Stress-Test Your Strategy: The 7 Questions to Ask

For sure, we all would like to believe about ourselves that we are good at strategy formation – only those “dumb” implementers are failing us all over again. Simons’ “7 Strategy questions” are a great coaching tool to help us with implementation – the questions are designed to help a Coach or a Manager to identify key potential issues.
Harvard Business School Professor – Robert Simons published in 2010 an article at Harvard Business Review: ”Stress-Test Your Strategy: The 7 Questions to Ask”, with the following list of questions:
- Who is your primary customer?
- How do your Core Values prioritize Shareholders, Employees, and Customers?
- What Critical Performance Variables are you tracking?
- What Strategic Boundaries have you set?
- How are you generating Creative Tension?
- How Committed are your Employees to helping each other?
- What Strategic Uncertainties keep you awake at night?
Here, we are going to explain a context for all those questions.
This video is part of our course: "Coaching Business & Corporate Strategy". If you would like to explore it in more details, here are the links to the course:
Video illustration is created by Natasha035 – for more details, please visit: