Strategy Development Campaign

Strategy development is not the same thing as strategic planning.

Good strategies result from approaches that are: 

• Facilitated or somewhat structured, 
• Curious and inquisitive, and 
• Highly collaborative

In today’s climate, leaders struggle to carve out time for strategic dialog. With operations to run, leaders to develop, and fires to fight, where is this time for contemplation supposed to come from? 

While we can’t answer that question for you, we can offer some help in how to get the most of your time spent.

How much time should leaders set aside for strategic dialog? In his book, “One-Hour Strategy”, Jeroen Kraaijenbrink introduces the “one-hour rule”:

• Executives should spend one hour per day on strategy
• Managers should spend one hour per week on strategy
• Employees should spend one hour per month on strategy

Let’s say you commit to following this rule. You and your leadership team schedule a dedicated one-week block each quarter (i.e. bundling most of your “1 hour per day” time from the 60 working days in the quarter), to develop (and refine) your strategy.

How should you drive the campaign? That is, how can you organize your thinking, such that it produces good outcomes every time: namely, a high-quality set of strategic decisions?

We offer three building blocks to help you form a way of working for strategy development. To illustrate, we will apply some popular ideas on strategy development from Roger Martin, a recognized thought leader on strategy, and author of a number of books on strategy including the classic “Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works”.

The three building blocks are:

• Strategy Campaign - facilitate the workflow for strategy development
• Strategic Decision Framework - e.g. Roger Martin’s “Strategy Cascade”
• Possibility Space - constrain the best alternatives into a 5x5 grid, to support better dialog

But first, what do we need from a strategy? What should it look like when we’re done here?

Martin defines a strategy as an “integrated set of choices”. Since choices result from decisions, it’s fair to say we will need to make some decisions. We also want to drive a broad, yet structured, exploration of the possibilities (including the possibility of continuing with the status quo). 

Exploring options and converging on crisp choices is challenging, even for stable leadership teams with lots of reps. This is where we can benefit from some structure.

Strategy Campaign

Start by setting expectations for this (new) strategy development workflow. Time is precious, so help people see how you will make it efficient and effective. Find a good balance or combination of asynchronous (prep) and synchronous (meetings) activities. 

Decide:

• Who to involve (a right-sized group of staff, peer leaders, subject-matter-experts, etc.)
• How long to spend, in calendar time (e.g. 1 week in focused off-site, or 3 weeks with a via a series of meetings)
• Scope of discussion (e.g. your org unit, with clear accountabilities and decision authority)
• Horizon of discussion (desired impacts visible in 6 months vs. 1 year vs. 3 years)

With a campaign defined, the logistics should be in place, and participants should know what they’re in for. If the approach to strategy development is new to the group (e.g. using Martin’s “Strategy Cascade” for the first time) then this is a good time to drive some education.

Strategic Decision Framework

Using Martin’s definition of a strategy as an “integrated set of choices”, we can go upstream and ask:

“What decisions-to-make would drive those choices?”

Luckily, most strategy frameworks are, under the hood, a list of questions to answer and decisions to make. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel and can leverage a lot of prior work. 

For example, Roger Martin’s “Strategy Cascade” is built around 5 choices, or decisions-to-make:

By framing these as decisions-to-make, we can leverage tenets of good decision architecture (link), to avoid circular discussions and aimless brainstorming meetings.

For example, in the early stages, participants should have a chance to pose questions - to surface the uncertainty - and work together to build a shared understanding of the context, or landscape.

The decisions across the framework are worked in parallel (not sequentially). Each can be treated as a distinct decision, though, with an owner, framing, options, and an eventual commitment across the group.

Before the commitment is made to any one decision, we need to look at the connections across them, and how they work together to create a winning strategy. We call this collective set of options (across the decisions) the “possibility space”.

Possibility Space

It’s not a decision unless you are deciding between a set of (ideally diverse) options and alternatives. To build the possibility space, we converge on the five most promising options from each decision-to-make. With five decisions and five options, we construct a 5x5 grid that creates an enabling constraint for the dialog that follows. The size is arbitrary (it could be a 7x7 grid) but the importance of the constraint is significant.

Following the ideas of Roger Martin, we define a "possibility" as a combination of one option from each decision-to-make: a path through the possibility space. We look to form a small set of candidate possibilities for evaluation. Make sure that the status quo is represented in the possibility space, and elevated as one of those candidate possibilities.

Possibilities help the group envision alternative futures, much like the output of scenario planning. The difference is that while scenario planning places the focus on “outside-in” sense-making, strategy development focuses on “inside-out” choices (leading to investment).

Next, we follow the guidance of Roger Martin on how to evaluate our candidate possibilities. For each possibility:

1. Identify a set of conditions for each that answer the question, “What would have to be true?” for this possible future to be preferred, or at least promising?
2. For each condition, work with the group to arrive at a confidence level (in whether it is likely to be true) as a probability %.
3. Label any conditions with a confidence below some threshold (say, 30%) as potential barriers to choosing that possibility as the preferred strategic intent.
4. Define the work needed to improve the confidence in the barrier conditions, via discovery, research, or experimentation. Set constraints for how much to spend on this work to collect information to drive down the uncertainty (link to value of information).

With a set of possibilities and refined confidence levels, the group can commit to making an integrated set of choices across the decision framework.

And with the introduction of some probabilistic thinking (in the confidence levels), leaders can set expectations that these conditions can (and should) continue to be monitored, Changes in the landscape can then drive changes, leading to more adaptive strategies.

But this is just one balance point you will have to find for yourself. Strategy development is more art than science. There is no recipe.

Based on your context, find your balance in:

• Amount of time (as costs) to dedicate to strategy development
• How long (calendar time) to allow for exploration during strategy development
• How to effectively connect the choices made, to the investment portfolios and work planning activities
• How adaptive to be in strategic refinements (stay the course vs. react to changes)

But regardless of your context, setting good expectations with campaigns, steering dialog with decision frameworks, and allowing for probabilistic thinking with possibilities is likely to up your game.

And, as Roger Martin says, you should be “playing to win”.

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