Strategy

The strategy is the top-level approach to achieve the mission by addressing the impacting elements and providing focus on the essential activities within the enablement process. The strategy evolves based on what is learned about the impacting elements and iteration creation. It adapts to change and the uncertainty from complexity. It consists of continuous improvement of three components:

• Objectives - are the approaches that will demonstrate progess towards achieving the mission and in addressing the impacting elements
• Solutions - are what must be created to achieve the mission, deliver on the objectives and to address the impacting elements
• Measures - are the measurements of progress toward the mission and to evaluate the effectiveness of the objectives and solutions.

Strategy Development is a layered approach of predictions to ensure alignment of the strategy.

• Current State Prediction Layer – provides the status of the impacting elements, causation of the status and impact on the complex system. These are predictions of the role of the impacting elements on achieving the mission. Since experts can’t accurately calculate what complex systems will do, they use predictions based on the sum of the predictions of the impacting elements. While we may think we know someone (impacting element), they may not share enough.
• Future State Predictions Layer – tells us where we are going (likely scenario) and when (scenario timing). These are predictions of the future status changes and timing of the impacting elements and complex system changes. This builds on the predictions of previous layer (status, causation and impact) to predict the likely scenario and timing. An example would be predicting your knee pain will improve (likely scenario) in a few days (timing) without going to the doctor.
• Strategy Forecast Layer – tells us how to achieve the mission. This is a forecast of what the impacting elements will do (changes to current status, future status and timing) based the strategy and timing as a result of executing the strategy. It is also a forecast of the progress and timing of achieving the mission.
• Adjustment Prediction Layer – tells us how to manage continuous improvement through iteration. This is a forecast of the impact of potential adjustments to the impacting elements, strategy and predictions (current state, future state and strategy forecast predictions) to help decide which adjustments to implement.

This is step 4 of the Enablement Process and Iteration Generator.