Over the past 13 days, we’ve been talking about strategy. Here are a few highlights from previous posts:
- You Have Business Goals, But Do You Have a Strategy?
- Is Vision Different from Strategy?
- How Do You Know If Your Strategy Is Successful?
In our last post, we laid out a framework (the balanced scorecard strategy map) you can use to visualize your strategic moves.
The strategy map is meant to communicate your strategic hypothesis.
With your hypothesis, you are saying, “if we take these coordinated actions, we expect to have these results”.
You are deciding to do specific things which means you will not be doing others. It brings clarity and focus.
Once you have the strategy map in place, you and your team act as scientists, collecting data on a monthly basis which either confirms or denies your strategic hypothesis.
Monthly data collection and review is critical for success.
So how does this monthly review work?
The most successful companies do the following:
- They have a strategy that can be reviewed – even refuted (see my previous blog posts).
- They realize that meeting to talk about tasks and status on projects is not the same as meeting to discuss their strategy and if it’s working. These are two different meetings.
- Each member of the team updates their KPIs (metrics) on a monthly basis – there is accountability.
- When a goal drifts off-track the rest of the team works to figure out why to get the strategy back on track.
- They don’t abandon the strategy too quickly. They stay focused. It may take months to determine a trend.
- The team commits to this process and they see it as a real driver of success.
Do you have a strategy with clear goals and accountabilities?
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