The last few posts have been about strategic change – whether extending our strategic position, or transforming it if the current business model may cease to be viable. Here is the full list of those posts:

• Extend your strategy – don’t reinvent it

• Modeling your extended strategy

… but if you have to move from an old business model to new:

• Planning and managing full strategic change [A] 

• Strategic change [B] – migrating customers from the old business model to the new

• Strategic change [C] – transitioning the staffing, maintaining the old model while building the new

• Strategic change [D] – building the new proposition and the capacities to deliver it

The journey takes time

In every case, the strategic extension or change will play out over time – usually many years.

And over that time, most if not all of the business system elements are continually changing, and all of those changes reflect the constant stream of decisions in every part of the business. We are not in the position of Captain Kirk on the Starship Enterprise who need only say “Make it so!” for the entire journey to just happen.

To illustrate … in figure 1, we are both moving customers from an old proposition to a new one, and winning new customers to that new proposition. If we implement the new proposition too slowly, current customers are lost to rivals who move faster, and we lose the race for new customers.

… but we need enough staff throughout this journey, both to support the declining old business and to support the fast-growing new business. In the blue scenario, we fail on both these needs – in the green scenario, we continue hiring to sustain the old-skill staff we need and to achieve the new-staff growth we need with rapid hiring to overcome fast staff turnover.

Figure 1: Adequate staffing for both old and new business models to protect and grow revenue

Model that journey !

The model behind figure 1 captures most of the customer-migration and staff transition issues discussed in post [B] and post [C] above. And the model is able to capture anything from a minimal extension of our strategy (simply adding new customers with a new proposition) to a total change of strategy, where (as in figure 1) customers switch away entirely from the old business model.

… and the success of any strategic journey depends on making good, quantified decisions throughout the 5-year transition, which we can test in that model.

Surely, if your organisation will be going through some strategic change in coming years, you would want to explore that journey before setting off, and steer your path along that journey every step of the way?

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Strategic change is just one of the challenges for which a digital-twin business model is the only solution that can give the strong understanding and control of our future that we need (unless anyone can point me to an adequate alternative?)

As a senior leader, you have staff or consultants who can learn to build such models for you. But you do need to understand those models – which you can learn about in this online course …

There is a low-cost ‘essentials’ option,

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