Strategy Mapping

Strategy Mapping – Defined

Strategy mapping is a graphical representation of key strategic goals, showing the logic that connects them together. It can be used to systematically connect the strategic aspirations of senior leadership to the enabling actions of front-line teams. A strategy map (the output from strategy mapping) is an interconnected cascade of goals, connected together using why-how logic – see the Cascade Model of Strategy.

Strategy Mapping – Our services

Goal Atlas works with you to build strategy maps that show how your strategic actions connect, the reasons why these actions are important and where there may be gaps. We help you identify the difference between change-making strategy and ‘business-as-usual’ and how KPIs can ladder up to strategic success. Our mapping promotes ownership of strategic goals to ensure your strategy is adopted by those tasked with bringing it about, and provides alignment across different strategies within a single organisation. Our strategy mapping consultancy services are supported by our best-practice models and frameworks, and by our unique strategy mapping software. We also offer a half-day strategy mapping workshop giving you hands-on experience applying strategy mapping to your own strategy challenges.

Watch our introductory video on Strategy Mapping:

This three and a half minute video:

• explains the strategic challenges that strategy mapping helps resolve
• gives a simple lifestyle example (the whys and hows of running a marathon) to show how strategy mapping works
• moves on to a more business-focused example (increasing revenue from online sales)
• and then shows how strategy mapping can interconnect related business goals

What strategy mapping is used for:

Strategy adoption The most obvious use of strategy mapping is to enable strategy adoption across your organisation. Working down from the top of a strategy map, you start with the highest-level strategic goals and need to decide how best to achieve them. A strategy map helps you drill down from these top-level goals by asking a repeated series of ‘how?’ questions. With each ‘how?’ you ask, you will move further from actions undertaken by senior leadership and closer to actions taken by front-line teams.

Validating the strategy you’re developing Less obvious but just as valuable is to use strategy mapping as a technique for systematically validating your strategy, as you develop it.  Essentially this involves asking, for each goal on the map, 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. Learn more about this – it’s called the SaNity Check Model.

Designing effective KPIs for tracking strategy Connected goals together by means of why-how logic produces a cascade of causation. Completing all the goals at the bottom of the strategy map will cause the goals higher up to be completed, and so on to the top of the map. This connectivity makes it a lot easier to define KPIs to track progress towards strategic success. Measurements of success at the bottom of the map aggregate up to measurements of success higher up the map.

Innovation and risk management  Many other great things that can be achieved with strategy mapping. For example, pick any goal on the map and you can ask ‘how else could this goal be achieved?’ or ‘what other purpose could this goal serve?’ in order to be more systematic in screening innovation opportunities. Or Work through the entire strategy map and ask ‘what would happen if this goal could not be achieved?’ – this gives a structured approach to strategic risk management.

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