Strategic Decision Making | The Window of Opportunities Tool
In it’s simplest terms, strategic thinking boils down to choosing how to navigate from A to B. Priorities and values play a large role in shaping how you choose to do that navigation. But the challenge is that often, when it comes to thinking strategically though a project, we are met with seemingly competing priorities. The Window of Opportunities tool will help you and your team clarify priorities and keep moving forward together. This tool features in the Philosophy at Work’s Strategic Thinking workshops.
How the tool benefits strategic decisions
It is normal to frame decisions about priorities in your mind as a binary, either/or choice: ‘Should we move our offices to Manchester, or should we stay in London’s silicon roundabout?’. Or, if the decision is slightly more complex, and we think multiple options are open to us, the framing used may not be binary, but it is still laregly shaped by the options one takes to have open to them: ‘Should we move our offices to Manchester, should we stay in London’s silicon roundabout, should we set up shop in Reading, or should we close things down in the UK and relocate to Lisbon?’.
The problem with this common approach is that it is passive and limits our consideration to the choices you already take to be before you: London, Manchester, Reading or Lisbon. When you are making decisions and doing strategy, the last thing you want to do is cultivate a position of passivity and self-made limitations.
To counteract passivity and produce more expansive strategic decision making, we developed The Window of Opportunities. It is a simple, process-driven approach to doing strategy that will help you get your thinking down on paper and bring clarity to your decisions.
“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”
How to use the Window of Opportunities tool
Step 1: Flip Your Focus
Instead of framing your strategic decisions in terms of options, begin by framing it in terms of your valued outcomes. Returning to the example above, rather than focusing on a decision between London, Manchester, Reading and Lisbon, zero in on your desired aims for the business: Perhaps, to: cut real-estate costs; retain a presence in the key scenes of my industry; and be ableto attract desirable employees.
These desired outcomes are important metrics for your decision making. They articulate what you want to get out of the decision. In my experience, this first step can be challenging, but it is so valuable. Making yourself consider what you really want to get out of your strategy tends to bring significant amounts of clarity.
If you do your homework at this first step, you might not even need to go on to Step 2 and Step 3 – but we would encourage you to continue, because those later steps are where the tool gets really creative and satisfying.
Step 2: Translate Your Aims Into Metrics
With your aims clarified, the next step is to translate those aims into terms that you can use to test the quality of individual choices or business development opportunities. These translations will provide binary sets of metrics enabling you to get strategic decisions out of your head and onto paper. This move is hugely beneficial as it helps you see the quality of potential decisions more clearly.
For example, if one of your aims is to ‘cut real-estate costs’, you might translate that into a binary metric of ‘cheap or expensive’. The desired aim of ‘retaining presence in the key scenes of my industry’ becomes ‘Connected or Isolated’. And ‘able to attract desirable employees’ is ‘Attractive or Unattractive’. These sets of terms are the metrics you will use to help make your decision.
Step 3: Construct Your Window of Opportunities
Having translated your aims into metrics, the next step is to put those metrics to work on your strategic decision. To do this, draw a window where each pane is divided by a set of terms/metrics. If you are working with to main aims that have been translated into two sets of metrics, your window might look like Image 1.
Equally, if three aims matter to your decision (as in my example about moving offices above), your window can be divided up as in Image 2.
Step 4: Plot Your Strategic Options On The Window
Now you’re ready to plot where each relevant choice you are considering lands on your Window of Opportunities. This is a seemingly easy task, but one which often illuminates valuable insights. For example, in the decision about where to relocate offices, where should we place the option of retaining offices in London? That city is certainly an expensive choice, but is it also a ‘connected’ and ‘attractive’ option?
The realisation of these questions is valuable because it means we have struck on a feature of our strategic decision making that need more research. What it tells us is that if cost, connection and attractiveness are important to us, then we may need to gather further information before we can move forward.
This is helpful because we am no longer left on the fence wringing our hands about whether to choose London or Lisbon. Instead, the immediate task before us is research-based and insight driven rather than being about choice. This insight does not make our decision any easier, but it does give us something to work with. We need never flip coins. We need only understand our true aims, employ the window of opportunities and carry out research when we realise we do not yet have sufficient information to allow me to plot a choice on the window.
Step 5: Reflect & Act
As you were plotting your options in the window, you might have noticed that whole regions of the window, regions made up of value metrics you really care about, have no options in them. This is an incredibly helpful discovery. It shows that the options you thought you had to decide between are, in fact, not the options you should be deciding between. Instead, you should go back out, armed with your strategic aims, and identify options for action that would fit comfortably in those regions of the window.
As you reflect on the Window of Opportunities you have just created, you might also find some limitations in the aims and metrics used. This can also be a valuable realisation. It just means you need to go back to your aims and clarify exactly what it is you would like to achieve in this next period of work. Clarifying aims can be challenging, but it is well worth the investment of time and mental bandwidth. Without being clear about your desired destination, executing your organisation’s direction of travel will be haphazard.
The Window of Opportunities tool provides you with a systematic process for making strategic decisions. It will not make decisions for you, but it will help you clarify your thinking and identify potential choices you might not have previously considered.
The Window of Opportunities tool is used in Philosophy at Work’s Strategic Thinking workshops. If you found this tool helpful and would like to support strategic thinking in your organisation, let us know. We’d love to be your thinking partner.
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