A pathway from vision to action.
These days just about every organised group of people has a Vision of some kind; an audacious and compelling expression of the future they want to create. And every one of those people has a To Do list of some type; a specific set of KPIs they are expected to deliver by a predetermined time.
But almost no-one seems to have the bridge that joins the two; where there should be a clear path from The Work We Do and The World We Are Making there is only a yawning chasm of nothing.
With no apparent road to the future, most of us just shrug our shoulders and turn our attention to our immediate duties. Which is a shame, because then we’re less likely to see the meaning of our work, less motivated to give it our all.
That’s why we believe strategy is so important; it fills the gap between How We Work and Why That Matters, the Job and the Vision. Which is what all organisational strategies attempt to do… but we think they’re doing it the wrong way around.
Changing The Process
Everyone’s doing it backwards
The standard approach is to start with the status quo and project forward a few years, usually no more than the length of a political cycle, which might tell us something. Then everyone looks at their current products and services, processes and systems and wonders how different they might evolve over that time period and the answer is almost always ‘not much’. So the strategy ends up being a slight tweak on Business As Usual.
That doesn’t fill the gap. At best, it builds a little look-out on the edge of the cliff.
Be ready for course corrections
Think of strategy like the navigation app in your smart device. It knows where you are. You tell it where you want to go. It plots multiple courses between those two points and suggests the fastest, smoothest path to take. But notice it does one other, clever thing – as you travel along, it alerts you to barriers and obstacles and – this is important – reroutes you to find an alternate path to your destination. If done right, a strategy should be capable of the same kind of course correction.
But a great vision should never need revisiting – change the path, not the destination.