IIDC Strategic Tool
The IIDC tool moves a team through four stages, Identify where you stand, Investigate what's driving it, Develop the response, Communicate it, so strategy work doesn't skip straight from a hunch to an announcement.
Four stages sit in a straight line, each one leading directly into the next with nothing skipped.
Reach for this when…
- A strategy gets announced before anyone investigated why the current position is what it is.
- Plans exist but nobody below the top team can repeat them.
- You need a simple shared sequence for a team that's never run a proper strategy process.
How to run it
- Identify: state where you are now and where you want to be.
- Investigate: dig into the internal and external factors driving the gap.
- Develop: build the initiatives and actions that close it.
- Communicate: take the strategy to everyone who has to carry it, not just to those who approve it.
A worked example
Situation. Litia Waqa runs Suva Physio Clinic, a physiotherapy clinic in Suva, Fiji, booked solid on paper but losing money, with three partners guessing at the cause separately.
Applied. She ran the sequence over three weeks: identified the real gap as revenue per session rather than bookings, investigated and found late cancellations went unbilled, developed a cancellation-fee policy with automatic reminders, then communicated the change to reception and therapists before it went live, not after.
Result. Unbilled cancellations dropped and revenue per session rose within two months, and the change landed without pushback because reception heard the reasoning before patients started asking questions.
The catch
It's a sequence, not a source of insight, so a weak Investigate stage, asking the wrong questions, still produces a confident-looking Develop stage. Communicate sits last on the list, which tempts teams to treat it as a one-off memo at the end rather than a loop that should feed straight back into Identify.
If Communicate is the first time the people who have to run the plan hear about it, you've done a launch, not the IIDC process.