The Case for CASE

Annual strategy planning makes it difficult for organizations to navigate market dynamics, technological breakthroughs, and unforeseen obstacles. If “strategy” is identifying and overcoming challenges on the way to a longer-term objective, then how can doing it once a year be successful? New challenges will always emerge, and we learn about others by taking steps to solve one challenge. The strategy needs to be dynamic. It needs to be an automatic and continuous pursuit of reaching a vision.

Many organizations react on the fly to each emerging mini-crisis precisely as they should. Continuous Adaptive Strategy Execution (CASE) enables this adaptability while ensuring cohesion with the overarching company vision and establishing a shared framework for prioritizing how urgent change is versus staying on the planned path. Without a shared strategy, decisions made at any team or product level appear logical in isolation but often lead to misalignment (or conflict) with the broader organizational objectives.

If the following scenarios are familiar to you:

• Each November, there is an intense period of planning activity to outline the following year’s roadmaps and budgets, only to find that nothing you planned gets delivered that year.
• A culture in which leaders escalate tasks to get them completed leads to a cycle in which everything seems to require escalation.
• Teams are perpetually busy, but their efforts aren’t aligned with strategic objectives.
• Your organization is overwhelmed by an abundance of OKRs, or other performance management scheme, with each team member pulling in a different direction and little to no movement on these objectives.

Then, it’s time to explore CASE. Implementing CASE doesn’t demand a significant increase in effort; instead, it optimizes and connects existing business activities your company is already doing. CASE can significantly enhance efficiency and outcomes by streamlining activities, distributing effort more evenly throughout the year, and integrating feedback and data-driven insights into decision-making.

Consider CASE your strategic framework if you seek to break free from the cycle of reactive planning and misaligned efforts. It’s about doing more with what you already have—smarter, not harder—by infusing adaptability and alignment into every layer of your organization.