The future vision has to do with changes, growth and ultimately transformation. A future vision is not a vague statement, frequently created as an obligatory part in classic strategic planning processes.

The creation of a future vision is especially necessary in critical moments, when the environment-organism relationship must be rethought.

To this end, Symnetics applies the Future Search Approach, aiming to find the common ground to all stakeholders in the organization ecosystem. It is a far-reaching and real-time method, which brings together various parties interested in the mission and future of an organization.

The approach principles have been developed and formalized by Marvin Weisbord, Sandra Janoff and a number of other professionals who, by studying and applying it for many years, have contributed to the understanding of large group dynamics and the systemic thinking.

Symnetics is a member of the Future Search Network. For more details see also www.futuresearch.net.

Today, executives must be sure that the strategy formulation and planning are properly put into practice, given that, according to Fortune Magazine, the capability to execute the strategy is more important than the strategy itself.

The fact is that, for creating competitive edge, executives have come across issues that push them into rethinking the traditional application of the strategy formulation and planning tools. Strategy must be reviewed non-stop and not only annually or half-annually. Strategy must be accessible, understood and monitored to quickly adjust the course of its implementation.

In spite of using classic strategy formulation tools, the approach proposed by Symnetics differs from others in that it integrates strategy formulation and integration through the Balanced Scorecard as shown in the next slide.

A winning strategy aims to obtain sustainable competitive advantages that results in gains above the average margin in the industry where it operates. To assure strategy will achieve this goal, our stand point sustains the execution of an appropriate and previously determined economic-financial model. This review starts with a top level discussion about the economic value gap to be closed by the strategy; next the gap is decomposed into sources generating income and resource consumption and finally the construction of model to generate value for shareholders.

To ensure future benefits to be achieve with the strategy implementation and guarantee its systemic consistency, this is not and cannot be a one-shot review. Instead, as the strategy development process progresses, new and important insights are incorporated, like peculiarities of the value offering, need to adapt internal resources (competences, technologies, etc.), needs to allocate resources for projects, etc. This ongoing feeding process increases the model strength and reduces the level of uncertainty in relation to the expected return of the strategy to be implemented.

Today, the more an organization is market oriented, the more it achieves expressive results. A market orientation is measured by the knowledge of its customers’ needs and its capability to meet these needs in a more effective and profitable way.

Therefore, a value proposition is the core of a strategy. It is the central point which determines the strategic requirements necessary to design the business processes and their management.

Consequently, the path toward strategic alignment through business processes consists in:

•  Revealing how these processes behave through their inherent variables and comparing them with the strategic demands;
•  Indentifying performance gaps;
•  Setting targets; 
•  Organizing and executing efforts to eliminate these gaps and monitoring performance levels by means of a service level agreement.