What’s the Next New Thing in Strategy? (Part 2)

In Part 1, we examined the first six strategy tests: the foundation and insight questions that determine whether you have genuine competitive advantage. You learned about beating the market, identifying true sources of advantage, getting granular about where you compete, staying ahead of trends, developing privileged insights, and embracing uncertainty.

The next four tests determine whether your strategy survives actual implementation. These aren’t about what you know. They’re about what you do, how you decide, whether your team believes, and if you can translate thinking into action.

Execution: Can You Actually Deliver This Strategy?

Test 7: Does Your Strategy Balance Commitment with Flexibility?

Every naira you lock in reduces your ability to adapt. Sign a three-year warehouse lease in Challenge? You’ve committed to that location regardless of how distribution patterns shift. Order four months of raw materials? You’re betting prices and demand won’t change before you process that inventory. 

But without commitment, you can’t build anything real. You can’t develop supplier relationships with month-to-month thinking. You can’t build market presence by constantly changing focus. You can’t create operational efficiency without investing in systems that take time to mature.

Successful Ilorin businesses have figured out this balance. They commit where they have clear advantage while maintaining flexibility everywhere else. Think of your strategy as three types of moves:

Big bets are high-commitment positions you make when you see opportunities others are missing. A grain merchant opening a third warehouse after proving the model in two locations isn’t gambling, it’s leveraging tested insights.

No-regrets moves pay off under any reasonable scenario. Improving your supplier payment reliability delivers value whether you grow 15% or 40% this year. Training your team on quality control helps regardless of which products expand.

These moves don’t require betting on a specific future. They make you better at core operations no matter what happens.

Real options are low-cost actions today that preserve your ability to commit later. Maintaining contact with potential suppliers you’re not currently using creates flexibility if your primary sources become unreliable.

Test 8: Is Your Strategy Contaminated by Bias?

This test requires honesty because your brain is designed to trick you into believing your strategy is better than it actually is.

Overoptimism is assuming your execution will be better than competitors’ even though you’re hiring from the same talent pool. You project growth requiring everything to go right while ignoring the probability of diesel price spikes, power failures, or supplier delays.

Ask yourself: when did one of your initiatives last finish on time and under budget? If the answer is “rarely,” why do your current projections assume that pattern will reverse?

Anchoring happens when you fixate on arbitrary reference points. You price based on production costs rather than what customers value.

One Tanke manufacturer may struggle because the owner anchor pricing to raw material costs plus markup. Customers don’t care about production costs. They care about reliability and quality relative to alternatives.

Loss aversion makes you hold failing strategies too long because admitting failure feels worse than losing money slowly. You keep an underperforming product because you’ve invested in machinery.

Businesses that survive recognise sunk costs as sunk. They cut losses quickly and reallocate to opportunities with better odds.

Confirmation bias operates invisibly. You seek information supporting your beliefs while dismissing contradictory data. You remember the customer who loved your product and forget the eight who complained.

Survivorship bias creates distorted pictures. When you study successful businesses, you’re only seeing companies that survived. You’re not seeing ones that tried similar things and failed. Everyone studies successful food processors. Nobody examines the twelve that closed in the past four years. You’re only seeing half the picture.

To fight these biases, develop multiple hypotheses instead of falling in love with one explanation.

Test 9: Does Your Whole Team Actually Believe in This Strategy?

After your last planning session, everyone agreed. Stakeholders approved. Your key people expressed support. You left feeling aligned.

Then nothing changed. Operations continued using the same processes. Sales pursued the same customers. Production stuck to the same priorities. The strategy existed in documents but not in daily decisions.

Real conviction requires more than meetings. It requires experiences that shift how people see reality. When your financial manager has personally dealt with delayed customer payments, they understand why your strategy emphasises payment terms differently than if they’d just read about it.

These experiences create visceral understanding that data alone can’t produce. They make problems real instead of abstract. And that emotional connection generates conviction needed to push through obstacles during execution.

Test 10: Have You Translated Your Strategy into Clear Actions?

Your strategy talks about “improving product quality” but doesn’t specify which three processes to fix first. This vague statement feels like a strategy. But it’s not actionable. Your team can read it and still have no idea what to do Monday morning.

Real action plans answer specific questions: Who is doing what, by when, with which resources, measured by what outcomes?

Who means naming specific individuals, not departments. “Production will handle quality improvement” is not an action plan. “Bayo will lead quality improvement, with support from Kemi on training and Tunde on equipment” is an action plan.

What requires concrete actions, not abstract goals. “Improve quality” isn’t an action. “Reduce defect rate from 8% to 4% by end of Q2” is an action.

When means specific dates, not vague timeframes. “Soon” isn’t a deadline. “By March 20” is a deadline. Deadlines create urgency.

Resources must be explicit. How much budget? How much of each person’s time? What equipment is required?

Outcomes need measurement. “Better quality” is not measurable. “Defect rate below 5%” is measurable. “Happier customers” is not measurable. “Customer complaints below 10 per month” is measurable.

The Advantage Nobody’s Discussing

While your competitors copy the latest business model they heard about, you can win by answering basic strategic questions clearly. While they’re importing frameworks from markets with different dynamics, you can be building genuine competitive advantage specific to operating in Ilorin.

The next new thing in strategy? There isn’t one. Old fundamentals, executed with discipline, beat new frameworks executed carelessly every single time.

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