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Distillations in this newsletter: Strategy mapping in practice. Published examples of Strategy Scoping documents.
STRATEGY DISTILLED:
A monthly concoction of insight, learning and things you might have missed for anyone who works on strategy, works with strategy or just loves strategy.
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This month …
- Strategy mapping in practice
- A strategy snippet you might have missed: Published examples of Strategy Scoping documents.
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Strategy mapping in practice
I’m just about to enter the final month of an amazing 18-month project with a wonderful client. In it, I’ve have been helping facilitate:
- Initial scoping of the strategy;
- Discovery and strategy development;
- Drafting of the strategy;
- Refinement and ratification of the strategy;
- Initial development of the strategic plan.
The outcome is a 10-year strategy for an organisation of a few thousand staff. There were many remarkable things about this project but the one that’s most relevant to today’s topic is that I used strategy mapping at every step of the way (if you are new to strategy mapping, I’m talking about why:how logic mapping, not Balanced Scorecard Mapping or Wardle Mapping). So, today, I want to say a bit about why this worked really well and then leave you with a list of ways you should think about using mapping throughout the whole strategy development and strategic planning process in your own strategy work. To help you understand how this can be done, below is a summary of how I applied strategy mapping to the stages in my recent consultancy project:
- Initial scoping of the strategy. Right at the start of the project, I used strategy mapping to analyse the client’s current strategy. This proved a great way to look objectively at a strategy everyone was already familiar with and force them to question whether it was actually as logical and coherent as it first appeared when simply reading it. From the discussions that this provoked, we produced a list of good strategy criteria to check that our new strategy, once written, was good enough.
- Discovery and strategy development. This phase of the process was undertaken with several different members of the leadership team, who had taken on the role of strategy theme leads. Strategy mapping was a brilliant tool for the fast-loop iteration of strategy ideas. It typically went like this. I’d have a meeting with a senior leader, where, after reviewing whatever data analysis had been done so far, I’d invite them to talk about the strategic challenges they saw and any ideas they had on how the strategy might respond to those challenges. I could let them speak in their own words, structuring their thoughts in whatever way came naturally to them and allowing them to digress, contextualise and respond to my questions as part of conversational flow. As they did so, I would start identifying the why:how logic within the story they were telling. At appropriate moments, I would ask them to confirm or challenge the logical connections that I was piecing together. It was always, however, my job to be the ‘logician’ and their job to tell me about the facts, explain their conjectures and describe their aspirations. After our conversations, over the next day or two, I would produce a strategy map that I felt reflected the key issues from our conversation and send it to them for comment. “Is this what you meant?”, was my usual question. They’d comment on the map and, in response to their comments, I would update the strategy map until we were both happy with it. Then we could send it out to members of their own team or to other strategy theme leads for their comments. In this way, the strategy maps evolved in a way that captured each step in the process, recording subtle changes in strategic thinking as different people offered their input. On more than one occasion, I was asked where a particular idea came from and could pinpoint its first appearance in a strategy map to a particular conversation on a specific day.
- Drafting of the strategy. After you’ve been working on a strategy map for a while, you start to notice that its internal coherence becomes more striking. More and more of the questions people ask about the strategy already have an answer somewhere within the strategy map. It starts to become an embodiment of the wisdom of crowds. This is a great time to start drafting the strategy. A draft, once extracted from the strategy map forms the basis for engagement and consultation with stakeholders. This, then, expands circle of influence shaping the strategy.
- Refinement and ratification of the strategy. Informed by stakeholder inputs, the strategy begins its home run to becoming a final strategy document. This usually requires another round of input from strategy theme leads and possibly a final round of consultation on a near-final draft of the strategy. Where strategy mapping plays a key role at this stage of the process is strategy validation. Does the strategy have internal consistency? Do the higher goals justify the lower goals and do the lower goals provide methods of achieving the higher goals (this is done by means of a SaNity Check)? Validation doesn’t just improve the strategy it also gives senior leaders and Board members the confidence to ratify the final strategy and approve it for launch.
- Initial development of the strategic plan. You’ve probably heard the expression that ‘approving a new strategy is when the hard work begins’. Starting work on a strategic plan was still hard work in this project but strategy mapping made it a lot more grounded and a more systematic process. Having a fully mapped version of the final strategy document was a great place to start. This gives you a discrete number of strategic goals to plan to achieve. Strategic planning elaborates the methods by which these strategic goals will be tackled, which requires drilling down into the methods for achieving strategic success. By the end of this process, having a fully mapped strategic plan turned out to be a truly wonderful thing. Each goal in a mapped strategic plan can have a goal owner, targets and deadlines, resources, rules, policies or standards. With such attributes, the strategic plan can transform into roadmaps, critical path analyses, swim-lanes, Gannt charts or whatever planning tools your organisation prefers.
