Enterprise Strategy:

Strategy Innovation

Strategic Intent

Inspiring Means by Which Your Organization Will Achieve Its Vision

Strategic Intent Defined

Strategic intent is a high-level statement of the means by which your organization will achieve its vision. It is a statement of design for creating a desirable future (stated in present terms). Simply put, a strategic intent is your company's vision of what it wants to achieve in the long term.

In complexity science's terms, strategic intent is decomposition of exploration rules into the next level of detail, the linkages to the exploration rules and the transition rules that define how it will migrate from its current design and ecosystem to a future business design and ecosystem.¹

Purpose of Strategic Intent

The logic, uniqueness and discovery that make your strategic intent come to life are vitally important for employees.  They have to understand, believe and live according to it.

Strategy should be a stretch exercise, not a fit exercise. Expression of strategic intent is to help individuals and organizations share the common intention to survive and continue or extend themselves through time and space.

Cases in Point: Using Strategic Intent to Inspire Radical Innovation

DuPont asked their scientists to help the corporation "invent its ways" out of the company financial malaise.

Texas Instruments exhorted their employees to "find new businesses in the white spaces" between existing business units.²

In other cases, employees were urged to move the firm beyond the constraints of current customers, current business models, and current technologies to explore growth in new directions.

Analog Devices urged their employees to get into a new industry (the automotive industry).

Otis Elevators asked their people to pursue an industry "Holy Grail" (to find a way to move people up and down a mile-high building).

Air Product urged their employees to lead the next industry-transforming breakthrough (gas separation technology).

Developing a Statement of Strategic Intent

Strategic intent takes the form of a number of corporate challenges, specified as short term projects and opportunities.

The strategic intent must convey a significant stretch for your company, a sense of direction, discovery, and opportunity that can be communicated as worthwhile to all employees. It should not focus so much on today's problems, which are normally dealt with by company visions and missions, but rather on tomorrow's opportunities.

The strategic focus is the starting point for developing a statement of strategic intent. A statement of strategy must become then a statement of design through which the principles, processes and practices of an organization are developed. These statements must represent the whole as seen from any location in the organization.

Strategic intent should specify the competitive factors, the factors critical to success in the future. The end result should lay beyond the present planning period. Your strategic intent should also be accompanied by intermediate goals against which company achievements can be measured. It cannot be developed in a one-day strategy session, it should develop and mature with time.

Discovery and detection of opportunity serve as platforms for developing strategic intent. It is based on a vision of how the future will look in 10-15 years. A strategic intent creates a picture of the customer daily life and describes discontinuities and anticipated changes from the world of today. It describes future customer's needs and the success factors required for meeting these needs. "To achieve great things, you need ambitious visions. And it does not matter that vision cannot be laid out in details. It is the direction that counts."³