Category: strategy

Envisioning workshop: Co-create shared Vision and Strategies

The envisioning workshop is a group facilitation activity which:

  • Co-creates a shared business vision to unite behind
  • Identifies and prioritises strategies which are faithful to the vision
  • Generates the momentum to test and execute the strategic objectives

It helps ensure the co-created vision, strategic alignment and execution are in keeping with the elements described in Starting an Engagement.

Setup and Agenda

Participants should be the leadership team, stakeholders and key representatives from the execution team (aka delivery team). Ideally, there should be between five and nine participants, plus the workshop facilitator(s).

Duration: Typically 3-4 hours

Agenda

  1. Co-creation of the vision statement
  2. Identify measures of success
  3. Brainstorm strategies which will help deliver the vision
  4. Prioritise strategies
  5. Setup cadence and move into execution

Co-creation of the vision statement

To gain alignment it’s important that all participants co-create the vision. The vision describes an ambitious and motivational future-state for the business. This vision is written as a vision statement, which has the following qualities:

  • Succinct – one or two sentences
  • Visionary – Drives motivation to create a beneficial future-state
  • Works on the team’s behalf – Help to communicate and gain alignment across the business
  • Aligns the team with their stakeholders
  • Easy for everyone in the business to understand
  • Scoped – removes any erroneous activities such as pet projects

To move with velocity to drive profitable growth and become an even better McDonald’s serving more customers delicious food each day around the world.

McDonald’s Vision Statement

We’ll save money by eliminating impediments to deliver a frictionless customer experience, which empowers our front-of-house colleagues.

A Vision Statement created by a team in a FTSE 100 company

Identify measures of success

Brainstorm and agree on three or four measures of success. These ensure the right benefits, behavioural changes and consequences will be achieved which will support the vision.

Some examples of measures of success:

  • Reduce the cost to serve
  • Increase customer retention
  • Increase customer satisfaction
  • Increase incremental sales
  • Reduce carbon emissions across the vehicle fleet

Measures of success should be found within the vision statement. The following measures of success are implied in the McDonald’s vision statement:

  • Profit growth
  • Customer growth
  • Customer satisfaction
  • Global scope

Brainstorm strategies which will help deliver the vision

Now facilitate the participants to brainstorm a number of strategies which will meet some or all of the measures of success, which they believe will help to fulfil the vision.

If the vision is transformational, encourage the creation of strategies which will test long-held assumptions.

Participants can write their strategies individually or in pairs. Each strategy idea should be written on post-it notes. Once participants have written a few each, remove any which the participants agree are duplicates.

A strategy is something which gives consistency over time and contains the essence of how you’re going to be different

Gary Hamel’s definition of strategy

Prioritise strategies

These strategies should now be ordered relative to each other. They should be ordered by their degree of perceived value towards achieving the vision, and by the perceived complexity of achieving the strategy.

There are a number of ways to understand and measure complexity. For example, consider Liz Keogh’s Estimating Complexity and my RUDE technique.

This stage of the workshop creates a spread of strategies where the following can be identified and discussed:

  1. High-value strategies which are likely to have little complexity to deliver
  2. High-value strategies which are complex to deliver
  3. Low-value strategies which have little complexity to deliver
  4. Low-value strategies which are complex to deliver

Participants should then reflect on the distribution of strategies, and be encouraged to debate, modify, reposition, and possibly remove strategies. This helps the participants create an ordered backlog of strategies.

Setup cadence and move into execution

Since each strategy has a degree of uncertainty, each strategy should be treated as a hypothesis to be proven or disproven through rapid experiments. Therefore, following the workshop, with close support of their leaders and stakeholders, execution teams should test and learn whether the strategies can be achieved.

These strategies should be tested through the innovations, products and services built by the execution teams. A Lean Startup approach should be employed utilising concepts such as the Minimum Viable Product. In partnership with the workshop participants, teams should be disciplined and ruthless in discontinuing ideas which don’t meet the strategic objectives.

A possible set of evaluation criteria can be the one described by the Ash Maurya:

  • Desirability: The innovation, product or service solves a problem for the beneficiaries of the product or service
  • Viability: The innovation, product or service fulfils its strategic objective
  • Feasible: The innovation, product or service can be built and sustained
Ash Maurya (leanstack.com)

Another set of criteria could be testing for problem-solution fit and product-market fit.

