Is your strategy clear?

Your strategy is clearly-defined if it:

• Defines a worthwhile purpose that the strategy seeks to serve AND
• Defines a destination that, once reached, enables that strategic purpose to be served AND
• Defines a handful of core methods which will change the organisation sufficiently for the strategy destination to be reached.

Discover below:

• Key advice and actions to ensure your strategy is clearly-defined.
• Questions to ask to prompt deeper conversations on the clarity of your strategy across your organisation.
• Strategy models relating to clarity.
• Strategy workshops.
• Links to our full range of resources, including ‘The Strategy Manual’, our Strategy Glossary and links to articles and posts by Mike Baxter.
• We also offer consultancy and advice on all aspects of strategy.

Key advice and actions

Your strategy will be clear if it has a clear purpose, clear value if successful, a clear destination and clear core methods to reach that destination.

1. Defining purpose, value, destination and core methods for strategy

Strategy is the inter-connection between a destination, the value of getting there and the handful of core methods by which you get there. This can be represented using the Cascade Model of Strategy which demonstrates that strategy defines your desired future state (your destination), identifies the benefits of achieving it (your purpose, i.e. the strategic value of reaching your destination) and proposes the core methods needed to get there.

Value refers to a value exchange between you and the world. What do you offer to the world and what do you get in exchange? Strategic value will mean different things to different organisations, including “purpose beyond profits”, and to different stakeholders within that organisation and its community. To define what strategic success will look like, it is important to be clear about the value that your strategy seeks to deliver. The Value Model of Strategy forces you to think deeply about the value offered by your organisation and what value you get back in return. It allows you to explore how efficient and effective you are at delivering that value, and what this means in terms of the impact you have, and the value you retain in your organisation.

2. Strategy mapping

Strategy mapping is the technique that can be used to build the cascade of connections between strategic goals that is required to bring about strategic success. A strategy map presents strategic goals in a prioritised, validated logic diagram that can be used to manage and track the performance of strategy, assess strategic risks and ensure systematic strategy adoption, whilst helping to identify missing goals and opportunities for innovation. It connects the strategic aspirations of senior leadership to the tactical actions of front-line teams. This joined-up strategic thinking maintains strategic coherence and enables strategists to innovate by asking, ‘How else can we achieve this strategic purpose?’ and ‘What other purpose does this action serve?’.

Each goal in a strategy map has a purpose (or purposes) that identify the value in achieving it, and a number of methods required to achieve it. The Sanity Check Model is used to validate a strategy map by considering, for each goal, whether the purposes identified for that goal are sufficient and necessary to justify it, and then whether the methods identified are sufficient and necessary to achieve it.

Strategy maps ensure that the sum of all the small front-line changes add up to strategic success. This gives everyone a clear sense of strategic purpose by seeing how their individual achievements connect directly to overall strategic success. Strategy maps also facilitate strategy adoption and support strategic planning by clarifying goal ownership and facilitating the meaningful measurement and prioritisation of strategic actions.

To ensure strategic success, targets must be set and tracked so that they aggregate up to meaningful KPIs. Strategic KPIs can be seen to serve two distinct purposes:

1. Success-defining KPIs are ultimate indicators of strategy success. They enable you to decide if strategy success has been achieved and, if not, whether it is still wise to persist in pursuing it.
2. Critical-to-success KPIs track the progress of goals upon which the success of the strategy depends. They enable you to decide whether plans need to be adjusted to improve outcomes, or whether a different way of achieving the same outcome needs to be found.

Let’s talk about… clearly-defined strategy and strategy mapping

Use these questions to prompt deeper conversations* on clearly-defined strategy and strategy mapping across your organisation:

• How well can you connect your strategic goals with the changes that will achieve them? Do front-line teams have clear line-of-sight between their actions and their strategic impact?
• Is your strategy systematic and logical enough right now? How well would your key strategic goals connect using why-how logic? How else can you achieve each goal? Do your goals serve multiple purposes?
• How ‘joined-up’ are the strategies for different functional areas of your organisation? Do they lead to the organisation’s overall strategic goals?
• Do you have clear methods for delegating and measuring the progress of strategic goals?

*Download a pdf with some helpful rules (suggested by Ed Morrison and colleagues in their book Strategic Doing) to ensure successful conversations about strategy.

Want to know more?

Discover below the strategy models and workshops that can improve the clarity of your strategy, or see our full range of resources, including ‘The Strategy Manual‘, our Strategy Glossary and links to articles and posts by Mike Baxter.

We also offer consultancy and advice on all aspects of strategy – find out more about how we work.

Our strategy models and workshops are colour-coded  under the following themes:

Strategy models to bring clarity to your strategy:

Strategy workshops to bring clarity to your strategy:

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