Five linked choices that put your whole strategy on a single page, so your team can see it, pressure test it, and act on it.
Communicating a strategy is hard. The Strategy Diamond puts the whole thing on one page, as five choices that have to line up. Answer the five, and anyone can see your strategy at a glance, and see where it does not yet hold together.
The five choices
- Arenas: where will we be active? Which services, which locations, and which participants you will focus on, and which you will leave to others.
- Vehicles: how will we get there? Your own new sites, referral partners, or taking on work from another provider.
- Differentiators: how will we win? The few things you do visibly better, the reasons a family chooses you over the provider down the road.
- Staging: what is our speed and sequence? What you do first, and what you hold back until the first part is solid.
- Economic logic: how will we make our returns? Where the money comes from, and why it keeps coming.
When the five line up and point the same way, you have a strategy. Where they pull against each other, you have found your next decision. The PDF gives you a page to map your own.
The Strategy Diamond is the work of Donald C. Hambrick and James W. Fredrickson (Are You Sure You Have a Strategy?, 2001), presented here with attribution for leaders of service organisations.