How does incoherence in your organization impact growth and performance?
When an organization lacks coherence, it not only suffers from diminished competitiveness, wasted efforts, ineffective resource allocation, and poor performance but also pays an incoherence penalty—a compounding cost that hinders growth and innovation. No organizational or cultural solution can sustainably address the root cause of these challenges: a lack of coherence in business strategy.
Turning the incoherence penalty into a strategic advantage.
Incoherence transforms into a strategic advantage when your value proposition, capabilities, and product/service portfolio align with market demands. This alignment enhances resource efficiency, strengthens capabilities, and supports sustainable growth. Achieving and maintaining coherence requires disciplined focus and continuous refinement. When fully realized, coherence becomes a unique, hard-to-replicate advantage that drives long-term success.
Value Proposition
Identifying how to create and capture value in the marketplace and defining your unique approach to differentiation.
Capabilities System
Developing a system of mutually reinforcing capabilities specifically designed to support how you deliver value.
Product and Service Fit
Ensuring every product and service aligns with your value proposition and leverages your distinctive capabilities system.
Aligning your key elements for organizational success.
A capabilities-driven strategy road map is a structured process involving key management and stakeholders, designed to guide organizations toward strategic coherence. This process requires time for iteration, testing, and validation, ensuring confidence and commitment to a new value proposition.
This stage involves intensive discussions and workshops over several weeks with the same core team to explore three basic realities: customers and competitors (a market-back view); growth opportunities (an aspirational view of market attractiveness); distinctive strengths relative to competitors (a capabilities-forward perspective). From these insights, we synthesize clear, actionable hypotheses for potential value propositions.
The due diligence stage which involves validating and refining hypotheses from the Discovery Phase by evaluating their feasibility, enterprise value, and alignment with your capabilities, competitive positioning (right to win), financial prospects, and potential risks. The core team revises or discards hypotheses based on these insights, providing vital input for the choices to be made in the next stage.
In this stage, leaders review assessments from the previous stage and commit to a coherent strategy by selecting a value proposition and a capabilities system. This decision is not ordinary. It represents a fundamental commitment to objectives, targets, and the underlying logic, shaping priorities, resolving day-to-day conflicts, and generating the essential competitive advantage the organization needs.
This stage focuses on creating a plan to prioritize building capabilities, adjust investments, redesign structures, and initiate transformation in a clear order. The transformation begins with visible actions, leading to shifts in hierarchy, resource allocation, and growth plans, signaling a commitment to coherence.
By the Evolution Stage, you have entered your “new normal”—pursuing a new value proposition (way to play), exercising your capabilities system, and experiencing the right to win firsthand. You become an organization that lives coherence every day. This stage is non-programmatic and never-ending, requiring ongoing improvement, innovation, and alignment of organizational practices to ensure long-term growth and success. From this point forward, you write your own rulebook, coauthored by everyone who is committed to your success.