Crafting A Strategy to Thrive in a Challenging World

Here's what come first in a well-thought-out strategy

What is Strategy — and Why Does Everyone Need One?

To succeed in any environment where not everything is within our control, a well-crafted strategy is essential. Whether you're a new entrepreneur with a small business idea or a seasoned executive steering a multinational company into a new market or industry, a clear roadmap is needed. Such a roadmap helps navigate the inevitable shifts and transformations in the external environment, guiding how the business develops and adapts over time.

Strategy is not just a luxury; it’s a leadership necessity. It serves as a vital reference point that defines the direction a business or organisation will take into the future, allowing it to anticipate change, respond to new challenges, and capitalise on emerging opportunities.

But a strategy is much more than a plan, a goal, or a good idea. It’s not just a one-off decision, a mission statement, or a product launch. It is a deliberate process of aligning an organisation’s purpose, position, and direction in response to its environment. It’s also about navigating and leading through uncertainty, focusing effort, and adapting to change, because change is constant and transformation is often the difference between survival and success.

And strategy isn’t just for businesses. It applies to governments, nonprofits, and international organisations—indeed, anywhere external forces must be understood and navigated. These forces influence whether you sink, survive, or scale. Behind many of the most successful organisations—and careers—you’ll often find a well-thought-out strategy guiding the way.

While some strategies are carefully designed in advance, others tend to emerge through experience. Strategic clarity doesn’t always have to come from senior leaders; it often evolves through experimentation, workshops, feedback, and course correction in real time. Everybody can contribute, and should.

Now, imagine what happens without a strategy. You risk drifting — and you don’t want that. As the saying goes, "Only dead fish drift." Without a clear direction, you lose the ability to proactively navigate challenges and seize new opportunities. Leaders who don’t strategise or nurture a culture of strategic thinking are often easy to spot. They fall into short-term thinking, get caught off guard by change, make emotion-based decisions, and find themselves outflanked by more focused rivals. Markets shift, technologies evolve, policies adapt, customer tastes change, and employees look elsewhere— and those businesses without a strategy are the first to be exposed.

So, in a world of accelerating disruption, strategy is how you stay grounded—and how you move forward with clarity, resilience, and purpose.

The Case of The Unscrambled Beans Café

Let’s take an example of why strategy matters for a small business. Imagine an independent specialty coffee shop based in a large international city — let’s call it The Unscrambled Beans Café. It was started by two founders with a passion for ethically sourced coffee and community-driven interior design. The kind of place with books on the shelf, cosy nooks to hide away in, beautiful arabica aromas, and just the right atmosphere to pass a morning or afternoon with a few good cups of joe.

The founders dreamed of turning it into a city-wide chain — a sustainable, modern café brand with a loyal following, room to scale, and the best beans in town.

But six months in, growth had stalled.

Footfall was down. Costs were creeping up as climate risks disrupted global coffee bean supply chains, while interest rate hikes were reducing consumer spending power. The weather unexpectedly became too hot for coffee. Moreover, a modern international chain had opened across the street with a greater range of cheaper beverages, including great coffee and strong brand recognition. Meanwhile, an app-based coffee subscription startup was siphoning off digital-native customers with low prices and doorstep delivery to their offices. To make matters worse, the unexpected tightening of restrictions by urban planners stalled their expansion plans for new store openings.

The founders realised something critical: they had a great product, a lovely space to hang out, and a great name — but no strategy. They lacked a clear approach for deciding how to compete, where to grow, or what to prioritise in a crowded, fast-moving market.

And this is where change started to hit hardest. Transformation in the industry, shifting customer expectations, and emerging technology were shaping decisions they hadn’t anticipated.

Without a strategy to respond to these changes, they risked being left behind.

They needed a way to understand and respond to the external environment, to really know what business they were in, and to anticipate the change already happening around them.

Why the External Environment Comes First

Entrepreneurs often have a clear picture in their mind of the internal environment—what the business is good at, what they value, and what resources they have. That’s usually what drives them to start a business in the first place.

The external environment (the world the business operates in) is often more hazy in the mind, it can be overlooked. To different degrees, this is as true for experienced senior executives as it is for first-time entrepreneurs. After all, it is much easier to know and trust your people and product on the inside than those on the outside. Moreover, sometimes business leaders believe that if they supply a truly great product, the people will come. Sometimes that works out, sometimes it seems naïve.

What goes on inside a business is a big factor in determining its success; internal culture, leadership, and skill capabilities matter a lot. However, what goes on outside is even more important. Change and transformation in the external world are what ultimately determine whether a business thrives or falters. After all, it is where your customers come from, where your suppliers and competitors operate, and it is also where your license to operate gets its approval.

So, for the two founders to evolve their strategy to include the factors beyond their doors, they can find a lot of early clarity by drawing first on a classic tool of business strategy: PESTLE analysis.

Mapping the Macro Landscape with PESTLE Analysis

PESTLE is an analytical tool that helps businesses proactively scan the wider external environment across six macro factors that drive change and could have a significant impact on the business.

These factors are: Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental.

Conducting a PESTLE analysis as an early step in building your strategy can save much time, stress, and money later.

Here is an outline of the 6 factors:

Political: To what degree does a government influence or intervene in the economy or a particular industry?

Economic: To what degree do economic factors change supply and demand in the economy that could impact the business?

Social: What changing social factors, such as demographics, changing tastes, culture, attitudes, and values of the population, could provide new opportunities or impact profit?

Technological: These are factors such as innovations and efficiencies that could revolutionise how business is done or how data is handled and used to help the business grow.

Legal: These factors include specific laws that could impact the business and include everything from national consumer laws to local building and safety regulations.

Environmental: These are factors relating to the physical environment, such as the weather and climate.

Anticipate and Adapt to Change

By using PESTLE analysis, the founders, together with insights from their staff, could start to develop a strategy to better anticipate and adapt to the changing external environment and avoid falling behind. They will be better placed to grow into a city-wide ethical café brand with stronger customer loyalty.

Without this lens, they will continue to fly blind and remain exposed to unwanted surprises that change will eventually bring.

PESTLE is straightforward and gives them context — that’s what makes it a great starting point. In hindsight, it shows that their challenges weren’t personal or just local – they were external factors not caused by them. They were part of a larger system of disruption and transformation. The external environment was shifting, and without a strategy, this café business couldn’t adapt. So, as a starting point in developing a strategy, it makes a lot of sense to start with PESTLE.

The same applies whether you’re running a consultancy, launching a product, or scaling a social enterprise. If you don’t scan the landscape first, you miss the signals—and the shifts.