A strategic assumption is a belief about the market, the customer, or the organization on which a choice is based, without that belief being tested again and again. You find out whether it still holds by stating it out loud and comparing it with what is currently happening outside and inside the organization.
Every strategy rests on a few statements that no one voices anymore because they were once taken as settled. "Customers mainly choose us on price." "Our biggest competitor is too far from our segment to be a threat." "This regulation doesn't affect us, because we fall outside the target group." Such statements are not facts, they are assumptions that held true at some point and have never been reconsidered since. A company of 150 employees that chose three years ago to grow through one large channel did so based on an assumption about the stability of that channel. That assumption held then. Whether it still holds now is a different question.
Assumptions are rarely revised explicitly, because no one recognizes them as assumptions. They are part of how the market is discussed in meetings, woven into the way budgets are allocated and targets are set. A manufacturing company with 90 employees can steer for years on the assumption that the raw material price is a marginal factor, until a supplier switch or a price shock shows that this assumption had stopped holding true for some time, while no one can point to the moment it changed. Regulation, technology, and competitor behavior shift gradually, and an assumption that is not actively tested simply stays in place, even as the world around it has moved on.
It starts with writing down the assumption as a standalone sentence, separate from the strategy in which it is embedded. You then place that sentence next to what is demonstrably happening outside: signals from the market, moves by competitors, upcoming regulation. That is precisely the distinction between an outside view and an inside view, and it is the core of how do I test whether our strategy still holds. An assumption that was established two years ago based on three customer conversations and a competitive analysis must be checked again against those same sources, not from a gut feeling within the boardroom. Anyone who doesn't know where to start with that outside view can look into what is a horizon scan and how do you do it yourself to see which signals belong to it and how to gather them yourself without external research.
An assumption that appears shared on paper often turns out, on closer questioning, to be five different assumptions, one per board member. The commercial director of a service provider with 200 employees may assume that the customer chooses mainly on relationship, while the financial director has been seeing signals for months that price weighs more heavily than before. Both steer based on their own version of the same assumption, without this difference ever having been discussed out loud. That spread among board members is itself a signal: the greater the spread, the more likely it is that the assumption no longer holds unambiguously, or never did. When these differences become visible, the discussion quickly stops being about the assumption itself and becomes about who is right, and that touches on our board disagrees about the priorities, what now.
There is no fixed interval at which an assumption is automatically due for replacement; that depends on the speed at which the market, regulation, and competition move in that specific segment. An assumption in a sector with slow regulation and few new entrants can remain valid for years, while an assumption in a rapidly changing market can become outdated within a year. What is certain is that assumptions have an expiration date that does not coincide with the date of the last strategic plan. How you estimate that interval for your own situation is worked out in how often should you recalibrate a strategy.
You get an initial indication by going through the ten questions of the free mini-test; it gives an indication of the pressure profile of your own strategy without requiring an extensive process for it. Anyone who wants to go further after that indication can lay the assumptions and the spread within the board next to the outside view in the strategic stress test itself. At some point, it doesn't stop at establishing that an assumption no longer holds: every theme that follows from it translates into tasks, hours, and systems that someone has to carry out. Anyone who wants to know what a decision about a shifted assumption means for who in the organization will do what ends up at the werkscan on ftetoai.com.
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