You may have a Powerpoint file entitled “Strategy”, but are you sure it’s really a strategy? Before rolling it out, make sure it passes this checklist:
- Does it accurately and honestly detail your company’s current position and condition in the market?
- Does it describe an ambitious, yet achievable, future position and condition?
- Is this future position and condition described by both concrete numbers and inspiring prose?
- Does it recognize foreseeable obstacles, and make room for the possibility of unforeseen obstacles?
- Does it spell out key priorities so that teams can make better, faster decisions without having to run everything up the matrix?
If you answer “no” to any one of these questions, start over.
If everything checks out, then congratulations! You have a strategy. Now what?
- Share with department leads. Consider your strategy a brief for each team, not just the executive team. Each department head should work with their team to develop tactical scenarios (i.e., possible ways to make forward progress), including key activities, dependencies, assumptions, measures, and resource needs. Give them a simple template that they can use to describe each scenario. This step should take no more than two to three weeks.
- Find synergy. Convene a cross-functional planning team (with both a mix of junior and senior leaders) to review each team’s scenarios. Give the team the task of finding commonalities between each department’s work. In other words, bring these action plans into harmony and help knit the groups closer together. This will likely require a creative leap, and the team may very likely develop a new tactical plan across the company that is informed by each department’s initial plans. This step should take no more than two weeks.
- Critique. Bring the planning team’s work back to each department to raise objections (e.g. ‘This is unsafe for the business to try.’) and develop contingency plans (e.g. ‘What happens if commodity prices spike?’). This step should take no more than one week — don’t worry if you can’t generate every possible future disruption.
- Schedule. Plot the calendar: take over a wall in the office (or use a Google Sheet) and put key deliverables and milestones, by team, in order. Don’t use anything that can’t be erased or moved — the calendar must be malleable. Get this step done in a week if you can.
- Act. Put your hard work into practice. Get the organization on a shared metrics dashboard and transparent project tracker (Pro-Tip: start with Google Sheets before moving on to something more sophisticated). Make it the job of every employee to raise a red flag when they’re feeling stuck or when work, overall, is obstructed. Each team, at every level, should check in on actual progress versus the ideal plan each week. Shift milestones when you need to and then, as a team, discuss the implications and share with other teams.
- Speed up and streamline. As your market becomes more frenetic and uncertain, your ability to plan, execute, and respond must become more adept.
- Reduce the amount of paperwork and ceremony (start by banning Powerpoint).
- Work in collaborative document formats (Google Sheets over static Excel files).
- Invest in a self-serve data platform so any team can track market and customer feedback.
- Plan in shorter cycles (a year becomes a quarter becomes a month becomes a week).
All of these things can make your team far more nimble, but get the basics right, first. So many consultants and business books focus on the tactics of speeding up an organization without putting the essential building blocks in place.
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