The question that’s on our minds as we close this week is “How do you challenge something that’s never been articulated?” The question arose at a gathering of strategists we convened in which we polled the group to determine how many of their firms had written down the assumptions underneath their strategy.  Literally, do the assumptions exist on a piece of paper or in an electronic file—anywhere.   (Of course, challenging those assumptions is at the heart of avoiding top-line growth stalls, as we articulate in Stall Points and in the Red Flag diagnostic exercise.)
 
So, the question was as follows: “The core assumptions underlying your firm’s strategy are: (a) Written down; (b) Not written down, or (c) Sort of written down.”  You can guess which was the most popular response!  Fully two-thirds of the room fell in the last two categories, with (c) the people’s choice.
 
It’s interesting that most strategic plans are very accurate at capturing goals, as well as uncertainties—things we don’t know that we expect will be significant—but are not at all helpful at clarifying what we believe.  At articulating it in a way that enables constructive challenge and conversation.  It may be that we like it this way—one member of the group speculated that executives prefer to be imprecise because they want to retain their freedom to change their minds!  It may also be that we don’t agree on the assumptions—that if you asked the members of the senior team to take a crack at “the ten assumptions that are most significant to the success of our strategy,” you would get ten different lists. (Undoubtedly, this would be the case. If you want proof, try it!)
 
Whichever it is, the fact remains that if your core assumptions are “in the ether,” you run the very large risk of a nasty surprise when one or more of those assumptions becomes dangerously out of date.  We offer a number of practices in the book for articulating assumptions, but our favorite for this task is probably the Core Belief Identification Squad (pp. 129-33), an internal hunting expedition to discover the deepest beliefs of the firm about its products, customers and markets through the use of a series of provocative questions. (“What 10 things would you never hear customers say about our business?” is one of them, for instance.)
 
So, how would you respond to our snap poll?  What ways have you discovered to articulate your strategic assumptions in a way that they can be exposed to constructive challenge?