As you start pondering 2026, here are five practical tools to help you develop your strategy and create a simple, sustainable cadence—daily, weekly, quarterly, and annually. The tools will help you to:
- Ensure a quality information supply (daily).
- Develop scenario prompts (weekly).
- Frame your strategic filter (annually).
- Map your current and future business model (quarterly).
- Set a quarterly focus.
- Make your organisation more situationally aware, adaptable, and resilient.
1. Daily scanning
Most leadership teams don’t lack intelligence. They lack signal discipline. Create a simple information dashboard and raise the quality of what you consume. Pick a small, deliberate set of sources, for example:
- Google Alerts
- Singularity University
- Wired
- Techcrunch
- Interesting Engineering
- Stanford University
- MIT Technology Review
- Harvard Business Review
- ScienceAlert
- Futurism
Spend five minutes every morning scanning what lands in your inbox. You’re not reading for insight—you’re scanning for weak signals, emerging risks, and asymmetric opportunities. This habit alone will make you a better strategist within 30 days (and cheer you up no end).
A fuller list is available on request—just drop me an email.
2. Create scenario prompts
Information without interpretation is noise. Translate what matters into scenario prompts, for example:
- The world in which…… ?
- What if this trend accelerates faster than expected?
- What if this becomes regulated, automated, or commoditised?
- What if a new entrant builds this into their core model?
Strategy lives in conversation. Discuss these prompts regularly with your leadership team. Assess impact, explore responses, and identify options—not detailed plans.
3. Design a strategic filter
Design a strategy lens to guide your decision-making. Anchor it around six parameters and express each as a clear statement.
- Vision – Where will the organisation be in 1, 3, 5, and 10 years?
- Purpose – Why do you exist?
- Values – The ten guiding principles (in priority).
- Passion – What does your organisation genuinely care about?
- Positioning – How do you want to be perceived in the market?
- Resourcing – Quantify the resources available to you (time, money, knowledge, and network).
Make sure everyone in your organisation agrees on these six statements. From work with our clients, we know that in practice, most teams discover that alignment is assumed rather than real. And this is a big problem.
4. Apply reverse attribute listing
Reverse attribute listing helps you look at your organisation with fresh eyes. Break the business into its smallest components and ask, for each part:
- Is there a story?
- How does it add to the experience of our offering?
- Is it a differentiator?
- Is it core?
- Can we outsource it?
- Can it be removed?
- What technology can we apply now?
- What technology is available in 2-5-10 years that could be applied?
- What emotions are triggered?
- Does it have a negative or positive climate impact?
- Is it circular?
- Can we use it as a talk trigger?
- Can we visualise it (video, VR)?
- Can it be digitised?
- Can it become a distribution channel?
- How quick or slow is it?
- Does it add to the friction?
- How much does it cost?
- How much does it add to the profit?
- How does it add to ZMOT, FMOT, SMOT, and UMOT?
Attribute listing is a perfect tool to help you analyse your organisation and develop future business models. Combine this with your scenario prompts (congratulations, you now have created your own innovation cocktail).
5. Collapse everything into one quarterly focus
Strategy often breaks down in execution because focus is lost.
- Pick one strategic focus only.
- Attach clear numerical targets.
- Agree explicit rewards for achieving them.
If you have more than one priority, you have none.
The result
Each tool runs on a different rhythm:
- Daily sensing
- Weekly interpretation
- Quarterly focus
- Annual recalibration
Applied together, they make your organisation more situationally aware, adaptable, and resilient—without trying to predict the future (you can´t). If you want help applying these tools in practice, drop me a line or schedule a call.
