If we knew what we need to know in order to act correctly, we could take entirely new methodological approaches to strategy development. Many steps that are necessary in conventional methods would become unnecessary. The time usually required for developing strategies could thus be reduced by up to 90%.
This idea guided me early on in developing new methods for strategy design. After many years of development and testing, these methods and tools have reached a high level of performance and have proven their effectiveness in numerous practical applications.
The “Great Transformation21”, with its hardly manageable complexity, systemic interconnectedness, and enormous change dynamics, places significantly higher and partly entirely new demands on corporate leadership. This applies particularly to the development and the increasingly rapid adaptation of business missions and strategies.
Conventional approaches are becoming less and less suitable for this purpose and increasingly lead in the wrong direction. In contrast, the complexity-appropriate Direttissima approach opens up new possibilities for leading organizations. Its key elements are: right, fast, precise, and coherent.
I call Direttissima the method of the fastest and most direct path to the right strategy. The term comes from mountaineering and refers to the most direct route to the summit.
The method combines two kinds of knowledge: the knowledge within the organization and the knowledge that is brought in from outside. Through this combination, strategies can be developed much faster while remaining well-founded.
A formative example arose during a conversation with an entrepreneur. On the back of a restaurant menu, a sketch of a strategy for one of his business fields emerged. It included the solution-invariant customer problem, the resulting customer benefit, possible solution variants, as well as a draft of a business mission and key economic targets.
This simple structure proved to be extraordinarily effective and led, in the following years, to a world market position in this business field.
Such experiences also revealed the limits of conventional strategy processes. Strategic projects often begin with extensive analyses and large amounts of environmental information. While this work can be valuable, it frequently leads to long processes and delayed decisions.
Especially under conditions of increasing complexity, an approach is needed that leads more quickly to what is strategically essential. This is precisely where the Direttissima method begins: it consistently focuses on the few decisive questions that are truly relevant for strategic positioning.
Direttissima therefore does not mean simplification at any price, but a consistent focus on what is strategically decisive. It enables leadership teams to arrive at clear, precise, and coherent strategies more quickly under complex conditions.
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