What We Talk About When We Talk About Strategy
Sharehold’s Language for Innovation, Community Design & Organizational Design
What’s all of this strategy mumbo jumbo? I ask that question at times too. When it comes to talking about strategy, transformation, and design, it’s easy to get lost in buzzwords. Having a shared vocabulary not only makes it easier to progress together but adds clarity around your intended output.
Transformation requires both imagining and actualizing a new future. But when you’re close to a challenge or in it, it’s easy to lose sight of the outcome. We become so focused on perfecting the vision that we can easily get stuck discussing the minutia and make little progress. Or, we may become so consumed by action that we mistake our list of to-dos and tactics for a plan.
Like many founders and many of Sharehold’s clients in the thick of community and organizational transformation, I’m impatient. I know where I want to go and I want to immediately carve a path to get there.
Superpowers, a tool created by SYPartners to learn how to optimize your work, describes this inclination as Experimentation, a prototype mindset. My other superpower is Cultural Compass, an intuitive understanding of an organization’s DNA and the path forward. While Experimentation is about action, learning, and iteration, Cultural Compass is about vision and truth (or the “right” answer). Sometimes, these strengths seem to conflict with one another.
Early in my journey as a community and organizational designer, I had to quickly learn how to connect my two somewhat-opposing strengths with strategy. Strategy is the link between vision and action. As Vince Law puts it:
“Strategy… bridges the gap between what you aspire to be and what you are doing.”
If the mission says what your organization does and the vision says why, the strategy explains how, in the broadest of strokes. The strategy provides guidance for action and the execution of the vision.
Furthermore, to be most effective in my work, I needed to learn how to speak with nuance about where each of these efforts began and ended. For the sake of clarity during conversations around transformation and strategy with clients, my team and I find it helpful to define common terms. Here is some of our team’s commonly used strategic language.
Is there anything missing? Something that you recommend we add? Let us know. We’ll continue to update this list of lingo.
At a High Level:
Transformation: Transformation is the process of fundamental change from one state of being to another at the core of an organization or community. Becoming something new is a significant undertaking that occurs over time. Transformation often encompasses big ideas, such as the transformation from a retail-first to direct-to-consumer business or, even more broadly, the transformation to a digital-first business. The majority of Sharehold’s clients come to us in the process of transformation.
Innovation: Innovation has two meanings. Like transformation, innovation is a process of change, though it’s particular to the process of improving something specific. Innovation is also the outcome, output, or artifact of the process of change: the new idea, product, method, etc. Innovations might be entirely new inventions or an upgrade to an existing solution. Transformations may contain or be fueled by several innovations.
Design Thinking: Design thinking is a process and methodology for creative problem solving that brings users into the research, problem solving, and solution building involved in innovation and transformation. Design thinking was popularized by IDEO and Stanford’s d.school, and you can read more about it here. Sharehold practices design thinking in our transformation and innovation work.
Design: Design is a very general term with two meanings. It is the process of planning or problem solving for a specific outcome, output, or artifact within constraints. Design is also the experience of the final outcome whether that is the look and feel of a brand identity, a user interface, or something more abstract, such as a system, community, or organization. There are many types of design and designers, and the word “design” is often qualified to describe its output: community design, organizational design, user experience design, brand design, print design, etc.
Community Design: Community design is design thinking applied to community building. It is the methodological and iterative process of defining a community strategy and building the experience of a community using design thinking. Elements of community design might include membership strategy, community personas, community journeys, commitment curves, engagement strategy, program design, and more. Community design can serve as the embodiment of an organization’s or community’s transformation.
Organizational Design: Organizational design is design thinking applied to teams and organizational development. It is the methodological process of defining an organizational strategy and building the experience of a team using design thinking. Elements of organizational design might include: change management strategy, behaviors, and rituals, culture, training, collaboration strategies, or even strategic plans. Organizational design can serve as an embodiment of an organization’s transformation.
Note: Community Design and Organizational Design can be quite similar. A team within an organization can function as a type of community.
The Details:
Innovation and transformation don’t just happen. Community and organizational design and their strategies are only as useful as they are executable. Here’s what you need to bring your wildest ideas to life:
Vision: A vision expresses an organization, project, or community’s desired or aspirational future state. It answers the question, “why?”
Mission: A mission describes what an organization, team, community, or program is currently doing to bring its vision to fruition. It answers the questions, “what?” and “for whom?”
Strategy: Strategy defines how the mission will be accomplished. It answers the question, “how?” It’s common for multiple strategies to support a single mission and vision. A strategy may include multiple programs, tactics, and goals.
Goal: Whether you’re using KPIs or another goal-setting methodology, a goal defines what success looks like for a given strategy. Goals are often defined on the strategy level and then laddered down into supporting goals for programs, tactics, and channels.
Tactic: A tactic is a specific activity conducted in support of a strategy. A tactic may or may not be organized into a program. Note: This is often where efforts fall short. Tactics are often mistaken for strategies.
Program: A program is a collection of formalized, interrelated activities or tactics undertaken with a shared goal. Programs serve to support a strategy. Examples of programs include an ambassador program, conference, a suite of training, etc.
Roadmap: A roadmap is a plan of execution that includes a detailed approach and timeline of the sequence of tactics and rollout of programs in order to reach the strategic goals.
Tool: The tool is the specific means by which you’ll deliver a given tactic. Often, tools are defined by channels or platforms. For example, push notifications, Facebook Groups, or Slack.
Note: Tools are also sometimes mistaken for strategies.
What exactly your plans include is unique to what you’ve set out to accomplish and your particular design constraints (time, budget, capacity, etc.). However, you only need to look but so far ahead. When we find ourselves stuck on impossible-to-answer questions or in a debate over the odds of outcomes we can’t quite predict, it’s helpful to remember that the best-laid plans must allow for uncertainty. Sometimes, the best plan is to move in one direction over another, define strategies for answering big questions, and refining from there.
Towards progress!
