skills/strategic-analysis/references/strategic-frameworks.md

# Select a strategic lens

Use only the sections relevant to the decision. These are analytical lenses, not required output templates. Choose the dimensions and evidence that distinguish options; leave an unsupported assessment unknown. Do not populate every framework to demonstrate coverage.

## External environment and competitive position

| Lens | Useful question | Evidence and interpretation |
|---|---|---|
| Five Forces | Where is industry profit captured or competed away? | Examine entry, substitutes, suppliers, buyers, and rivalry through observed prices, concentration, switching costs, contracts, capacity, and entry economics. Consider network effects or platform dependence when relevant. Distinguish industry pressure from a particular firm's ability to respond. |
| PESTLE | Which external changes alter this decision? | Select political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental changes with a plausible causal route to the business. State timing, exposure, source freshness, and response. Separate enacted requirements from proposals. |
| SWOT and TOWS | How can internal strengths or gaps interact with external opportunities or threats? | Separate internal from external factors. Turn the supported intersections into actions: exploit a strength, close a blocking gap, defend against exposure, or avoid an unsuitable commitment. A generic attribute such as “strong brand” needs evidence. |
| Competitive positioning | Which customers will choose us and why? | Compare cost leadership, differentiation, and focused positions against willingness to pay, delivered cost, required capabilities, and competitor response. Mixed approaches need a coherent activity system, not an automatic “stuck in the middle” verdict. |
| Strategy canvas | Which customer-valued factors distinguish offers? | Choose factors from customer research. Use a consistent anchored scale and disclose missing competitor evidence. Test eliminate/reduce/raise/create moves against customer value and economics. A visual divergence is not proof of demand. |
| Value chain | Where are cost and differentiation created? | Trace primary and supporting activities, their cost drivers, and their reinforcing links. Avoid double-counting shared costs. Link an activity advantage to a customer outcome or economic effect. |

## Capabilities and operating alignment

**7S:** assess strategy, structure, systems, shared values, style, staff, and skills only as they bear on the decision. Describe the mismatch and observed consequence. A low skills score does not prove a structural problem. Diagnose the mechanism before proposing an org chart change.

**VRIO:** evaluate a resource's value, rarity, imitation barriers, and the organization's ability to capture its benefits. Not valuable implies disadvantage; valuable but common implies parity; valuable and rare but imitable implies temporary advantage. Valuable, rare, and hard to imitate but not supported organizationally is potential advantage not yet captured. Sustained advantage requires all four and remains conditional on changing markets. Explain the imitation barrier concretely.

**Balanced Scorecard:** translate a chosen strategy into financial, customer, internal-process, and learning/capability outcomes as relevant. Define each measure, baseline, target basis, owner, and review rhythm. Treat the causal links between measures as hypotheses to monitor, not guaranteed sequences. Avoid targets that reward a local metric at the expense of the enterprise outcome.

## Growth and portfolio allocation

**Ansoff:** compare penetration, new products, new markets, and diversification by their specific unknowns, capability requirements, investment, and route to customers. A category does not establish a numerical risk rating.

**Growth-share matrix:** plot units using defensible market-growth definitions and relative share against the chosen competitor. Inspect cash generation, reinvestment needs, and actual competitive economics before assigning invest/hold/harvest/divest. Share alone does not prove scale advantage.

**Nine-box portfolio:** compare market attractiveness and competitive position using explicit factors and weights. Show whether plausible changes in ratings or weights change allocation. Separate an ordinal score from financial value and hard funding constraints.

**Three Horizons:** distinguish sustaining the core, scaling emerging businesses, and creating future options. Horizons describe maturity and uncertainty; assign timing to the industry and initiative rather than fixed universal year ranges. Evaluate whether the portfolio funds its future while sustaining the core. Use milestones that release later funding as uncertainty falls.

## Business model and market access

**Business Model Canvas:** inspect customer segments, value propositions, channels, relationships, revenue streams, resources, activities, partners, and costs. Focus on coherence between blocks. A change in channel may alter economics, service obligations, or partner incentives elsewhere.

**Market entry:** compare organic build, acquisition, partnership, joint venture, licensing, and export where feasible. Align investment, speed, control, reversibility, regulatory access, integration demands, and time to commercial traction. Test the entry economics independently of total market attractiveness.

**Platform strategy:** identify participant groups, what each contributes and receives, who pays, and who is subsidized. Distinguish same-side, cross-side, and data effects. Test cold-start acquisition, liquidity, trust, multi-homing, disintermediation, governance, and contribution economics. Network effects need observable evidence of increased participant value as participation grows.

## Synthesis

Connect findings across lenses without counting frameworks as evidence. Identify dependencies, contradictions, and uncovered questions. State the decision implication and what would disprove it. Quantify only where a defensible model supports quantification; qualitative constraints can still decide an investment.