So, it really was end-to-end strategy mapping and, whilst every aspect of the process is still fresh in my mind, here are my recommendations for how you should think about using strategy mapping in your own work.
- Analysis of existing strategies. Strategy maps can be created from existing strategies. This could be your own current strategy, allowing in-depth analysis of current strategic goals and the actions being taken to achieve them. Or it could be your competitor’s strategies, if you have access to any of them. What do you see as their strengths and weaknesses? Where are they distinctive? Where are the gaps that you could create your own distinctiveness and harvest the value from doing so?
- Communication about strategy. Conversations about strategy can be captured in a strategy map to reflect key ideas about how strategic goals will be met, and the purposes they serve. These strategy maps can then be shared with individuals and teams and adapted to record subtle changes in strategic thinking as different people offer their input into the maps.
- Validation of strategy. The logic and completeness of strategy can be sense-checked by conducting a ‘SaNity’ Check. Using this simplest possible strategy map (see Fig. 1), SaNity-checking asks:
- Whether ‘B’ and ‘C’ together are both Sufficient and Necessary to achieve ‘A’
- …if not, what is missing / what does not need to be there?
Figure 1. How to read a strategy map
- Innovation. New ideas about strategy can be generated by challenging an existing strategy map:
Using Figure 1, how else can you achieve goal ‘A’ other than through goals ‘B’ and ‘C”?
What other purpose, other than goal ‘A’, could goals ‘B’ and/or ‘C’ serve? - Delegation & accountability. Each goal in a strategy map should have a ‘goal owner’ who is accountable for achieving that goal and its children, unless and until they delegate those goals to others.
- Measurement & governance. KPIs / KPTs can be attached to individual goals. These can aggregate up towards measurement of another strategic goal higher up in the map. This shows the interdependence of achievement of connected goals and allows progress and impact of the strategy to be tracked and reported.
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A strategy snippet you might have missed
Published examples of Strategy Scoping documents
In February 2023’s Strategy Distilled, I explained the case for strategy scoping. Here is how I began …
Strategy scoping writes the brief for strategy development. It ensures the strategy you develop is rigorous and fit-for-purpose, setting both signposts and milestones for strategy development. Strategy Scoping has three main objectives:
- To enable initial decisions to be made about what purpose your forthcoming strategy is intended to serve, what, broadly, is in- and out-of-scope and to assemble a body of evidence to explain and justify those decisions.
- To propose what needs to be done during strategy development, who needs to be involved and how key strategic decisions are going to be made, validated and ratified.
- To define a set of criteria by which the strategy, once produced, will be deemed to be fit-for-purpose.
It is, however, hard to find published examples of strategy scoping documents, partly because they are often called something other than ‘strategy scoping document’. But as a result of a spoonful of effort and a heaped spoonful of luck, I’ve found two.
The first is the Sussex Partnership NHS Trust, who have published a document entitled ‘Developing our organisational strategy for 2025-2030’ that opens with these words:
“We are pleased to share that during 2024 we will be working in partnership with people who use our services, our staff and our partner organisations to develop our new organisational strategy. This is an opportunity to bring together people’s experience, expertise and ideas to help shape our future plans. Our new strategy will describe our vision and ambition and define how we will deliver high quality, specialist NHS mental health, learning disability and neurodiversity services for patients, families and carers.”
Secondly, Medact, a charity that supports health professionals from all disciplines to work together towards a world in which everyone can truly achieve and exercise their human right to health, recently published a blog post ‘Working towards our new Organisational Strategy’. In it they say:
“Medact’s Organisational Strategy sets out our approach to winning our vision of a better world, including our theory of change that guides our movement in this mission whilst embracing our collective vision and values. We are currently in the process of developing our next Organisational Strategy. As a member-led organisation, we have and will continue to prioritise time for deep discussion and detailed input to this process from our members, supporters, local and issue groups, individuals involved in our work, the board of Trustees, and the staff team.”
Whenever you are planning to conduct a strategy scoping exercise within your own organisation, or for a client, have a look at these for inspiration.
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We, at Goal Atlas, work as strategy facilitators. We provide frameworks, tools and hands-on advice and guidance to support your leaders, managers and front-line teams to develop the strategy that works for you.
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