A final stage of the workshop is for the participants to agree on how to brief and support execution teams to address two or three strategies from the top of the strategy backlog.

The continuation of existing strategies, innovations, products and services should be judged against their alignment to the vision and its measures of success.

A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision

Eric Ries

A cadence structure should be agreed and set-up for the participants to regularly meet, review and adjust the strategic fit to the vision. This should be done in union with the execution teams.

To ensure on-going alignment and support for execution teams, execution teams should be encouraged to make use of visual management techniques which demonstrates how their current and future work is testing the agreed strategies. The Cone-shaped Backlog is one such visual management technique.

The cone-shaped backlog ensures alignment to the vision, strategies and measures of success

The Cone-shaped Backlog

Here’s an approach I’ve found successful when helping teams ensure their backlog supports optionality, handles uncertainty and continuously adjusts so their goals and strategies are aligned to their vision.

A backlog should have these qualities

The backlog is made-up of backlog items. Each item represents a business goal, which when delivered by the team, will provide a beneficial outcome to the business and its customers/stakeholders.

Qualities of the backlog:

  • Easy to update by the product owner
  • Should be available to everyone in the business
  • Shows the backlog items for the next sprint
  • Conveys a vision of the future with a tangible path to the present
  • Reflects vagueness and options
    • If a distant backlog item is too vague to describe in words, consider drawing a picture, as shown in the photo below
  • Self-explanatory to anyone in the business

The cone-shaped

I often encourage teams to visualise the backlog in a cone-shape in this manner:

  • The neck of the cone shows the current sprint goals
  • The widest point of the cone shows the furthest goals which may be months or years from now.
  • The centre of the cone shows the goals for the intervening time periods. This area can be divided into sprints, months, quarters and half-year intervals.
Backlog visualised as a cone, like the cone-of-uncertainty

Reason for the cone-shape

  • It reflects the cone of uncertainty, where the further out the team considers, the less certain they are of the future environment.
  • The narrow neck of the cone reflects the fact the team can only sustainably deliver a small number of goals. Invariably there is more demand than the team can supply, so the team should gradually constrain the number of goals as the time nears the current sprint.
  • The further into the future, the more the team can consider a wide number of options. This optionality allows the team to consider many possibilities and scenarios without having to commit earlier than necessary. However, as time draws nearer, and as the cone gets narrower, the team will need to reduce the number of options based on the insights they have gathered.

Additional information which supports the backlog

As shown in the photo above, to enable continuous alignment across the business, there is additional information I advise teams to use:

  • Vision Statement: This is a short easy-to-understand statement which describes what the team intends to achieve. It’s written by the team, with their sponsor and stakeholders. The vision statement ensures alignment for the team with those they serve and with those whom the team may rely upon.
  • Strategies: These are the current set of approaches the team have reasonable confidence in that, if delivered successfully, will help fulfil the vision statement.
  • KPIs: These Key Performance Indicators are a small selection of measures which indicate whether the team’s strategies and sprint goals are achieving the team’s vision.
  • Epics start and end dates: Epics are goals which span more than one sprint. On the backlog, the likely start time of an epic is positioned with a blue post-it note; the likely end time is positioned with a pink post-it note.

Further Reading

Business Agility

Increasing your organisation’s competitiveness

Business Agility is a competitive capability to rapidly sense and respond to change with the right business initiatives that will benefit the organisation and its customers.

The following are prerequisite to enabling business agility:

  • Gain an awareness of the threats and opportunities from market, social, technological changes
  • Use the Envisioning workshop to close the gap between vision and execution.
  • Create an ambidextrous organisation. Create a flow of initiatives which balances these focuses: 1) continuously improve current offerings 2) retire non-viable offerings 3) innovate new offerings
  • Determine which initiatives provide a strategic fit with the vision
  • Mindset and ways of working. Push authority to individuals by encouraging them to demonstrate greater strategic clarity and competency
  • Co-evolve ways of working to reduce the delay between alignment effort, execution and ROI
  • Create light-weight governance which removes non-value add activities and reimagines the role of the PMO, HR, finance and the role of sponsors

Resource to download, print and share

Presentation slides

Contact me (dean@latchana.co.uk) if you’d like this presented in your organisation or business community.

