Use August to Reflect on your Strategy

Leon Mundey
13 hours ago
6 min read

August is a good time to step back, test your direction and adjust the route before the final part of the year.

For many businesses, August brings a slightly different pace.

Customers are away. Colleagues take holidays. Meetings reduce. Some of the usual day-to-day noise disappears.

For business leaders, that can create something that is often in short supply during the rest of the year: space to think.

It is tempting to use that extra space to catch up on emails, clear the to-do list or get ahead on operational work.

But August can also be a valuable opportunity to step back from the business and ask a more important question:

Is our strategy still taking us where we want to go?

Strategy should provide direction, not become a straitjacket

One of the biggest misconceptions about strategy is that, once it has been agreed, it should remain fixed.

In reality, good strategy needs to flex.

That does not mean constantly changing direction or abandoning the plan whenever something gets difficult.

You still need a clear destination. You need to know what you are trying to build, where you want the business to be in three, five or ten years, and what you need to achieve along the way.

But the best route towards that destination may change.

Markets move.
Customers' priorities change.
Competitors develop new propositions.
Technology creates opportunities that did not previously exist.
People join or leave the business.
Economic conditions change.

A strategy developed twelve months ago may therefore need to evolve, even if the overall destination remains exactly the same.

From our experience coaching high-performing businesses, strong leadership teams understand the difference between changing the destination and adjusting the route.

Think of strategy like a river

A useful way to think about this is to imagine a major river such as the Amazon.

A river is always moving towards its destination, but it does not travel there in a straight line.

It moves around obstacles, responds to the landscape and continually finds the best route forward.

Your strategy should work in much the same way.

You need clarity about where you are going, but enough flexibility to respond intelligently to what happens along the way.

Being adaptable is not the same as being unfocused.

The danger comes at either extreme.

A business that changes direction every few months never creates enough momentum.

But a business that refuses to adapt because "this is the strategy we agreed" can miss significant changes and opportunities.

The aim is to keep the destination clear while regularly asking whether the route still makes sense.

Start by looking back at the year so far

Before thinking about what comes next, August is a good point to review the plans you made at the start of the year.

Ask yourself:

Are we ahead, behind or broadly on plan?
Which priorities have progressed well?
Where have we lost momentum?
What has gone better than expected?
What has been harder than expected?
What assumptions did we make at the beginning of the year that no longer look correct?
What has changed in our market, customers or competitive environment?

Try to distinguish between an execution problem and a strategy problem.

If an important initiative is behind because nobody has taken ownership of it, that may be an execution issue.

If customer demand has fundamentally shifted away from the product or service, that may require a more strategic response.

Not every difficult month means the strategy is wrong.

Equally, simply working harder at something that is no longer working is rarely the answer.

Then look towards the end of the year

Once you have reviewed where you are now, ask what really needs to happen between now and year-end.

The important word here is really.

Most businesses have too many priorities rather than too few.

Consider:

What financial result do we need to achieve?
Which customers or contracts matter most?
Which significant issues need to be resolved?
What people or capabilities do we need to strengthen?
What are the two or three things that would make the biggest difference to the year?

Then ask another question that leadership teams often avoid:

What should we stop doing?

Strategy is as much about deciding what not to do as deciding what to do.

If everything remains a priority, nothing really is.

Revisit your longer-term destination

The day-to-day demands of running a business can also gradually disconnect leaders from the longer-term ambition.

August is a useful time to reconnect with it.

High-performing businesses tend to have a clear picture of where they are trying to get to over the longer term.

That goal should be ambitious enough to make you think differently about the business rather than simply extrapolating today's performance forwards.

Ask:

Do we have a clear long-term ambition?
Does the leadership team genuinely understand and believe in it?
Is it ambitious enough to challenge our current thinking?
Are the decisions we are making today moving us towards it?
If we continue doing what we are doing now, will we realistically get there?

That final question can be particularly revealing.

Sometimes there is a significant gap between a company's ambition and the strategy actually being pursued.

Recognising that gap early gives you time to do something about it.

Is your strategy genuinely distinctive?

Another useful area for reflection is differentiation.

Many businesses believe they have a strategy when what they really have is a collection of goals and improvement projects.

A strong strategy should help answer:

Why should the customer choose us rather than a credible alternative?

Statements such as:

"We provide excellent service."
"We put the customer first."
"We provide high-quality products."

are positive, but they are rarely strategic because almost every competent competitor can make the same claims.

A more distinctive strategy requires clearer choices.

Think about:

Your core customer

Who do you most want to serve?

Trying to appeal equally to everybody often produces a business that is particularly compelling to nobody.

What you want to be known for

What do you want customers to immediately associate with your business?

Speed?

Expertise?
Convenience?
Innovation?
Reliability?
Specialisation?
Something else?

Your real points of difference

What can you consistently do that your competitors find difficult to replicate?

Often the most powerful differentiation comes not from one headline feature, but from a combination of capabilities, processes, knowledge, relationships and choices that reinforce each other.

A practical strategic thinking exercise

You do not need a full off-site strategy day to make progress.

Find somewhere away from your usual desk and give yourself 60 to 90 minutes without email, Teams or phone interruptions.

Take a notebook and answer these ten questions:

Who is our ideal core customer?
What problem do we solve particularly well for them?
What do we want to be known for?
Why should a customer choose us rather than a credible alternative?
What capabilities or strengths do we have that are difficult to copy?
What should we stop doing because it distracts us from our strategy?
What is the biggest opportunity in front of us right now?
What is the biggest threat we may be underestimating?
What must we achieve by the end of this year?
Are we genuinely moving towards a clear and ambitious long-term destination?

Do not worry about producing polished answers.

The purpose is to identify where your thinking is clear and where it is not.

Then ask your leadership team

One of the most valuable parts of this exercise is not necessarily your own answers.

Ask your leadership team to answer the same questions independently.

Then compare the results.

Where everyone gives broadly similar answers, you probably have reasonable strategic alignment.

Where the answers are very different, you have found something worth discussing.

For example, if five directors give five different answers to "Who is our core customer?" or "Why should customers choose us?", that tells you something important.

Those differences are not a problem to hide. They are precisely the conversations a leadership team needs to have.

Use your holiday to create distance, not another workplace

None of this means spending your summer holiday buried in spreadsheets or writing a new strategic plan by the pool.

The point is almost the opposite.

Some of the best strategic thinking happens when you create enough distance from the business to stop reacting to it.

Ideas often appear while walking, travelling, reading, exercising or simply doing something completely unrelated to work.

Keep a notebook or your phone nearby and capture thoughts when they occur.

You might ask yourself:

What patterns am I noticing?
What has changed since January?
What are we continuing to do simply because we have always done it?
If I were starting this business today, what would I do differently?
Where are we making life unnecessarily complicated?
What opportunity do I keep thinking about but never creating time to explore?

You do not need to resolve every question immediately.

Sometimes simply capturing it is enough.

The destination can stay the same while the route changes

Strategy should give a business confidence about where it is heading.

But that does not mean blindly following a route that no longer makes sense.

The best leadership teams regularly lift their heads from the day-to-day, check where they are, look at what has changed and decide whether they need to adjust course.

August provides a natural opportunity to do that.

So if you are taking some time away from the business this month, enjoy the break.

But perhaps take one strategic question with you:

Are we still taking the best route towards where we want to go?

Sometimes a little distance from the business is exactly what you need to see the answer.