As we look at the future of life sciences industries there are two truths: companies are having to adapt to a world where flexible working is vital to success; and in this new, hybrid-working era, value is being created in most areas of business by software that drives greater collaboration and innovation.
Demands are evolving, why isn’t strategy keeping up?
Our notion of convenience has been reinvented and will continue to be challenged. Remember the age of DVD rental? Now it’s hard to imagine not watching films and tv programmes on demand. Netflix has changed the way we consume entertainment. Similarly, Spotify has transformed the way music is distributed and consumed in an incredibly short period of time.
The same transformation has been achieved in the retail sector by businesses such as Amazon, which is now the largest internet retailer in the world. The company’s founder Jeff Bezos continues to highlight in letters to shareholders that its success is down to a relentless focus to ‘obsess over customers’ and the desire to make bold decisions, rather than timid ones.
So why is it that the largely analogue nature of the strategic planning process hasn’t evolved at the same rate?
Reimagining strategy development
The hybrid workforce
Hybrid working means the company office has become the new ‘off-site’ and the home is now the office. People in the company office are likely to be moving around, not sitting at a desk in front of a computer. A wide range of devices are being used to collaborate and communicate: computers, laptops, iPads and mobile phones, and the extent to which people are being required to come into the new ‘off-site’ vs work at home varies widely.
Working hours are no longer nine to five, and when it comes to collaborating and communicating, people prefer using their own devices.
Optimised communication and collaboration platforms
The way we now work, remotely and hybrid, has resulted in the proliferation and adoption of optimised communication and collaboration platforms like Teams and Slack. But do the drivers that have allowed these platforms to evolve imply a benefit in strategic planning and what are those drivers?
Saved time – Time is of the essence in any industry. The more time you can save, the more productive teams can be.
Reflect on projects that you’ve worked on where the team members have collaborated with each other then compare and contrast that with any experience you’ve had where collaboration was suboptimal, or proved to be challenging.
Team members collaborating in real time are motivated to ensure that the information needed is available, no matter where they are, and the end goal is achieved more quickly.
Do you have experience of any strategy conversations where cross-functional partners failed to turn up or, conversely, where strategic value was created because they did turn up?
Many years ago I recall a breakthrough in the strategy discussion about how to position Paxil/ Seroxat against Prozac.
The insight came from someone in medical affairs. The medic concerned sat back and reflected on his clinical experience and said: “Many people who are diagnosed with depression initially present with anxiety, but when we dig a little deeper, we find out that what’s really going on is that they are depressed.” The team went back to the data and did a retrospective analysis that highlighted that Paxil/Seroxat out-performed Prozac for patients who initially presented with anxiety.
This allowed the company to frame the opportunity in a different way and end up with a label stating that Paxil/Seroxat was for patients showing signs and symptoms of anxiety and depression.
This offered SmithKline Beecham a significant source of competitive advantage and fuelled its life cycle management plan, which helped differentiate its product from Prozac. Had medical affairs not participated in that strategy discussion, this insight might never have been revealed.
We need input from all departments, but we also need to be able to track these inputs. When discussed virtually, it is essential we use resources that record every contribution and enable them to be found with ease. The days of reams of notes on boards and flip charts are gone. Tech needs to deliver the opportunity for cohesive and accountable strategy development virtually and across not just locations, but time zones.
Strengthened team relationships – Strategy development, refinement and evolution require cross-functional contribution and are reliant on those insights provided by those closest to the customer – the local markets. It is imperative therefore for both the cross-functional partners and local markets to feel part of, and understand, the importance of their contribution to the team.
Building effective working relationships between members matters, therefore collaboration tools, such as NMBLR, that provide a structure to support the strategy discussion are an excellent way for team members to feel more comfortable working together. It connects them to each other and keeps things moving forward.
Inevitably in strategy teams you will have members with different levels of strategic planning expertise and strategic capability. People need to feel that the strategy discussion is a ‘safe’ environment, that you are unlikely to be put in a situation where you don’t know what is expected of you or where lack of experience and/or language barriers are allowed to get in the way.
