5 Tips for Successful Strategy Development
How to Make Sure Your Strategy is Relevant and Impactful
This week I was asked what makes a strategy development or yearly planning process successful. Here are my top 5 tips to deliver relevant and actionable strategy and how I ensure a good outcome. You can use this list whether you are hiring an external consultant or you are running a strategic initiative yourself.
1. Keep the objectives clear and focused and always check back to make sure the conversation stays relevant.
Strategy projects involve diving deep into market opportunities and company data and it is tempting to go off on a tangent for too long and come out at the end of a working session or workshop without having clearly answered your most urgent need.
At the start of a project my focus is on having a clear and tight scope for the question(s) we are solving for. Through-out the working session, whether they are stakeholder interviews or cross-functional meetings to generate and prioritize investment opportunities, I often refer back to the objectives and make sure that the conversation stays relevant.
The opportunity generation phase will likely uncover additional areas for exploration above and beyond the objectives of the project, that can be explored later, and that is a bonus outcome. I’ve often seen follow-on initiatives to explore and develop products or feature sets that were first surfaced during yearly strategic planning.
2. Make it a process and build a cross-functional team rather than just one big event.
To make sure that the working sessions or workshops are truly focused on the right needs of the company and relevant to all key stakeholders, I first meet individually with the members of the team during the data collection and analysis phase.
This means I build a relationship with the team as the work ramps up and understand both their wants and needs from the strategy project as well as their working and communication style.
Since strategy development requires a cross-functional approach where the outcome needs to reflect and leverage the expertize, strengths and capabilities of various functions, it is key to understand the varied perspectives and points of view they bring to the table.
Getting this deeper understanding of your cross-functional team early in the process helps you adapt the working sessions to the team and gets you more effeciently to a relevant strategic outcome.
3. Establish a common understanding of business and other technical terms important for the process.
The team members will have various levels of experience participating in strategy sessions and not everyone is familiar with business and strategy terms such as "Total Addressable Market" or "Competitive Advantage" or "Scenario Planning". In the preliminary discussions leading to and during the main working sessions I make sure we have a common understanding of what we are talking about and why they are important for the our process.
I explain the concept through definition and examples and show where in the framework and meeting agenda it will show up.
4. Focused and alert discussion moderation is important.
Given the high stakes of strategic sessions and their cross-functional nature, they can become unbalanced, where a side of the business is over-represented and influences the outcome disproportionately.
When you build the cross-functional team and design the frameworks to use for data analysis and decision-making, make sure that they are well-balanced and weighted based on the desired focus of your strategy and not influenced by the structure of the company or the size of the functional areas you’re working with.
As the moderator, I make sure all of the relevant sides of the business are represented in the working sessions and that they all get to weigh in and contribute to the outcome.
5. Work out how the strategy outcome should be communicated to the larger team and how it impacts them.
A successful strategy includes communication to the larger team impacted by the changes and working out with the functional leaders how to make sure that everybody in the company knows if and how their scope changes.
This is a two-way process, where the strategy team guides and answers questions from the leaders who weren't part of the core development team and work together to make the necessary changes through-out the organization.