Developing a winning strategy with Caliber’s Strategy Chessboard

A new framework from Caliber Consulting provides management and strategists with a strategic route to success. The firm’s ‘Strategy Chessboard’ guides leaders through key strategic factors to weigh up while mooting a next move and helps them to identify and counter threats that may be just around the corner.

Every leader and strategist likes to imagine their future plans as part of some greater, metaphorical struggle. Possibly the most popular kind of analogy in this regard, thanks to its high-minded reputation for individual intelligence, is the chess match – in which two grandmasters each plot their next move, while patiently scrutinizing and anticipating the plans of the other.

To that end, many leaders face a similar outlook at the helm of their company – they must plan their moves, anticipate of the moves of their competitors, and remain (several) steps ahead to win the battle.

“Too many strategy frameworks and tools dance around the real essence of strategy,” claims Dina Maryam, a senior consultant at Caliber Consulting. “Fundamentally, strategy is about critical choices the organization embarks on, with those choices focusing on imperative areas such as geographical focus, customer segments, and product/service portfolio, amongst others.”

While there are dozens of frameworks and tools that help shape the crafting of a strategy or help operationalize it, there are according to Maryam “just a few tools that really capture it”.

Source: The Strategy Chessboard from Caliber Consulting

Strategy Chessboard

To help leaders capture the essence of major strategic decision-making, Caliber Consulting has developed the ‘Strategy Chessboard’, an approach that helps craft strategies, and then bridge the gap between strategy and execution.

The framework does this by setting out a series of key differentiators, offering decision-makers the chance to review and leverage 15 strategic options, ranging through five core categories. These are geography, service, sectors, investors, and channels.

By plotting a business’ position according to these choices, leaders can then categorize the strategies they need to put into play, based on varying levels of supply and demand power, guiding companies to make contextually relevant decisions.

At the same time, it encourages leaders and decision-makers to view their overall strategy from a holistic point and promotes an integrated set of decisions. The framework integrates different strategic schools of thought, “providing a comprehensive toolkit for addressing diverse business challenges effectively” according to Maryam.

‘Choosing what not to do’

The Strategy Chessboard aims to get right at the lifeblood of strategy, by focusing on the choices and getting decision-makers to have the right dialogue and conversations that help craft winning strategies. As the renowned strategist Michael Porter, once said, “Strategy is choosing what not to do.”

To that end, the chessboard from Caliber Consulting helps create strategic focus by forcing decision-makers to run through strategic options and make a firm choice.

“Strategic decisions shape the organization’s direction, resilience, and overall financial health,” explains Maryam. “In chess and in business, good strategic choices push leaders towards success: they can drive growth, innovation, and profitability. But poor choices can lead to missed opportunities and business decline.”

Source: The Strategy Chessboard from Caliber Consulting

From the drawing board to practice

As opposed to the many highly complex strategic planning frameworks around, using the Strategy Chessboard couldn’t be simpler, according to Caliber Consulting’s first-hand experience. Walking through what is needed to take away the useable insights it offers, Maryam notes three clear steps.

First, business leaders should use the grid to identify the business drivers that will influence their success. Part of this should include segmenting the categories according to which is a priority that the business most needs to target to prosper.

Second, after defining their strategic categories, leaders should use this to lay out the options to stakeholders in their business. This should incorporate their opinions – in this form of chess, conferring is permitted – to help assess the feasibility and impact of strategic changes and analyze the internal and external factors at play.

Finally, leaders should then use this input to make a definitive strategic choice – which is well-suited to business needs. Again, this needs to be aligned with a long-term vision of the company and weighed for its risks and benefits.

“One of the key differentiators of the framework is that the board provides a visual framework for experimenting with different strategies and configurations of strategic visions, before putting them into place. Above all, it promotes the concept of strategic adaptability – which is so important to success in chess and in business.”

“The chessboard defines the company’s decision and direction which require further operationalization during implementation to more tangible and specific terms,” Maryam concludes.