According to Josef Oehmen, an associate professor at the Technical University of Denmark, research they conducted shows that whilst strategies come in all shapes and sizes there are four major fields of 'strategy work':

Discovery, Experimentation, Transformation and Operational Excellence. There are two independent factors, The Degree of Impact to People and The Degree of Uncertainty to Tackle.

Below is a digest of his work.

Discovery-focused strategy work

Discovery-focused strategy work often has a scary component: We think that there is something out there that will significantly change our business model, our product portfolio, or the way we do our job. This is amplified by the large degree of uncertainty inherent in this work – even if I think we can hire the people to make blockchain work for us, is there really a market? Is it worth doing, and if yes, how much am I prepared to lose?

Experimentation-focused strategy work

The discovery stage, if performed effectively, often leads to an interesting problem: what are we to do with ideas that are currently impossible to evaluate as a classic business case? We don’t know yet what their market may be, how much they would cost, if the technology can be developed to suit our needs (and what these needs are), nor if our organisation is equipped to carry them to completion.

The experiments that were devised took many forms: one company co-created product use scenarios with possible clients in a number of workshops; groups of companies teamed up to sponsor research and proof-of-concept implementations; new processes and technologies were tried internally for 100 days in parts of the company; and companies formed internal start-ups to operationalise novel technology solutions and champion them on client projects.

Transformation-focused strategy work

After targeted experimenting and prototyping sufficiently mitigated the risks of a business project, we find that the classical activities of organisational transformation, change management and portfolio management are put to good use. While the uncertainty is now relatively low, the scope of people affected increases dramatically, presenting significant people-based challenges.

Operational Excellence focused strategy work focused

The final category of strategy is oriented towards enhancing day-to-day practice one step at the time. The organisation first needs to develop a thorough understanding of the skills and requirements needed for the introduction of a new technology. Activities in this space involve exercises with operational management and experts to unearth and synthesise possible needs, with the aim of developing a prioritisation framework. They considered questions such as: “What technology for what product or market? What is our implementation roadmap? What are our criteria to prioritise activities, as well as exclude ideas?” These were implemented as standard operating procedures, building step-by-step on capabilities that already existed.

An important aspect to highlight is that an organisation does not “move” through these four types of strategy. Instead, they are four categories that structure the portfolio of strategic thinking and related activities that are typically being undertaken at the same time. Several studies have shown that the most successful companies had learned to execute activities in all four quadrants, all the time, and had robust processes for managing the transition of an activity from one quadrant to the other.