The pharma innovator’s strategic summer resolution

How much time do you spend thinking about the impact of what is working and what is not in today’s organisational reality, versus what was captured in the situational analysis in your brand plan?

Ask yourself:

1. Have we been bold enough, or are we just offering our customer ‘table stakes’?
2. Are we making space for innovation by stopping activities that aren’t providing value?

During your brand planning work, you will likely have carried out scenario planning to prepare for whatever you could anticipate might come your way. Now that you are one or possibly two quarters in, it is time to look with a critical eye on the environment today:

1. Identify the three most significant changes in the environment in the last three months and challenge whether the original assumptions for your brand plans still hold. (If your answer is yes to all, look back at the environmental data as I find this is never the case.)
2. Discover where you are winning and how you could accelerate this work. Consider what you need to stop doing to enable this. (Tip: try giving up three things for everything you take on – it is remarkably freeing and effective!)
3. Assess whether the risks or potential disrupters that you identified are more or less likely now.

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky described the planning fallacy – our inability to accurately estimate how much we can achieve within a time frame – in 1979.  Specifically, we are far more likely to overestimate what we can get done, with a combination of internal factors, including optimism bias, and external factors, such as societal pressure (ie, wishing to look competent) contributing to this problem.

It is likely that you (like me!) have fallen behind your original timelines. Before rushing to catch up on plans, stop to think: “Is this still right? Does this plan reflect what we know about the environment today?”

At this point, I like to play out thought experiments with my team, such as:

• If we had just six weeks to achieve our year goals, what would we do? What wouldn’t we?
• If we were our (key competitor), what would we focus on?
• If we only had £1,000, what would we prioritise?
• If we were rewarded for having the most innovative plan, what would we change?What new idea would we bring forward?
• What ideas/activities give us energy and make us most proud? What projects give us a ‘heart sink’ moment and why?

Although fun, the danger of thought experiments is that the ideas can be based on our own subjectivity, rather than the objective data.

I would encourage everyone on your team to analyse the source data (rather than high-level reports) to gain informed perspectives on trends and insights, such as your competitors’ latest investor presentations and analysts’ views, the publications your customers read and medical information queries or safety questions for your medicines.

Then, determine whether this data supports or disproves the ideas in the thought experiments.

I hope that this summer resolution works for you. These activities help me have a laser focus on what matters and energise the team, and they often prove to be a key inflexion point for performance in the year. Most excitingly, the efficiency it affords me provides the space needed for innovative thinking, inspiring change and creating new opportunities that I simply could not previously see.

So, what will you stop doing first?