Strategic Challenge Map

How to run it

1. Write the strategic context in a paragraph: what the organisation has to keep running, what it is trying to change, and the pressure it is under while doing both. Then name what you must not position against: the people, systems and decisions that are off the table.
2. Work four categories in turn: technological, regulatory, competitive and commercial, organisational. Under each, list the challenges, at least two, stated as things that are the case rather than things you dislike.
3. For every challenge, cite the evidence that it is real and the date that evidence carries. A challenge with no citation is an opinion.
4. For every challenge, say whether your proposal removes it, reduces it, or does not touch it, and justify the verdict mechanically: what changes that makes this stop being true. Then name the proof a sceptical expert would insist on.
5. Rank the challenges by urgency, driven by deadlines and consequences. Everything critical means nothing is. For each, judge how well a lightweight intervention fits versus changing something at the core.
6. Define the proof: the metrics that would satisfy the sceptic, each stated so two people would collect the same number, sorted by the kind of doubt it answers, with the artefact you would put in front of them.

Where it falls down. Without the evidence step it becomes a list of fears.