Strategic Thinking: an ongoing process used to identify and respond to current and emerging challenges and opportunities.

By building strategic thinking into organisational life, Vantage Point Consulting helps organisations anticipate and create adaptive change at whole organisation level through to unit, team and individual level - with customers and with suppliers.

Asking the hard questions, identifying and responding to the adaptive issues facing an organisation and developing flexible but focussed strategies to respond to these demands requires a well thought out process of ongoing strategic thinking and strategy development. This process cannot be confined to a one-off retreat and needs to consider a variety of questions:

• What do we know about our circumstances and environment that requires particular attention?
• What opportunities does the future hold and is there a gap between these opportunities and our ability to capitalise on them?
• What is the time horizon of our thinking and planning?
• What will we do with the outcome of our thinking?

Vantage Point helps consider and respond to these questions with the design and facilitation of strategic thinking and direction setting processes, and by drawing on experience in strategic consulting with a variety of large and small organisations. Whether via a consultative organisation-wide strategic planning process, or through specific training for individuals, Vantage Point equips people with the skills to exercise leadership and contribute to change at all levels.

Some of the specific services we have provided are:

• Design and development of strategic planning processes
• Design and facilitation of customer and stakeholder research, feedback and consultation
• Development of internal participatory consultation and planning processes including large scale forums (ie 100 people plus)
• Visioning and scenario planning
• Facilitation of strategic thinking retreats and workshops
• Specialist training in strategic thinking and planning

What do you need help with? Please contact us to see how we can assist, or explore the following scenarios based on our recent work:

Strategy Scenario 1: Maintaining and Building Relations
How can we maintain trusting relationships with customers and suppliers in a competitive environment where we need to maximize profit and/or meet complex customer needs?

Strategy Scenario 2: Strategic Thinking
How do we identify and responds to the real (adaptive) issues facing the business in an increasingly complex and competitive environment? How do we grow this business so it has a sustainable future?

Strategy Scenario 3: Strategy and Commitment
How can we successfully implement our increasingly demanding strategies and still keep our customers and staff involved and satisfied? How do we overcome resistance to new strategies and ways of doing things?