House of Strategy: A model for designing strategies using stakeholders' opinion

- We model consensus of fuzzy-opinions in a non-repetitive Delphi survey.
- We propose House of Strategy, a model for Goal, Objective, and Strategy planning.
- House of Strategy can be used to prioritize strategies for implementation.
- House of Strategy can be used as a strategy communication tool.

The paper presents building of a model, i.e. House of Strategy, out of a two-round Delphi survey, which can be used in strategic planning to develop sets of Goals, Objectives, and Strategies. The survey was made among the stakeholders of the Indian Shrimp Industry in order to set the future goals, and concurrent objectives and to design strategies to achieve them. The first round of Delphi survey resulted into generation of sets of Goal, Objectives, and Strategies. The second round of the survey gathered opinions of survey panelists regarding the desirability and feasibility of the Goals and Objectives, and feasibility and effectiveness of the Strategies. Consensuses of stakeholders' opinions on the each of the items with respect to above said criteria were estimated using standard fuzzy consensus building algorithm. Hierarchical representation of a Goal, their corresponding Objectives and Strategies form a tree like structure, called as GOS tree. Seven such GOS trees were developed, each representing a Goal at its top echelon. Validity of each GOS tree was tested using the ratings of the panelists on the goal, objectives, and strategies with respect to the feasibility criterion. The proposed validation process of a GOS tree resulted two set of weights separately for the objectives and the strategies that explained the importance of each of the strategies in achieving the corresponding objective and importance of each of the objectives in aligning towards the goal. These importance weights of the objectives and the strategies were local to the GOS tree. Seven such GOS trees were developed each representing for a future goal. As a strategy might have presence in multiple GOS trees and contributing towards multiple goals, an overall contribution of the strategies was to be found out. We proposed a framework, House of Strategy, which can be used to combine all the GOS trees at one place and could help, in a two-step process, in finding out the overall contribution of each of the strategies towards overall achievement of Industry's goals. The House of Strategy consisted of two sub-Houses, i.e. Goal-Objective (GO) and Objective-Strategy (OS) sub-Houses. In the first step, the GO sub-House calculated the overall priority of each of the Objectives depending on its local importance weights (with respect to each of the GOS tree it represented) and corresponding desirability of the local goal and its own desirability score. Similarly, in the second step, the OS sub-House helped in calculating the overall priority of each of the strategies depending upon the priority of its corresponding objectives (in a GOS tree) as derived by the GO sub-House, its local importance weights (with respect to each of the GOS tree it represented), and its own effectiveness score. Using the House of Strategy, we have prioritized the strategies raised during the Delphi survey. The proposed methodology of building the House of Strategy can be used for designing strategies for an organization/industry using stakeholders' opinion and prioritizing them in order of their overall importance in achieving intended objectives and goals. Furthermore, the House of Strategy can be used as an effective communication tool to portray the goals, objectives, and strategies along with their priorities at one place.