You have defined your purpose. You have articulated a compelling vision for your organisation. Your values and your norms are clear. You have analysed your market and your competitive environment. You have evaluated your financial performance from your previous year and set your financial targets for the coming year. You have reviewed your offer. You have a strategy.

Figure 1:  Strategy Core

Now what? Well for many organisations, now the plan is filed away for the year. Business continues as usual.

But if you aim to execute your strategy it is now time to translate your strategy into a plan. For your plan to succeed you want your staff to embrace their responsibilities. And we only ever commit ourselves to what we have created ourselves – It is the way we are wired. Therefore, it would be good to have a way to involve your teams in defining their plan.

Solutions Focused Conversation is the best way to engage a team in planning. In this process your team defines an ideal future and the ‘Hot Topics’ required to achieve it. It is a good conversation method.

But how do you focus your team on the critical questions?

Academics have been creating organisation models since the dawn of Organisational Development. Models provide teams with perspectives to understand themselves in their context. In 1996 Kaplan and Norton published the “The Balanced Scorecard” which quickly became a popular management tool. In 2004 they published a version of the Balanced Scorecard, adapted for strategic conversations. They called it “Strategy Map”. We use this tool in StrategyWorks to translate strategy into a plan.

The tool includes the four key perspectives:

  1. Financial Perspective: Financial measures and targets to gauge success.
  2. Customer Perspective: How your target market perceives your offer and the measures to gauge how much you matter to your clients.
  3. Internal Process Perspective: What you do to present your offer.
  4. Learning and Growth Perspective: Your “Intangible Assets”.

Following this structure, your plan of action may be shown on one page. At StrategyWorks we use the following format:

Figure 2:  Strategy Map

Each point you describe on the page is supported by a more detailed page of information in our planning template.

Translating strategy into a plan using Strategy Map includes the following advantages:

  1. Strategy Map provides a systemic view of how you create value in your organisation. Learning and Growth describes the capital through which you carry out your internal process, to produce your offer through which you achieve your financial targets. And you may use some of your shareholder value to upgrade your Human, Information and Organisation Capital.
  2. Strategy Map shows the specific processes and outcomes on which you choose to focus. And how they integrate.
  3. Strategy Map provides a checklist of Key Areas of Performance for you to consider in your strategy. For example:
    ⦁  At a high level: will you focus on Innovation?
    ⦁  At a detailed level, how do you rate and select specific suppliers?
  4. Strategy Map offers a common lexicon to manage the often-contradictory drivers for strategy. When Manufacturing push for production, Governance assess for quality and Accounting drive down costs, different options can be modelled on Strategy Map.
  5. Strategy Map provides a single point of collation to resolve the complexity arising from different strategic inputs for different types of plans required to implement strategy.
  6. Strategy Map highlights the significance of intangible assets in evaluating organisations, those assets not necessarily shown in your Balance Sheet and Income Statement, the hidden 80% of your value.

Each of these advantages is described in more detail in the manual for “The Works”.

Contact us at StrategyWorks if you would like to find out more about how to use Strategy Map to define and execute your strategy.