Planning

            The quality of the plan phase will show as we start to deliver. You are now at start of the year when the winning strategy is to be implemented. Form your intensive planning, you should have a clear, stretching, inspiring long range plan and a sharply focused on the plan. These should by now have been fully shared and explained so that everyone in and around your unit understands them. They should be visible – prominently displayed to remind everyone what is important. You should have one complete business plan which incorporates these specific plans and integrates all key strategic information from market knowledge through to internal budgets. In addition you should have a linked set of plans which detail the means of delivery of the strategy and which affect everyone in your unit (directly for managers, indirectly for others).These should be accessible by all. Finally you should have a clear allocation of who is expected to do what. With such powerful preparation, you are ready to mobilize your teams into improvement action. This is what we have built up to. Planned well, it can go like a train from now on if not, it could feel more like herding cats.            

Process Or Function

            There is one more big issue to consider before we leave the PLAN phase. The chances are your business is organized along functional lines. This is largely a historical convenience built around command and control. You know your business doesn’t really work like that – with neat pockets of expertise making their individual contribution. Business is a flow of value creation. The more directly the flow to the customer, the greater is the value generated. The process thinking fits the reality of business better and that functional boxes inhibit and disjoint the flow. For winning strategies, there is little doubt that business processes are the key to delivery. An important step in the THINK phase is to test the key goals against the main processes in the business and search for the connections. All the support systems are operated functionally, then a big move to process deployment might be too counter-cultural and thus ineffective. To deploy by process, you must at least have defined and mapped the key processes at a high level and ideally at sub-process level.

Linking It All Together

            That your winning strategy will be as much about how it is done as what it contains. Your system can also help change how you and your colleagues manage and work. Intriguingly, how you plan, the way in which you do it, could be a strategic advantage too. In other words, your winning system can have a profound effect on the way your organization works and, provided you know what you want, can accelerate it towards the winning culture you seek. Openness, visibility, challenge, trust, integrity are all values which your winning system can emphasize and demonstrate. They have strategic value in their own right. Equally determination, commitment, measurement, action-orientation, feedback, data-driven, speed… these too have broader business benefits. Use your winning system to help people become familiar with this mode of work. Let them see it in action, to feel it for themselves and become part of that way of working. You can create quite a cultural shift without anyone really noticing things are changing. It’s probably for this effect on culture that policy deployment has become a natural extension of those companies with total quality.

Hard Catchball

            Catchball sounds lights and fun. Well, humor and fun is a good way of breaking down barriers and opening up channels. But catchball has a hard side too. When you toss the ball to a colleague you are asking for a considered response. Mostly you are asking them how this winning concept can be delivered in practice. If they are unsure about what it is or whether it is right they can throw it back. Or they can throw it to another colleague to bring in more expertise. But this is not banter or intellectual chat, it is work. The issue must be worked on seriously and urgently. The organizational trick is to initiate intensity of thought simultaneously across the business. Think about it – if you do it sequentially it will take forever. This is where the system plays another vital role. A key element is documentation. Clear documents create a standard means of communication between people working on different but strategically related tasks; a language with which they can converse strategically. It forces managers to describe what they are planning succinctly and unambiguously.

Presenting The Strategy

            Now have a balanced business strategy and a framework with which to describe the future direction of your unit. Look at it as a whole. Work on its presentation. We have nearly finished the THINK phase and will go straight into planning .This planning will probably be unlike any you have done before. It will involve more people, it will be intensive, it will all happen quickly. You will need to react and adjust, building on the views raised, refining the thinking. You want to feel confident that this is your best shot before that happens. Format is important. The idea is to present all the winning concepts and key supporting data on one presentation sheet – a strategic summary. This can be extremely valuable for putting over the winning message succinctly and directly. Typical content is a vision statement, mission, values and the goals from balanced business strategy. In addition, it is good practice to go a step further and show the links between the big picture and how it is going to be done.

Breakthrough

            The strategically significant in which case it is useful to have identified them as such. Stop wasting more time on them. Some others are important if not vital. These can be delegated. They may be picked up as a critical at a lower level or you can make sure they are managed through conventional means. But don’t clog your winning system up with them – keep that for vital winners. While you are engaged in his goal culling, look out for something else. Your surviving goals will become the vital few – those giving radical evolution. A breakthrough goal requires more resource, is more disruptive, and is less certain. It is a big risk and yet a potential big gain. For this reason avoid tackling more than one breakthrough goal per team at any one time, at least until you have perfected your system. Identify the breakthrough goals on your balanced strategy – they need extra attention. Vital few and breakthrough goals are not mutually exclusive categories. Breakthrough goals are part of the vital few which will drive the winning strategy.