Toolkit Category: Strategy

The purpose of this tool is to give you a common sense, staged approach to making good-quality decisions.

The tool provides you with a comparison matrix to think about the other key players working in your area. It then prompts you to consider whether they are your competitors, possible collaborators or complementary to your work.

The intention of the approach is to help businesses create value and replace outmoded models of working. It is based on the belief that all business models can be described through nine building blocks, which show how a business either makes money or delivers its mission and generates income.

PESTLE analysis is a mechanism for scanning the external environment, or big picture, in which an organisation operates

The purpose of this tool is to provide you with a checklist against which you can self-assess your current plan. It could also be used as guidance criteria for revising your current plan or for writing a new plan.

The SWOT matrix provides a framework for assessing internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats. It helps open up critical thinking across the whole of your business activities. Carrying out this analysis will often be illuminating, both in terms of pointing out what needs to be done, and in putting problems into perspective.

The approach involves plotting your projects, decisions or activities on the certainty/agreement axes. Depending on where the projects or activities are placed, a different response is needed in terms of management and decision making.

This is not so much a tool as a series of reflective prompts to help you ask the brutal questions and confront your brutal facts. If this set of questions is not brutal enough for you, feel free to amend or add! The tool can be used on your own or with your team if you have one. As they are reflective questions, take time to think about them.

This tool provides an approach to ensuring that your creative vision and financial goals are fully integrated so that their relative strengths are understood.