Right now, running a business is anything but typical – we’ve had a decade’s worth of shifts in a year.
So, if you give teams the usual high-altitude operating plan for 2021, you risk not getting the outcomes your stakeholders are expecting.
Every larger firm I work with has some outlook tool for budgeting and managing operations, with the senior management team crafting a strategic plan that usually contains a single and multi-year look ahead. There may be “scenarios,” but at the end of the day, you need to put one model in play. With COVID, you may well have a rolling 90-day lock-in, with the rest as “budgetary.”
This plan is rolled out to the doers – typically level two leaders that decompose it into operating investments, programs, and projects. In normal circumstances, this is a smooth process that overlays nicely on a multi-year canvas. There is lots of implicit information that usually “rolls forward” that allows planning teams to be efficient.
30,000 ft strategy >> planning team = runaway level actions
This is akin to an architect passing a sketch to the tradesman on the job site, expecting that the tradesman’s journeyman skills will fill in any gaps and the outcome will be as intended. If the project scope and trajectory are typical, this will work just fine.
For 2021, we have a much tougher job leading our businesses. There is simply too much variability in the space between financial projections and the runway for a cohesive and aligned result to occur.
(And if you pass the team too much choice complexity, it risks teams getting stalled.)
To achieve the adaptability needed, I would suggest you consider adding two pieces to the usual deployment plan:
30,000 ft strategy >> Strategy Linkage Team >>Leverage Team>>Planning Team = Runaway Level Actions
The two functions in the equation above are usually embedded in the planning processes, but with the variability that COVID has brought, making them explicit has been the key to success. In the past, tacit knowledge and carry-over momentum from year to year allowed strategic implementation to be worked out by individuals and teams in an ad hoc way. But with all the variance introduced by COVID, this approach is going to be like driving with the parking brake on.
The telltale signs of having this problem are found on your calendar. If it seems like you are having repetitive alignment and resource meetings, it’s a sure sign that it would be more efficient to take this on as a cross-functional team.
The Strategy Linkage Team
This group’s charter is to take the 30,000 ft strategy down to runway level:
- First, they are needed to develop scenarios and select the most likely “how’s” of achieving the targets set out by the top management plan.
- Second, they need to find a way to test or validate that the projected actions will actually yield results.
- Third, they need to work out a set of measurements that will show that the firm is either exceeding or falling short of its planned future.
This needs to be a well-curated, cross-functional group that has strategic, operational, and process subject matter experts on it. The leader needs to have strong facilitation skills and be persistent in getting plans and scenarios into a level of detail that can be taken on by the functions.
Some of you are thinking, yes, that’s alignment work, and we do that. The difference here is that historical benchmarks of what works and doesn’t work will not serve us well in a “during+dealing with COVID” world. As we continue to grapple with supply chain disruptions, market shifts, and consumer behavior changes, we need to take the time to test and validate our hypotheses. Flipping this over, if you go right to scale implementation, you are doing a very expensive experiment on validating your strategy.
The Leverage Planning Team
This group’s charter is to step back and look at the organization’s full capabilities and make strategic leadership and staffing choices that allow the highest probability of success with the most efficient investment. In complex firms, there are matrixed resources that can lead, manage and implement the strategic items developed by the linkage team. By making explicit choices about ownership and cross-functional team membership, you avoid myopia and having unaligned, passionate individuals achieving gains on areas that are not as high of a priority.
Like the strategic linkage teams, this needs to be a cross-functional effort. For team membership, the recipe is strong facilitation and a tilt towards operational team members who have experience and a high-level view to know where all the available resources might come from. In some cases, the strategic efforts may actually be best led by staff functions like marketing or IT.
For example, if a new “no contact” process is needed for a product, it might be matrixed across ops, product, marketing, distribution, and R&D. Knowing where the strongest capabilities lie, and how to access them, is once again best handled at the leadership team level.
Similarly, if the plan includes integrating a new product line through acquisition, it activates resources in operations, quality, product, finance, and perhaps R&D. Who is chosen to guide this work, manage this work, and have their hands on the oars of the boat, is challenging and best handled as a cross-team decision.
This work is necessary and will not disappear if a firm doesn’t choose to take these process steps. Instead, the work will simply be hidden from sight and consume enormous amounts of time, budget, and people resources. In the meantime, management will be wondering why progress may have ground to a halt.
If you get tapped to lead strategic implementation in this cycle, I would love to share the deeper models and patterns that underlie this post. Deep integration and alignment are key to having success, and having a clear set of steps and processes will move the probability of success way up.
If you’d like to talk more, please feel free to reach out to me directly at scott@scottpropp.com or use this link to put a call on the agenda.
