TRANSLATING STRATEGY USING STRATEGY MAP

If you don’t make a difference you don’t matter. To create significant difference, leaders consider what is happening in the strategic neighbourhood.  They talk about who they are, what they bring to the industry, how they are performing, who they want to be, and how they want to engage in their industry.  Many topics!  Each with useful models and content.

To engage everyone to deliver the difference you need a plan. Actually you need a few plans.  These may include:

  • A process improvement plan
  • Sales plan
  • Balanced Scorecard
  • Project portfolio
  • Operating plan
  • Budget
  • Resource capacity plan
The complexity can be confusing. Teams can get lost between talking about what is happening in their industry, how well they have done and what they intend to do next.

To resolve the complexity, leadership teams need to pause and decide on their offer, how they will deliver this offer and what criteria they will use to measure success.  And there is a tool designed to document these decisions.
Success may be measured in many dimensions. In the past, business measured success purely in financial terms.  But there was a growing call to measure other criteria.  About 20 years ago Kaplan and Norton published their ‘Balanced Scorecard’.  They included measures for the success of the value proposition, the ‘Customer Perspective’.  They also included a focus on the process used to deliver the offer, ‘the Internal Perspective’ and the intangible assets required to implement the processes, the ‘Learning and Growth Perspective’ .  The Balanced Scorecard was an immediate hit in planning circles.  The ideas soon found their way onto the strategic agenda and K&N responded by defining the ‘Strategy Map’.
Strategy Map is a powerful tool to converge all the strategic issues onto a foundation for planning.  This provides a pivot point, a fulcrum, a lever for heavy lifting in the strategic conversation.

Strategy Map provides a systemic view of Strategy. Intangible assets include three areas:

  • What leaders need to attract grow and retain the people (Human Capital)
  • How they manage information (Information Capital)
  • How they get things done (Organisational Capital)
The Intangible assets are required to drive the Internal Processes. The Internal Processes describe the work carried out to present the Value Proposition to the market.  The Value Proposition is how leadership would like the market to perceive the offer.  A positive response to the Value Proposition leads to financial rewards, measured against the targets set in the Financial Perspective.
Here is the format of Strategy Map we use in StrategyWorks  (click on it):
The top block in our one-page plan covers the core of the strategic conversation.  This includes the business concept, vision and the core values.  A core activity in most of our strategy workshops is ‘brainstorming the strategic issues’, which we do using the Strategy Map.  We use these issues to agree a core set of strategic imperatives, also plotted on the Strategy Map.  Leadership teams doing this work create a solid foundation within which to reflect on strategy.