Here is an excerpt from an article written by Rahul Bhandari for MIT Sloan Management Review. To read the complete article, check out others, sign up for email alerts, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
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To shape strategy now, leaders need more than predictions: They need a lens to see challenges more clearly.
There’s a quiet crisis in strategy today. Most executives assume that if they scan hard enough, analyze deeply enough, or plan thoroughly enough, a path forward will reveal itself. But that’s an illusion left over from a more stable era. I’ve spent years working with Fortune 100 leaders, founders, investors, and policy makers in moments of high-stakes uncertainty. Again and again, I’ve watched smart people get stuck not because they lacked insight but because they couldn’t interpret competing signals.
Strategy doesn’t start with prediction. It starts with perception, especially in environments where signals conflict, timelines collide, and consequences compound.
At its core, strategy focuses on two questions: “What forces are shaping this situation?” and “How should we respond?” Specifically, it takes into account two types of forces at work and their natures: the time horizon of a situation, from short term to long term, and the impact level of that situation, from low to high. Once leaders learn to see these forces, they can stop simply reacting and start understanding. The complexity doesn’t go away, but it becomes navigable.
Strategic Clarity in a World of Flux
The strategy framework I’ve developed comes from my years as an investor and adviser, and as a teacher to executive audiences. I think of it as a lens for seeing a challenge more clearly.
The simple act of decoding the forces affecting their businesses can help leaders see where to focus their attention.
The forces at work framework maps the forces that affect strategic decision-making across the two simple dimensions of time horizon and impact level. (See “The Forces at Work: Weighing Time Horizon and Impact Level.”) These two dimensions produce four categories that help frame strategic conditions: continental drifts, which are slow-moving, high-impact structural shifts; lightning strikes, which are fast, disruptive shocks; smoldering embers, which are quiet but accumulating pressures; and surface ripples, which are distractions that often appear to be larger than they actually are.
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Rahul Bhandari is a lecturer and dean’s fellow at the Darden School of Business and CEO of Force Multiplier Capital. He’s also the author of Slingshot: The Power of Bold Moves (Wolf Trap Press, 2021).