Domino’s Pizza Turnaround Strategy is an interesting case study in strategic initiatives, which I have described in detail in this article. Its core competitive challenge involved shrinking market share, declining revenues, and public relations problems.  It decided to reinvent the pizza by changing most of the ingredients.

As part of its strategy, the company also changed parts of its communications program with consumers, franchisees, and others. It embarked on a novel advertising campaign that took advantage of social media. Just like changing the ingredients was a reconfiguration, the new actions reconfigured business processes.

Why did Domino’s choose to invest significant resources undertake the makeover of its core product, with the risk of disrupting traditional consumers? The company’s advertising highlighted customer complaints. “Instead of ignoring them, we choose to use them to motivate us to do better,” said CEO Patrick Doyle. Domino’s product development team reframed the complaints into focused inspiration to make some difficult changes. It reframed its story away from its heritage (we deliver pizzas) to one of a heroic story (we’re a team that is unafraid of challenges).

Strategy Involves Reconfiguration

I propose that the process of strategy development is the reconfiguration of assets to meet a core challenge.

Let’s unpack that statement: Organizations (and individuals) have tangible and intangible assets. When they practice strategy, identify gaps. They search out assets from within and without and start moving those assets to create power. Often, they remove assets that are not contributing to the organization’s competitive power.

As an analogy, picture two homeowners who are selling their house. They want to “stage” the house so that it shows well. They de-clutter and discard things. They arrange furniture so that it highlights the home’s charm. They repaint. These homeowners are reconfiguring their home to achieve the important end of a fast and good offer from a buyer.

The second part of the statement says that the target of reconfiguration is that of meeting a core challenge. All organizations face numerous challenges. Sometimes they are the challenges of keeping up with growth and demand.  Sometimes the challenges are in maintaining a competitive advantage. Which one is the “core challenge?”

I’ve met many senior managers over the years. All of them are concerned about their success and are actively thinking about it. Although it might be tough for them to come up with a single “core challenge” most can easily list a handful of things that deserve attention.

These same managers generally have a difficult time when examining their challenges in light of the inevitable changes that will take place in the future. None admit to having a crystal ball, and few make the time for describing scenarios.

The practice of thinking strategically can help with identifying this core challenge and with making the right choices for reconfiguration.

Don’t Plunge into Strategic Planning without Some Individual Strategic Thinking Practice

Most good strategy work involves pondering questions. These questions are open and ambiguous.

On the other hand, a strategic-planning session typically is focused on creating a deliverable: a strategy and a document to describe that strategy.

It’s best to ask people to work on the strategic thinking before engaging them in strategic planning. Give them homework in the way of data, historical analysis, and so forth.

Also, encourage their imagination: what might the future look like? The goal is not prediction, but rather to create some open-mindedness and flexibility.

Strategic Thinking Involves Reframing

Strategic thinking is an individual competency. Its greatest value to organizations is that it contributes reframed explanations of the current and future situation. That means that we are taking current assumptions and reframing them into a novel, hopefully-interesting explanation of reality.

The simplest kind of reframing is that of refocusing.  To refocus is to shift the attention from one thing to another, much the way that Domino’s shifted the attention from “crust tastes like cardboard” to “best-tasting pizza.” I think of it as analogous to cropping a picture: you’re selecting the part of the picture that you want to emphasize.

A second, more-powerful type of reframing is one that questions and challenges the validity of the current paradigm.  Is Domino’s Pizza a food delivery company. I think the answer is no: it is a restaurant that happens to deliver food. The question “Who are we?” tends to stimulate this kind of reframing.

Strategic thinking is a habit involving awareness of the current situation and the openness to new frames that explain the situation. To improve your strategic thinking competency, look closer at the concept of reframing.

Tips for Reframing

• Identify anchors in your thinking. Do you always go to the same explanations about why things happen in your industry or to your organization? What are your biases and prejudices?
• Be playful with ideas. How could a new competitor disrupt your industry?
• Get to know people who hold different ideas and philosophies. Yeah, this is standard creative thinking advice; however, seriously considering the validity of other points of view can show you new ways of looking at things.
• Practice with historical thinking. What were the key events that resulted in the current situation? How much has the organization culture affected the retelling of the story? Take a look a turning point in the past, and look for analogies: how is it similar and how is it different from the current situation?
• Play with scenarios. No one knows what will happen in the future, but a few minutes of considering best and worst cases can give you a new perspective.

A competent strategic thinker is continually aware of mental frames and continually practices reframing. It’s part of the playful thinking style. At some point in time, your intuition will tell you when the core challenge has appeared. That’s your signal to start considering the options for reconfiguring.

With this model of reconfiguration and reframing, I suggest that organizations don’t need to be constantly making strategy. It’s too distracting from the running of the business. Instead, I believe that every organization should ask its employees to make strategic thinking a habit.

To “think about” strategy is to imagine the reconfiguration of assets and actions into a new system.  To “think strategically” is to mentally reframe the assumptions associated with personal perspective.  This gives us a more nuanced way to describe strategic thinking as an individual competency. Do you agree?