It’s strategy season…that all-important time in the business year when the first portions of an annual plan are taking shape. Plans are also being established for those offsite sessions so new vision targets can be set.
The process of setting a near-term target that is in your field of view greatly improves your chances of reaching your long-term vision. And in the current environment where our stakeholders are demanding tangible progress to our aspirational goals, the stakes have never been higher.
In my consulting work, I’ve had a chance to support clients on many of these efforts. Something I’ve learned over the years, is that there is something good golfers know that can help leaders move the vision work from potentially useful to transforming.
If you’ve spent any time playing golf, then you know that when it comes time to working on your game, putting practice is the place to do it. One way to do this is to use what is called “spot putting.” This practice begins with the player reading the line of the putt and then picking a spot that’s about six inches in front of the ball. The goal here is to focus on rolling the ball over that spot. If you hit it then you’ve got the read right and the results are locked in.
Making Your Vision a Reality
Although vision can seem much more abstract than golf, and it may seem difficult to pin down a solid picture of the future, in truth, it’s simply a description of what success looks like at a specific time in the future. There is an old adage in golf that says, “there is a lot of green between the ball and the cup.” The same thing applies in business…many times our future statements are just too far from today to get the same commitment as this month’s shipment goals.
The path to forming a vision usually involves a combination of inputs that include internal stakeholder interviews and diagnostics, external insights from related organizations and good group work to get it built into something that people are excited about. For an example of what this looks like all buttoned up, see Zingerman’s 2020 vision here.
Once that portion is completed, you need a strategic plan. Think of this as your “how-to document” that allows you to build a concrete path from the present to this clear (but distant) future state. By setting clear midpoints for action that put the group on the right trajectory, the ops team and the strategic leaders become better connected.
When executed correctly, this process allows you to build a plan forward that allows the operations team to move on the project in a very specific way. This is where using the spot putting concept pays off:
What near-term objectives do we need to make to have the momentum to deliver on our vision?
To answer this question, the meeting needs to begin with an “if then” discussion. If we are going to bring this future to life, it is going to need this (specific event) to happen in the short term. For instance, if our vision is to reduce the environmental lifecycle impact of our packaging by a third by 2021, then what needs to be true in January of 2020?
This action creates clarity and allows the team to quickly assess if their vision is on track so that they can make specific midterm corrections as needed.
Using STRIDE
Once the vision is established, it’s time to develop a strategic plan – or said another way – a bridge between where you are now and your vision. The STRIDE process holds this strategic and operational work in one framework and execution path. Using this framework puts the strategic leader on track to create an integrated outcome that includes a strategic sprint, testing with key stakeholders, and integration with the operations agenda.
Specifically, this process involves stepping through a sprint to identify the key deep business case including business model, value chain map and market insights. We carefully go through all the areas we have substituted intuition for facts and stack rank them by impact. We then design impactful short-term experiments to remove the risks without disrupting the larger enterprise.
Once that foundation is in place, we go through the steps of establishing production by running a first article with the operations team, followed by limited deployment. Finally, we bring to bear the entire optimization suite and release for full production.
This five-step approach allows us to bring the entire enterprise’s best talent at the right time so that it has the maximum strategic impact.
Wrapping Up
Our youngest and brightest employees are looking to leadership to not only set an aspirational vision, but to also make good on it. By setting strong “in the field of view” early goals, all the stakeholders will know that the intention is authentic, specific and locked in.
If you’d like to talk more about how to design strategic plans that lead you to becoming a firm that is attractive to the best talent, partners and customers, we should talk. Please feel free to use this link to set up a call, or reach out to me directly at 847-651-1014.
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