Regardless of the type of strategy that you are developing; capture, corporate, change, product, etc., it is critical that you refine the strategy down to its essential elements. Complexity does you no favours. It makes the strategy hard to understand and easy to attack or avoid. Buy-in occurs when the fundamental tenants of your strategy are easily understood, easily remembered and easily put into practice.
- Keep your plan as simple as possible
- Make the plan easy to understand
- Create a plan that produces clear concise actionable strategies
- Use tools to support the development of the plan
- Do not make the plan a slave of complex methodologies
One approach to kick starting a strategy is to start by posing six questions about your business or team. These are frequently cited on the web and have been kicking around for a while – we like them and find them extremely useful when strategies stall;
- Why do we exist?
- Where are we going?
- How will we conduct ourselves?
- What will we do?
- How will we measure our success?
- What improvements or changes must we make?
This is a good opening session activity for a facilitated group session.
- Encourage a discussion on the contents of each question response
- Facilitate responses to each in turn, collapsing them into a small number of like responses
- Consider having the group rank responses
- Link Q1 and Q2 to the Vision and Mission statements for the company – do they fit / correlate?
Revisit these questions often. The answers will influence how you write Mission and Vision Statements.
The Six Questions
Let’s take a look at each of the six questions:
1. Why do we exist?
This is your reason for being in business. Closely linked to your Mission statement. This should also be a key value proposition as seen from the perspective of your core customers – why do they need you?
2. Where are we going?
This is you longer term view of how the business will evolve. Closely linked to your Vision statement. It can be expressed in the form of market share, market space, changes, financials, market perceptions, technologies and products, etc.
3. How will we conduct ourselves?
There are a number of ways to approach this question:
- What are your core values?
- What role will you take vis-à-vis your customers and suppliers?
- Will you be very public or discreetly in the background?
- Will you be a prime contractor for a product or service or are you a supplier?
- Niche or broad based?
- What is you customer relationship model or focus?
- Is there a specific set of rules, legislation or business association guidelines that you will follow?
4. What will we do?
Answers can be specific to markets or products, growth targets, performance relative to competitors, new products and services, improved scores on performance or engagement metrics, etc. Try to avoid generic answers such as grow revenues or maximize profits.
5. How will we measure our success?
Identify specific measures against each of the answers to question 4. Must be measurable.
- Financials in $ or %
- Markets in terms of geographical area, demographic, technology, product
- Performance in terms of scores, rankings, efficiency, quality, etc.
- Include timeframes as often as possible
6. What improvements or changes must we make?
Identify specific operational level initiatives against each of the answers to question 4. Must be specific. Attempt to set at least one near term achievable action/goal for each area. Attempt to define budgets, timelines and actionees for each.
Try these questions next time you have a facilitated session. Pull them out when you review a corporate plan or when you are doing a bid/no-bid on a major pursuit. Use them to provide some grounding on who you are. Do this exercises before developing Vision and Mission Statements.
Keep it simple.