that collide into actions are strategy.
Everyone knows SWOT; almost everyone does it badly. The failure mode is producing four tidy lists, admiring them, and filing the slide. The value of SWOT is not in the lists, it's in the collisions between them: pairing internal strengths and weaknesses against external opportunities and threats to force strategic choices.
- Strength × Opportunity: where do we attack? These are your growth plays.
- Strength × Threat: where do we defend? Use what you're good at to blunt what's coming.
- Weakness × Opportunity: what must we build or buy to participate?
- Weakness × Threat: where are we exposed? These pairings are your risk register's front page.
Discipline test: every item must be evidenced (a number, a fact) and every quadrant pairing must end in a verb. A SWOT with no resulting actions was a colouring exercise.
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Understanding Competition: Porter's Five Forces
Profitability is structural. Read the structure before you fight in it.
Michael Porter's insight was that industry profitability isn't about how hard companies compete, it's about the structure they compete in. Five forces set the ceiling: rivalry among existing competitors, threat of new entrants, threat of substitutes, power of suppliers, and power of buyers.
The framework's practical use is locating where the pressure on your margins actually comes from, and which force you can shift. Sometimes the answer is uncomfortable: in many travel niches the buyer power of platforms, not rivalry between operators, is what compresses margin.
In travel, AI agents represent a potential new entrant and a new buyer-power channel at once: an intermediary that books on the traveller's behalf shifts two forces simultaneously. Re-run the analysis whenever the interface to the customer changes.
- Score each force 1 (weak) to 5 (strong) for your specific segment, not your industry in general
- Attach one piece of evidence per score
- Circle the strongest force: that is where your margin goes
- Ask what would move that score one point in your favour
- That answer is a strategic initiative; test it against the prioritisation matrix in Step 9
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The 80/20 Rule: Focus on What Matters
A small number of inputs drive a disproportionate share of outputs. Find them, then be ruthless.
Vilfredo Pareto noticed 80% of Italy's land was owned by 20% of its people. Joseph Juran turned it into management's most useful lens: separate the vital few from the trivial many. In practice: 80% of revenue from 20% of customers, 80% of complaints from 20% of issues, 80% of delays from 20% of process steps. The exact ratio varies; the skew doesn't.
The strategic moves once you've found the vital few: double down on winners, reconsider the long tail (it's often a drag on cost and complexity, not a hidden gem), aim improvement effort at the few issues causing most pain, and check your calendar: are you spending 80% of your time on the 20% that matters?
- Define the outcome you care about (revenue, complaints, hours)
- List every contributing factor and quantify each one
- Sort largest to smallest, and compute cumulative percentages
- Draw the line where you cross ~80%: everything above it is the vital few
- Reallocate attention and budget to roughly mirror the curve
BCG research on AI scaling found winners concentrate on 3–5 high-value use cases rather than dozens of experiments. That is 80/20 thinking applied to a technology portfolio.
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KPI Trees & the Five Whys
KPI trees show you what is happening. Root cause analysis tells you why.
A KPI tree decomposes a headline metric into its drivers, MECE-style. Revenue = sessions × conversion × average order value; conversion = search-to-view × view-to-basket × basket-to-purchase. When the headline moves, the tree tells you where it moved. It doesn't tell you why.
That's the job of the Five Whys: ask "why?" repeatedly (five is a guideline, not a law) until you hit a cause you can act on. Basket-to-purchase fell → why? → payment failures rose → why? → a new fraud rule → why? → thresholds copied from another market... Now you have a fix, not a symptom.
The combination is the point: KPI trees for detection, Five Whys for diagnosis. Teams that use only the first alert loudly; teams that use only the second investigate slowly. Together they close the loop in days.
- Maintain one KPI tree per headline metric that leadership tracks
- Review branch movements weekly; flag anything beyond normal variance
- For each flag, run Five Whys with the people closest to the process
- Log the root cause and the fix; watch the branch recover
- If the same root cause appears twice, it's systemic: escalate it
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Prioritisation: Choosing What to Do First
Strategy is choosing what not to do. The impact/effort matrix makes the choice visible.
