One of the most rewarding yet challenging tasks is setting a future strategic roadmap for what comes next in your sports organisation. Whether you choose a 5, 10 or 20 year or longer-term horizon, bringing together different perspectives and stakeholders is a powerful way to create a comprehensive strategic vision for the future.
Sports organisations are getting better and better at developing strategies matched to internal capabilities. However, our XV team has recently noticed a systemic gap in sports strategic planning: a lack of comprehensive consideration of macroeconomic trends and external risk factors. Many sports organisations continue to overlook the external key forces acting upon a sports organisation, despite the existential risks to their strategy, sustainability, reputation and wider ecosystem. At XV, we believe it is a critical navigational tool for sports organisations to think about their future and develop real-world plans on how to get there – especially with advancements in business model innovation, AI and digital technologies both locally and internationally.
Step 1 – Create an external risks framework
Two widely used strategic risk frameworks in sports organisations for such analysis are PESTLE and STEEPLE – which serve as invaluable tools for understanding the external environment and guiding strategic decisions. PESTLE is a framework that helps you examine the Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental factors that can affect your project or organisation. By scanning these factors, you can identify the opportunities and threats that can arise from them. For example, you can use PESTLE to assess how a change in government policy, consumer behaviour, innovation, regulation or climate can impact your market, operations or resources.
Sports technology scanning is an important focus for XV and can help set a long-term R&D agenda, identifying disruptive technologies that can shape the new sports economy – whether it is eCommerce, AI, streaming, digital collectibles, digital infrastructure or API integrations.
STEEPLE analysis is the same as a PESTLE analysis, except it also includes examining Ethical and Ecological factors. A subtle but important difference.
Step 2 – Collect evidence
XV recommends collecting the data and necessary information covering those external factors, trends and challenges. Whilst this can be time-consuming and difficult to interpret and measure, it is invaluable for c-suite and directors looking to make fact-based decisions. It is critical that all sports stakeholders properly understand the purpose of the PESTLE or STEEPLE assessment and implications. Measurement is critical.
Step 3 – Quantify & mitigate uncertainty in sport
XV encourages clients to quantify the significance and potential impact of external risk factors that can challenge their sports organisation. Within XV's realm of sports digital and technology expertise:
· What are the key risks of advanced technologies in sports?
· What actions should you implement to mitigate or address these risks?
· What are the key opportunities and actions related to advanced technologies in sports?
Begin by creating a long list of external factors and scoring them based on their likelihood and significance of impact (e.g. high, medium, low).
Careful planning is a critical part of long-term success. Macroeconomic and external risk planning can be extremely useful and relevant to larger and more complex sports organisations, but even for very small sports organisations a well prepared strategic plan can identify one or two really significant issues that might otherwise be missed.
