Strategic Recalibration: Why January Matters

For executives around the country the new year can mean a new strategy, business plan or team initiative. There will be a temptation to grab an off-the-shelf four, five or six step process that promises to address amorphous concepts like organisational improvement, best practice, or culture, but this is more likely a slip stream to documenting old behaviours in new words.  

Meaningfully engaging with the start of the calendar year to ask ourselves, ‘why do I do this?’, ‘what does good look like?’, ‘how should we aim at it?’ is an antidote. It should preclude any strategic reorientation planned for 2025 as the former two questions point us toward reflection, whilst the latter question is about the resource allocation of time, people and money.

The latter we can do; we know our organisation, its limitations, strengths, the threat landscape and we can predict the risks and the consequences. This knowledge serves us when we need to make tactical adjustments or decisions under pressure. But, with the luxury of time accompanying the new year, we can notice new things, pay attention to opportunities that exist beneath the surface or require deeper consideration, and recalibrate to consider longer timeframes.

‘Why do I do this?’, both from an organisational and personal perspective is the most important place to start. Platitudes that we accept throughout the year should be interrogated and critiqued. Leadership jargon that we might find ourselves repeating should be contemplated and refined. Practically, this type of reflection should also set a point of reference for how you spend your time within the organisation, who you spend it with, and the rationale behind these choices. This will surface a strategic intent.

The concept of ‘good’, or what we define as good work, security practices, team-structures, capabilities and personnel, is often coloured by the pressures of the working year. In the maelstrom of an incident, review, audit or deployment our needs change. Long running issues can become a vacuum and swathes of time can be lost to situations that require a reaction. With the downtime accompanying the new year a considered definition for ‘good’ can be created. This should serve to define strategic success for the year, and guide us back to what we want to achieve.

Planning and forecasting are the steps that generally accompany ‘how’, but if time permits we can also develop a principled approach to execution. Armed with our strategic intent and a definition for strategic success, principles are guidance in a vacuum. These are the behaviours and the markers that we want to deploy in our daily approach to work, as well as moments of confusion and crisis. They communicate expectations and provide guidelines for how to act when there are no playbooks or direction. These strategic principles are the basis of change.

With these questions answered, you will be better positioned to delve into the traditional activities that help firm up a new approach. You will have a set of semi-defined considerations that can act as a decision-making criterion, making any off-the-shelf strategy process more meaningful.

Figure 1: Prompting Questions