Event Strategist Tools & Techniques

There is no single strategic planning tool or technique that will work for all events. You have to determine which one is best for your organization. Some will require fine tuning. Sometimes, you may need to combine two or more.

Balanced Scorecard (BSC)

Used by organizations to communicate what they are trying to accomplish, align day-to-day work with overall strategy, and monitor progress towards specific targets.

Based on the idea of looking at both strategic measures and traditional financial measures to get a more “balanced” view of performance. It helps identify the relationships between:

• Projects and programs people are working on
• Measurements being used to track success (KPIs)
• Strategic objectives the organization is trying to accomplish
• Mission, vision, and strategy of the organization

Blue Ocean Strategy

Focuses on the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost to open up a new market space and create new demand. It’s about creating and capturing uncontested market space, thereby making the competition irrelevant. It is based on the view that market boundaries and industry structure are not a given and can be reconstructed by the actions and beliefs of industry players.

Critical Success Factors (CSF)

CFSs define areas of performance that are essential for an organization to accomplish mission. Think of them as high-level goals imperative to meet your strategic goals and objectives.

There are four types of CFSs:

Industry factors: Specific characteristics of your industry. These are the things that you must do to remain competitive within your sector.

Environmental factors: Macro-environmental influences on your organization: the business climate, the economy, your competitors, and technological advancements, etc.

Strategic factors: Specific competitive strategy that your organization follows. This includes the way your organization chooses to position and market itself.

Temporal factors: Specific barriers, challenges, directions, and influences will determine these CSFs.

To identify your CFSs:

• Establish your organization’s mission and goals
• Identify your “candidate” CSFs
• Evaluate each candidate CSF to determine which ones are the most important – these are your Critical Success Factors
• Work out how you will assess the progress of each of your CSFs
• Clearly communicate your CSFs to those responsible for delivering them and to the wider organization
• Monitor your CSFs to make sure that you stay on target

Critical Question Analysis

Refers to when organizational leadership tries to answer four basic questions:

• What are the purposes and objectives of the organization?
• Where is the organization presently going?
• In what kind of environment does the organization currently exist?
• What can be done to better achieve organizational objectives in the future?

These questions are critical to the overall operations of the organization and enable management to streamline its operations to achieve its goals and objectives.

Five Forces Model (Porter)

A method for understanding the competitive forces within an industry. Also helpful in adjusting your own strategy to suit your unique competitive environment.

Five P’s (Mintzberg)

The objective of the Five P’s was to develop five distinguished strategic visions for the organizations. These 5 Ps are not mutually exclusive, quite the contrary – they complement each other. The core idea of the Mintzberg model is – your strategy is more robust if you’ve defined it taking multifaceted approach, rather than focusing on one factor. The Five P’s are:

• Plan: Developed of strategy in advance, with a purpose.
• Ploy: A way to outsmart the competition
• Pattern: What was successful in the past can lead to success in the future
• Position: How the organization relates to its competitive environment and what it can do to make its products and services unique in the marketplace
• Perspective: Influence of organizational culture and collective thinking on the strategic decision making within the company

Four Corner Analysis (Porter)

A predictive tool that helps in determining a competitor’s strategies or course of action, and thereby can inform your strategic planning. It complements Porter’s Five Forces Analysis well.

Four Strategies of Influence (Baker)

Different influence or persuasion methods that can be used during strategy sessions. The strategies are helpful for exploring different approaches or tactics. It requires an accurate assessment of the situation to determine which strategy is most appropriate.

• Investigator: Combines the push style and the logic approach. Involves careful and sometimes aggressive arguing a point in a very well-outlined manner, back up by facts and data.
• Calculator: Involves merging the pull style with the logical approach. Uses a less assertive approach, and instead argues points by highlighting the constructive parts of their arguments and the illogical points of their opponent. Also use data to support their arguments.
• Motivator: Mixes a push style with an emotional approach. Uses vision to inspire others to believe in their causes.
• Collaborator: Composite of the pull style with an emotional approach. Collaborators engage individuals’ emotions by including them in the decision-making process.