An Approach to Organisation Change

When working with organisations and clients, this is my reasoning and a suggested approach for examining where and how organisational change should occur.

For the sake of brevity, I won’t dive into detail here. Neither am I suggesting this a one-size-fits-all approach; this is a generic approach that should be customised to the client.

  1. In order for an organisation to compete it needs to establish (or reaffirm) a clear market differentiator that appeals to their customers/clients.
  2. The market is changing rapidly. There’s plenty of emerging threats and opportunities, some are known, some are unknown(able).
  3. The organisation needs to identify the cash cow operations & services that need to be maintained and improved; these drive revenue. This creates one side of what’s termed the Ambidextrous Organisation.
  4. They also need to retire operations & services that no longer drive revenue or are no longer a strategic fit.
  5. Critically the organisation needs to seek new operations & services for new or existing customers/clients. This creates the other side of the ambidextrous organisation. In reality, only a few ideas are credible to scale to become the new cash cows.
  6. Points 3, 4 & 5 should establish a continuous balanced flow of initiatives. This enables the organisation to continuously sense & respond to ensure ongoing market fitness. This creates a Lean Enterprise
  7. Especially for Point 5, since there’s a huge amount of uncertainty, the ways of working, organisational structure, success criteria and leadership style is different from what’s needed for Point 3.
  8. To seek new viable operations and services, the organisation needs to be especially outcome driven, with flexible ways of working, an experimental approach supported by leaders, close co-discovery with stakeholders, close collaboration with customers/clients, where potentially many strategies and solutions are vetted.
  9. This ability for the organisation to sense and respond is in keeping with The Agile Business Consortium’s definition of Business Agility.
Agile Business Consortium’s definition of Business Agility

Where to start

To develop and carryout changes of such significance and depth requires the direct involvement of the leadership team. The following slides provides a high-level view of what such an engagement is likely to cover.

Further Reading

Thanks to Luca Minudel for helping me strengthen this article.

Starting an Engagement

In this article I’ll explain my current approach to starting an engagement or initiative with the leadership team.

This approach will ensure the initiative gets off and continues on the right footing. It’s been inspired by Collis’ and Rukstad’s approach to articulating a strategy.

Let’s start with establishing and agreeing the initiative’s intent, what outcomes it’s trying to achieve, and the rules of engagement. Created collectively during a kick-off workshop, each of the following should have a statement written in a few clear sentences; the balanced scorecard will need something a little more elaborate.

Mission

Why the initiative exists. What’s the underlying motivation of the initiative; what’s its contribution to the wider organisation and whom it’s ultimately serving.

Values

Establish what the engagement team will believe in, and how it will behave. This team is a partnership of the key stakeholders/leaders and the consultants/coaches.

The values govern how the team behave (“doing the right thing”), not necessarily what the team should do (“the right thing to do”).

Vision

What we want the initiative to deliver. It could be an indeterminate future goal.

Strategy

What’s our game plan. Identify a number of coherent approaches that the team have reasonable confidence in. From these create an ordered backlog.

Ensure they’re SMART objectives. Know that certain approaches may fail, so ensure a plurality of strategies, and a flexible mindset.

To ensure understanding and alignment, use tools such as Karl Scotland’s Backbriefing A3.

Balanced Scorecard

Monitor and judge which approaches are working against success criteria.

To help with visibility and alignment, ensure the statements and balanced scorecard are shared across the organisation and with the relevant suppliers & partners.

Throughout the engagement judge buy-in and motivation, especially their appetite for uncertainty and the need to potentially change some established expectations. Establish how much genuine leadership commitment exists, especially when it comes to making some tough trade-offs.

The kick-off should be the start of an ongoing review to see if the initiative is on track; to check whether to continue with the current set of approaches or pivot with another set.

Importantly, if despite best efforts, the initiative isn’t providing value, exercise the option to end it early. There’s no point spending time and money flogging a dead horse.

I’m available if you’d like someone experienced to facilitate this as part of an engagement’s kick-off and to periodically review progress.

References