NMBLR app opens up global strategy for post-covid work models

By Janice MacLennan, creator of the NMBLR app

As we look around us and into the future of business there are two indisputable truths: That companies need to adapt to a flexible-working world; and that in this new, hybrid-working era, value is being created by software that drives greater collaboration and innovation. 

Teams need to be able to strategise together despite often being geographically separate. Where we used to board trains, planes, automobiles to attend essential meetings, they are now often held online.

But without the paper trails, the slides, and flipcharts, how do we log contribution of thoughts, and development of strategy? Notes are made and files saved but ploughing through these files is time-consuming and often confusing. Points get missed; contributors are not logged. Confusion arises and time is money. 

Technology needs to catch up with the working climate.

Strategy is often portrayed as a thinking exercise—a set of decisions and plans made by a small group. But strategy is brought to life by the people in every part of an organisation every day. Engaging the people critical to both creating and activating your strategy is challenging and risks being an element missing in the approach to strategy development, especially in this new hybrid working era.

This is where NMBLR comes in. The first-to-market NMBLR app is one of the most important technological innovations of 2022 as it enables equity, in strategy engagement, between all relevant internal stakeholders.

What is NMBLR?

NMBLR is a new cloud-based collaborative technology that supports real-time development and refinement of brand strategy by diverse teams. It can be used on desktop and mobile devices

NMBLR solves problems that arise with remote and hybrid working. And so, resonates with different companies for different reasons.

• For some it overcomes the challenge of achieving seamless and timely collaboration across cross-functional teams and global/local teams to co-create strategy 
• For others it is the means to integrate the need for both ‘long term strategy and shorter term activation’ in one place
• For many – it resolves the challenge of not being able to accommodate the uncertainties that exist in the environment they are operating in. Many are stuck with annual planning cycles which don’t allow them to respond to change and/or new information with speed whereas NMBLR is agile, fluid
• For everyone it is the challenge of ensuring that all actions/investments made by the different teams and different countries are focused on the activation of the strategy 
• For others, particularly fast growing companies – they’re challenged with organisational memory loss as people move on to their next position quickly.

How does NMBLR work?

In summary, it provides a cloud-based framework to help structure a team’s thinking. 

It has the end in mind, the intent of which is to articulate clear choices. It does this by ensuring you think through the most important dimensions of the asset/brand strategy: these include, a shared aspiration, a clear playing field (or focus for growth), an understanding of the sources of competitive advantage wherever you choose to play; the capabilities required to actually produce that advantage and the measurement system to make sure the strategy is working. NMBLR encourages regular conversations about the performance of the brand. 

Measurement of the strategy is enabled by asking you for the market data that will tell you whether your strategy is working or not and so makes it easy for the commercial leads to use strategy to inform every conversation they’re having with their cross-functional counterparts and country teams. Given that strategy is the most important set of things we’re doing to position the brand to win means we should be using these choices to frame up regular conversations about how that is going. What’s working? What isn’t? What do we see as early signals or new opportunities?

NMBLR ensures that activation of the strategy, and the investment in resources to support activation, is focused intensely on where these resources will make a significant difference and does not allow for resources to be wasted on anything else.

The platform allows for a core team, accountable for the creation and the activation of the strategy, to shepherd the process in this new hybrid world. The core team are the ones who need to be doing most of the ‘heavy lifting’, and part of this heavy lifting is figuring out who else to engage – often referred to as the extended team – and how and when to do so. NMBLR makes it easy to bring others in, to help the extended team to understand the direction of travel but also contribute to making the thinking better. To help the core team see what they might be missing, and ensure they are capturing and leveraging local market insights.

The NMBLR platform makes it challenging to ask for input if you’re not planning to use it – often the single most frustrating disempowering thing leaders do – i.e., pretend that people have a voice when they don’t! It does this by ensuring that the participants are involved in generating the choices which serve as the basis for the choices that are made. NMBLR works on the premise that people responsible for creating and activating strategy need to understand it and be engaged in it. Their contributions are captured using digital sticky notes and other mechanisms. The core team can reflect on these contributions and then make decisions. It allows for the rationale of any decision to be captured so that there is complete and utter transparency around the decisions made.

What makes NMBLR one of the most important tech innovations of 2022?

It inspires the development of game-changing, highly differentiated competitive

strategy by enabling the integration of insight with strategic decision-making and it promotes imagination by allowing the people critical to both creating and activating strategy to get involved at every step of the way. It encourages the generation of choice by making it easy for a diverse group of people to share their thinking about where to play and how to win there, and in the brainstorming of the ideas that could be invested in, to activate the strategy. It does all of this in one easy-to-use intuitive application.