When it comes to developing your business strategy, it’s important to reflect on your successes, your near successes and failures in the past. It’s by reflecting that you learn what your strengths are, what has differentiated you from your competitors and what kind of a mark you are making in your chosen field.
However, there is more to defining your business identity and direction.
Progression is not just about looking back constructively. It is as equally important to look ahead and define where you would like to be in the short, medium and long term.
More so, defining your business strategy needs to involve something extraordinary that only you can give to your business – dreaming.
Your dreams of where you would like your business to be in five or ten years, what you would like your legacy to be and what you would like your most important achievement to be is all part of it.
Dreaming about your business’s future energises it and you.
Dreaming, and using your intuition, can also help with identifying the less tangible successes and possibilities of your business. There are many tools used to measure performance, but what tool will measure your ability to capitalise on an opportunity, show leadership or demonstrate initiative – all of which help to improve business? Reflecting on these aspects is an important source of intelligence about your business, based on your keen observation and intuition rather than data.
Dreaming, gut instinct and intuition are all outside rational logic, but they are where our most transformative ideas come from.
So next time you take stock of your business, I encourage you to strategise by not just reflecting, but also dreaming. Get in touch with this power source then combine this with your reflections to formulate your future plans.
Do you allow yourself to dream when defining your business strategy?
“ Defining your business strategy needs to involve something extraordinary that only you can give to your business. ”
Diann Rodgers-Healey is the Executive Director of the Australian Centre for Leadership for Women (ACLW), through which she has established national leadership awards for women and organisations and contributed to policy, research and commentary on leadership, coaching and gender in politics and business.