Some people think quickly, others need time to reflect before they’re willing to contribute. If these differences are not managed effectively, the team relationships will be suboptimal. Companies that recognise the importance of creating the right physical and virtual environments for teams to thrive, and for innovation to foster, are more likely to make strategic choices that truly make a difference to patients’ lives.
I was impressed to learn that AstraZeneca is changing the environment for their commercial teams so that it can thrive in this new hybrid world.
Enhanced organisation – In many cases, collaborative tools are the best solutions when you’re trying to improve internal workflows and processes.
This is because it’s easy for information to go missing, or be overlooked, which wastes time and can mean we fail to leverage important insights. Strong internal organisation is something every strategy team should strive for.
I smile when I think of how often in the work that I do, that I find different people within the strategy team are sitting on information that has been filed away or forgotten. They’re not aware of the ‘gems’ that are being held in different research decks or advisory board reports.
So often, those all important insights that were revealed at a point in time and that supported decision-making have been lost.
When I joined the industry, I worked for someone who had been working on the brand for 20 years. Today, what is the average length of stay in any one position? Reflect on the knowledge/ management issues that staff turnover causes, the inefficiencies that result and the risk of strategies being reinvented, rather than refined and strengthened, as new information comes to bear when someone new is appointed to lead the asset/brand.
The aha moment!
Is there an opportunity to bring velocity, data and collaboration into the strategic planning process, especially in the hybrid workforce world?
Here is a perspective on the needs and challenges that exist and that encourages us to consider how digitalisation of the strategy development process could offer a source of competitive advantage:
- Agility – the increasing importance of being able to proactively act with speed, not haste, to market, or action, regulatory changes.
- Integrated insight – the value of collecting and utilising local insight to support global
direction, not hinder it. - Radical collaboration – the power of harnessing collective expertise and data in unison, not in silo or parallel, to promote creative strategies and drive innovative thought.
- Innovation – speed, access to real-time insight and data are ways to identify innovative ideas that can be built, tested and executed without friction, thereby driving market leadership and momentum.
- Shared investment – moving away from a top- down directive to a unified vision, resulting in less politics and inefficiency, as well as less rogue activity and deviation inconsistency. It also allows more emotional investment from all teams and stakeholders.
- Iterative/adaptive planning – the knowledge that the strategy, much like a technology product, is never ‘done’, but is rather a framework that can live in a live environment where it can be built upon. It can be tweaked and adapted seamlessly in reaction to opportunities and challenges, and executed with more velocity as a result.
- Experiment building – the capability to derive and identify opportunities to build tests and experiments with shared learnings that can be adapted and scaled.
- Accountability – using a collaborative tool, with data and collective participation, increases accountability of teams in execution.
Refine with software
Every industry needs to reconsider how it develops and refines its strategies in this hybrid working world, and healthcare can be at the forefront of this. We need an approach that allows us to strive towards real-time, adaptive strategy development and execution. One that actively encourages cross- functional team working, regardless of whether you are in your home office, in a face-to-face meeting or a mixture of both. That brings together different areas of expertise, insight and ideas. Software that elevates strategists and enables them to focus on higher order and more value-adding activities in the same way that accounting software does for accountants. The strategic use of technology can enable us to do better.
Because, as we all know, changes in the business environment, from competitors and regulators, don’t conform to our planning cycles. If your competitor makes a big strategic move the day after you’ve put the finishing touches to this year’s business strategy, it may be out of date before you’ve even started.
We need software that enables us to sense and process such changes more quickly, so that our strategies become living, dynamic processes, not static out-of-date documents collecting dust in folders.
Digitalisation of your approach to strategy is not, of course, the whole solution. But it absolutely has to be a part of it. Many organisations are already investing in the capabilities that will help them move further along on the digital transformation maturity curve. Those who fail to invest risk being left behind.
