Here's how you can navigate the risks of lacking a clear strategic direction in your startup.

Strategic ambiguity is not about SMART goals. It is important that both long-term and short-term initiatives and actions are guided by smart goals. Strategy, however, is the answer to the question. How will we approach a challenge in a manner that differentiates us and creates a competitive advantage.

Excellent point! Setting SMART goals is indeed crucial for strategic clarity. To further enhance goal setting, consider: - Alignment with Vision: Ensure goals directly contribute to your startup's overarching vision and mission. - Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Develop specific metrics to measure progress towards goals. - Regular Review: Schedule consistent check-ins to assess performance and make necessary adjustments. - Involve the Team: Encourage input from team members to foster ownership and buy-in.

In setting goals, review why you started your business, what you aimed to accomplish at that time. Possibly you discovered new opportunities that you thought had more promise than those you originally identified. Possibly you ran into sourcing, production or sourcing issues that side-tracked your mission. Market review could be an excellent to tool to help you focus, or maybe the market is still there but other tactical obstacles have diverted your attention away. Your goal-setting should help you understand which direction you want to prioritize. Achievability may your most important goal criteria. Once you've set the course, pursue that without distraction.

Learn as much as you can about your customer's customers. By helping them, your strategic direction and KPIs will become clearer. Never quit doing this...

One of the realizations of those who have achieved great success in business is arriving at the point where one realizes money, and access to it, can cover for a lot of mistakes in judgement. Entrepreneurs rarely assess risk adequately because by nature, entrepreneurs must project an element of invincibility in order to become entrepreneurs. That being said, underestimating the extra capital required to move through mistakes in assumptions and judgement is possibly the biggest risk in a start up. It often gets overlooked when founders try to meet their investor’s expectations by projecting invincibility. Investors know the challenges, so acknowledging a margin for error is not a disappointment to funders.

More important than assessing risks, is understanding the assumptions you're making about your business - and then validating those assumptions from direct feedback. Analysis is useful, but the businesses I see succeeding are those who listen to their customers and stakeholders regularly, and adapt their solutions to the address needs and problems that they discover.

If you’re going to seek out others opinions remember everyone has one. Founders are a different breed and should never underestimate a gut instinct over the opinion of someone who has never faced risking the same stakes. No path, even from those who have found success, will be the same as the path you are following. Ask questions that offer clear guidance and assess its value to your path.

I've found the key to getting good feedback is to be crystal clear about what you want to learn ahead of time. It helps you review your approach to notice where you might be introducing bias, or where you will be wasting your time with conversations that don't move you forward.

Even if your startup has a clear strategic direction, always be prepared to pivot. Unexpected opportunities present themselves uniquely and the bold CEO can seize on them and take off in a bold new direction. However, beware of shiny objects that distract hyou from the strategy.Th best wy to test the idea is to try and sell it to others. Thry will point out the flaws and your blind spots.

I worked for someone who was the master of the pivot. I realized he never lost track of the goal. When well laid plans went off track, as they always do, he refused to compromise on the goal even when the cost and risk was questionable. His steadfast commitment to “customer service” and “quality” overrode the cost and risk. Always sticking to the goal that inspired meeting the need should drive business decisions and not be compromised because pivoting requires letting something go. Be wrong now to be right later.

If you're an army of one, pivot away (at your own risk). Could be the market is signaling to you what it really needs versus what you thought it did. Maybe the whole strategy then needs to be rethought /re-calibrated. If you are a bigger group, a bad pivot could put you further down the cliff, and your are answerable to others - their input should be sought because they will bail in a heartbeat if they feel you mislead them... Ad astra per aspera.

People are naturally resilient and adapt quickly when then care about what they're doing and imagine a better way. Those ideas and that imagination comes from being aware of where you are and what's possible - one way to cultivate this is by having strong peer support networks where you can get feedback on what you're going through.