#45 - Shorts: A Framework to Improve the Impact/ROI of Strategy
A short letter that provides a framework to help increase the impact of a strategy
I keep all of my written notes from my years of working on my bookshelf here in Atlanta, and occasionally play a game where I open a random page in a random book and see what comes up. Oh the nostalgia you’ll feel when you find a graphic you drew 6 years ago… (complete with stick figures).
The graphic I found when I did this exercise this afternoon was of a framework I was developing for a client that never ended up getting utilized, but hey: you can utilize it :).
The idea was simple: how do you maximize the return that you get on strategic planning efforts. We spend all this time (read: $$$) developing a vision (what we want to make happen) and then outlining a strategy (how we will do it), but there are these other enabling factors that can make a break your strategy. Here’s the framework to help you track these enabling factors + talking points (below).
In the spirit of Exonomist being raw, I just rebuilt whatever I had in my notepad and am not going to clean things up or enhance the framework any further. I’m going to publish this letter, and come back in a future letter and critique + improve it. Some work is needed but I think it’s a nice starting point to formulate a plan to implement a new business strategy.
Here are the talking points:
Enable Your Business Strategy to have Max Impact By Thinking Through… (V1)
Communications Platforms: where you communicate with your organization and colleagues. Can be thought about as comprising “digital platforms” (e.g., Teams, Slack) and in-person environments (offsites, office, etc.)
Behavioral Norms: how people work together. What are the cultural values that underpin how people treat one another… And what are the specific ways that people prefer to function (i.e., Ways of Working). Examples of this latter category might be: “At Bridgewater Associates, we reserve 5 minutes at the end of a key decision-making meeting to provide feedback to one another on how we could have done better”
Language Systems: The terms that come to be company-specific or commonly used. Typically the acronyms that are utilized, the associations with words. For example, at one of my prior employers, the word “riff” meant to “riff with one another” as in: brainstorming. The moment I said that word in a startup environment, people panicked because to some people “rif” means reduction in force.
Insight Management: how you capture insights and then do something with them. When a strategy is being implemented, it is critical to track how it is being received by employees and customers and to iterate to improve how it lands with these populations.
Leadership Focus & Action: ensuring that the leadership layer of a company has the appropriate bandwidth and prioritization to focus on what matters most, and the time and leverage to galvanize powerful action.
Personal note: i’ve seen countless organizations where leadership layers are drowning in their BAU (business as usual) work, and don’t have enough time to focus on the highest-impact areas. This can be deadly to a company over time
External Awareness: being attuned to what is happening in the external world outside of a company. Especially in large organizations, it is easy to lose sight of what is happening in the external market. Competitive understanding should not be outsourced to a specific strategy or GTM team; it should be the responsibility of all employees to appreciate the macro environment, competitive movements, etc. If many people in an organization understand this, the feedback you get on your strategy will be more precise and helpful —> which will help your organization learn about how to adjust their approaches.
I challenge you to think about how your company could upgrade in these areas. One thing I’m personally proud of in my work life is our strong Leadership Focus & Action. At basically no time have I ever wondered what outcomes I’m responsible for… And our CEOs have always been hyper supportive of “cutting out the scope that isn’t moving the needle”…which helps us generally protect our time to drive results #OKRs