Every organisation has more good ideas than capacity. The impact/effort matrix is the fastest honest way to sequence them: score each initiative on impact (value if it works) and effort (cost, time, complexity), plot, and read the quadrants. High-impact/low-effort are your quick wins: do them now. High/high are big bets: pick one or two. Low/low fill-ins are for slack time, and low-impact/high-effort is the thankless quadrant: decline politely.
Use the live tool below with your real initiatives; the scoring arguments with colleagues are where the value is.
Impact / Effort Matrix — add your initiatives
Click a plotted initiative to remove it.
The matrix's real function is social, not analytical: it forces the sponsors of pet projects to defend their scores in public, with the same scale as everyone else.
Why Good Ideas Fail: Stakeholders & Resistance
Brilliant analysis dies in rooms where nobody built a coalition.
Most strategies don't fail on their merits; they fail on their politics. The discipline is stakeholder mapping: plot everyone affected on two axes, influence and attitude (champion → neutral → sceptic → blocker), and engage each group deliberately rather than broadcasting the same deck to all of them.
- High-influence champions: arm them. They persuade in rooms you're not in.
- High-influence sceptics: engage earliest, one-to-one, and let them improve the plan. Converted sceptics are your best advocates.
- Low-influence blockers: don't over-invest; keep them informed, contained by momentum.
- The silent middle: they follow visible wins, so manufacture one quickly.
Google's research on high-impact initiatives found early stakeholder involvement was a stronger predictor of adoption than solution quality. People support what they helped shape, and resist what was done to them.
- List every stakeholder; score influence and attitude honestly
- Meet the two most influential sceptics before any public presentation
- Incorporate at least one visible change from their input
- Secure an executive sponsor who will spend political capital, not just approve
- Deliver one visible win in 30 days and publicise it relentlessly
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Putting It Together: Your 90-Day Plan
Frameworks are inert until sequenced. Here is the sequence.
The playbook ends where your calendar begins. Ninety days is long enough to demonstrate real change and short enough to hold attention. The structure below runs this edition's tools in their natural order.
- Write the problem statement (Step 2) and get three stakeholders to sign it
- Build the issue tree (Step 3) and the KPI tree (Step 8) for the headline metric
- Run SWOT-with-collisions (Step 5) and Five Forces (Step 6) as evidence, not decoration
- Run the 80/20 cut (Step 7) on customers, products, and issues
- Generate options, score them on the impact/effort matrix (Step 9), select 2–3
- Map stakeholders (Step 10); convert the two biggest sceptics before announcing
- Frame the recommendation as an SCQA one-pager (Step 4) and present answer-first
- Ship one visible quick win and publicise it
- Stand up the weekly KPI-tree review; log root causes as they surface
- Retake the self-assessment at day 90 and compare scores
Organisations that pursue structured transformation achieve revenue growth 1.8× their industry peers (McKinsey). The difference isn't luck, it's methodology, applied on a calendar.
Go Deeper: The Complete Playbook
Ten frameworks got you started. The full book has thirty-one chapters, and the templates to run every one of them.
What the full book adds
- 21 more chapters across eight parts, from PESTLE and market sizing to systems thinking, hypothesis testing, OKRs and the Business Model Canvas
- A complete template library: issue tree builders, prioritisation scorecards, risk registers, stakeholder canvases and one-page recommendation briefs
- Digital transformation and AI: three dedicated chapters on adoption, enablement, and preparing your organisation for AI-driven change
- Case studies throughout, drawn from McKinsey, BCG, Accenture and real travel-sector transformation work
- The full 90-day programme, expanded week by week
Frameworks don't create advantage; the habit of using them does. Pick one framework from this edition, apply it this week, and let the results argue for the rest.