Bolder Business Strategies: 3 Proven Ways to Drive Growth and Performance

Try an Unconventional Approach to Create Bolder Business Strategies
Our organizational alignment research found that strategic clarity accounts for 31% of the difference between high- and low-performing organizations in terms of:

• Revenue growth
• Profitability
• Customer loyalty
• Leadership effectiveness
• Employee engagement

Is your business strategy up to the challenges that you and your leadership team face? 

That raises an important question: Is your business strategy bold enough to address the challenges and opportunities ahead?

Because the stakes are high, leadership teams can understandably become cautious. They may hesitate to pursue bolder business strategies to accelerate growth, reduce costs, disrupt established practices, or respond to competitive threats. Yet playing it safe can sometimes be the riskiest strategy of all.

Effective strategy retreat facilitation should create enough constructive tension to challenge conventional wisdom without encouraging reckless decisions.

We also know from our action learning leadership development programs that breakthrough thinking requires a growth mindset. Leaders must be willing to question long-held assumptions, reframe business challenges, and explore possibilities that initially feel unconventional.

Bolder Business Strategies: 3 Proven Ways to Drive Growth and Performance

If you want a different strategic outcome, you cannot always rely on the same strategic thinking. Creating bolder business strategies requires leaders to challenge comfortable assumptions, invite perspectives that disrupt conventional wisdom, and intelligently test new possibilities.

Based on insights from our leadership simulation assessments, here are three field-tested ways to move beyond traditional thinking and uncover potentially better solutions to complex business challenges.

1. Ask Different Questions to Challenge Strategic Assumptions
   Leaders often try to simplify complex problems into a few manageable components. While simplification can be useful, narrowing the problem too quickly can also narrow the range of potential solutions.
   
   Instead of asking, “What do we expect to encounter?” ask, “What would surprise us?” Instead of accepting current assumptions, ask, “Which assumption, if proven wrong, would most dramatically change our strategy?”
   
   You might also ask:
   
   — What are we taking for granted?
   — What would we do if our current approach were no longer available?
   — What opportunity are we overlooking because it does not fit our existing business model?
   — What would a disruptive competitor do differently?
   
   Better strategic questions expand the field of possibilities before leaders narrow their choices.
2. Actively Seek Different Points of View
   Bold strategies rarely emerge when everyone in the room sees the business through the same lens. As your leadership team makes strategic decisions, deliberately seek perspectives that challenge prevailing assumptions.
   
   That may mean listening to frontline managers, newer employees, customers, partners, or people from different functions and markets.
   
   Research on constructive debate reinforces the value of this approach: teams with different ways of processing information and solving problems can outperform more homogeneous groups on complex challenges. The goal is not diversity of opinion for its own sake. It is to expose blind spots before they become strategic liabilities.
   
   Ask people who disagree with you what they see that you might be missing. Then listen closely enough to reconsider your assumptions.
3. Experiment Before You Make the Big Bet
   Bold does not have to mean reckless decision making. The strongest leaders distinguish between intelligent risk taking and unnecessary exposure.
   
   Rather than committing the entire organization to an unproven strategic direction, test critical assumptions on a smaller scale. Run a pilot. Test a new customer segment. Prototype a process. Experiment with a new offering in one market.
   
   Prototyping is an effective way to test hypotheses for change because it converts strategic debate into evidence. Research on experimentation and innovation has similarly shown the value of testing assumptions before making large-scale commitments.
   
   The objective is simple: learn small before you bet big.

The Bottom Line
Growth requires change, and meaningful change requires leaders to think beyond the assumptions that created today’s results. Bolder business strategies do not come from taking unnecessary risks. They come from asking better questions, deliberately seeking perspectives that challenge conventional wisdom, and intelligently experimenting with promising alternatives. Are your leaders creating enough space to uncover the bold ideas that could redefine your organization’s next stage of growth?

See What Could Be Holding Your Strategy Back — Take the Strategic Clarity Diagnostic

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.