Gap Analysis

Involves the comparison of actual performance with potential or desired performance and also helps to create an action plan for bridging the gap.

You can conduct a gap analysis to address any number of business challenges:

• Performance (or strategy) gap: Actual versus expected performance
• Product (or market) gap: Actual versus budgeted sales
• Profit gap: Actual versus target profit
• Manpower gap: Actual number and quantified performance of workforce versus that which is required

Growth-Share Matrix (Boston Consulting Group)

A well-known approach to portfolio planning. Requires an organization to categorize its events as high or low along two dimensions: market share and market growth rate. 

OKRs (Objectives & Key Results)

A collaborative tool used by teams and individuals to set challenging, ambitious goals with measurable results. OKRs allow you to track progress, create alignment and encourage engagement around measurable goals.

PEST Analysis (Political, Economic, Social and Technology)

A tool to help understand how key external forces impact your business. There are other variations that explore additional forces (legal, environmental, demographics, ethics, etc.).

Root Cause Analysis (RCA)

A systematic, problem-solving technique used for identifying the root causes of faults or problems or why the problem occurred in the first place. The 5-Step RCA process is:

1. Define the Problem

   • What do you see happening?
   • What are the specific symptoms?

2. Collect Data

   • What proof do you have that the problem exists?
   • How long has the problem existed?
   • What is the impact of the problem?

3. Identify Possible Causal Factors

   • What sequence of events leads to the problem?
   • What conditions allow the problem to occur?
   • What other problems surround the occurrence of the central problem?

4. Identify the Root Cause(s)

   • Why does the causal factor exist?
   • What is the real reason the problem occurred?

5. Recommend and Implement Solutions

   • What can you do to prevent the problem from happening again?
   • How will the solution be implemented?
   • Who will be responsible for it?
   • What are the risks of implementing the solution?

SOAR Analysis (Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations, Results)

A technique which helps organizations focus on their current strengths and future vision, for the benefit of developing all strategic goals.

SOAR uses two of the four areas of analysis from SWOT; strengths and opportunities remain, but replaces weaknesses and threats with aspirations and results.

SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)

A technique used to evaluate a company’s competitive position and develop strategic planning. The primary objective is to help organizations develop a full awareness of all the factors involved in making a business decision. It assesses internal and external factors, as well as current and future potential.

TOWS Matrix (Threats, Opportunities, Weaknesses and Strengths)

A variant of a SWOT analysis, a TOWS analysis will look to match internal factors to external factors to help identify relevant strategic options. It can help an organization see how it can take advantage of opportunities, reduce threats, overcome weaknesses and exploit any strengths.

TOWS strategies fall into four categories:

Strengths-Opportunities: Develop plans that leverage the strengths of the company to capitalize on opportunities.

Weaknesses-Opportunities: After identifying weaknesses, focus on ways to resolve them in a goal to take advantage of opportunities.

Strengths-Threats: Use the company’s strengths to counter external threats.

Weaknesses-Threats: Find ways to minimize weaknesses and counter threats.

VMOST (Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategy, and Tactical)

A technique for evaluating an organization’s overall strategy and support activities, and determining whether they are all in alignment.

The goal is to enable a view of strategy (the S) translated into meaningful terms for the benefit of stakeholders by expressing it in the form of visions (the V), missions (the M), objectives (the O) and tactics (the T).

By expressing the overall strategy in this way, it can be analyzed for alignment with the current environment and internal consistency.

VRIO (Value, Rarity, Imitability, and Organization

A 4-Question tool used to analyze an organization’s internal resources and capabilities to find out if they can be a source of sustained competitive advantage. The questions are:

Value

Is the firm able to exploit an opportunity or neutralize an external threat with the resource/capability?

Rarity

Is control of the resource/capability in the hands of a relative few?

Imitability

Is it difficult to imitate, and will there be significant cost disadvantage to a firm trying to obtain, develop, or duplicate the resource/capability?

Organization

Is the firm organized, ready, and able to exploit resources/capabilities; to capture value?