Baskerville Drummond on the strategy challenge: part two

Baskerville Drummond continues to explore the practicalities behind driving strategy and change throughout a business.

It’s all very well to accept the imperative of change in the abstract – but to what extent is it embraced in practice? Doing instead of talking?

Above all, change – and in particular all-encompassing societal and technological change – requires leadership and courage – courage to face the future head-on.

Read part one here.

Does your firm actually have a strategy?

By this we don’t mean the document, which is prepared every two or three years, is based on a 5% or 10% annual increase in turnover and headcount, and uses the predictors of past success and extrapolating a ‘strategy’ from them. We mean a living, breathing strategy, which the firm embraces, enacts and keeps under constant review – ready to react to, or even better, anticipate emerging challenges and conditions in the marketplace.

At the very start of the process it requires a far more fundamental review of strengths and weaknesses, threats and opportunities – a full balanced scorecard analysis of the firm’s current position and market opportunities.

The main challenge is not to rely on the old equation of percent growth, but to focus instead on profitability, efficiencies and opportunities in order to underpin the firm’s future.

While the current buzzword technologies of artificial intelligence (AI), process automation and machine learning are as yet not widely adopted or trusted outside the top 30 or 50 law firms, these changes are coming.

True, we cannot be absolutely sure what the legal landscape – or indeed society at large – will look like five or 10 years hence. But we can look at some of the trends and prepare better by building flexibility and resilience into the strategy we adopt.

Key takeaways

1. All change requires leadership and courage – courage to face the future head-on.
2. Development of a true living, breathing strategy which the firm embraces, enacts and keeps under constant review.
3. Be ready and prepared to react to, or even better, anticipate emerging challenges.
4. The only constant is change and products/technologies are now under development which are not currently perceived as of use which will become ‘normal’.
5. There is no such thing as a technical or ‘IT’ project – there are business change projects which use technology to strategic advantage.