Dream in years, plan in months, deliver in days
How to break strategy down in digestible blocks for teams to act accordingly
Do you know the strategy of the company you work for?
For a lot of people that question leads to explanations of how the company makes money, their products, the mission or its biggest projects, but thats not a strategy. Where will your company be in 2-3 years and how that links to what its doing every day? If the strategy is international expansion then who, when, which countries, how, etc. are we going to get there.
This is a problem as it leads to confusing priorities and wasted resources. Which of my 2.000 projects is more important? (answer: the ones that align to the strategy), should I invest resources in this business unit? (answer: is your company planning to keep that unit in the next few years?) and should I hire? (answer: is business expanding or looking to save cost?). Should I raise the price of my product? (answer: is your brand looking to compete on value or cost?)
Strategy and culture instead of tasks
Having a strategy is not enough, we need to communicate it and connect it to reality. Employees in every level should tell the same story of what success looks like in 1-2 years (more maybe but depends on the company), and need to also explain what I’m doing in a day to day to reach that point. If our strategy is to expand then HR analysts should tell a compelling story of how they are finding the people we need, profiles, etc.
Communication can come in many shapes but the most important way is leading by example. Managers that constantly link their strategy in the mid-long term to the decisions they take every day. Implanting this 1:1 rule in its teams.
However, this is not the norm, bad managers tend to lead by assigning tasks to people. Instead of explaining to that HR analysts what are we trying to solve for, we ask them to find me 20 CVs with X position. We tend to jump directly to action instead of investing on syndicating the strategy and the objective we are trying to achieve.
Why is this a problem?
If I know my objective is to get from New York to Boston, I will be able to improvise. If there is an accident I can take a detour. If I’m late maybe I can pick up the pace. If I don’t have a car I will plan to take a train. When we give employees order we cripple their ability to adapt and when challenged they will insist on the approach “my boss gave me”. Corporate zombie like behaviour. Even worse, it’s a source of friction, when two employees fight over something that could easily be solved if you fall back to the strategy and which approach is best aligned with it. Taken even one step above…
Culture eats strategy for breakfast
The ultimate source of alignment is culture, but thats for another time…
Alining everyone on different horizons
A good strategy can be broken down in different horizons. Like in a team, we might choose to save a certain player for another match (the mid-term strategy) while defining how to play with others in this specific match (the short-term strategy). The team can even have in their roadmap the acquisition of new players in the next seasons.
To help people deliver, especially big teams subjected by the complexity of a large company, we can think in three horizons:
2-5 years depending on the industry, to explain to everyone what success looks like in the long term. Is this a business that we see growing or our objective its cost reduction or selling it? How we plan to do it?
1 year statement of intensions explaining to everyone what should be accomplished before going into vacations and what will be linked to their bonuses and other incentives. This doesn’t have to be written in stone or even a full commitment by the team as the strategy might have to be adjusted mid-game but directionally needs to align people on the 5-6 main missions or “themes” for this year. Are we going to focus on new functionality, or we should prioritise security and reliability? Are we expanding to more countries our we focus on the ones we have? Are we going to grow the team or instead we need to tighten our belts?
3 months detailed planning and commitments for what we, as a team, will deliver this cycle. In Agile terms this is a PI planning or QBR (Quarterly Business Review) but essentially, we align on the list of objectives to delivery (e.g., improve security in x service), teams have the time to analyse and commit to achieve that goal. In other terms, this is the breakdown of the 1 year statement in months and committed by the team.
To get practical, the 2-5 year strategy can take the shape of a document or presentation that can be shared with shareholders and employees. 1 year statement can be a Word like document we write together, as a team, to align on our goals and finally the quarterly plan must be translated into something more actionable, not documents. Many teams use tools like Jira or similar to sign and breakdown things to an actionable level.
At the end, the goal of any of these exercises is to align people, to have them say the same things on the elevators and coffee machines so everyone works on the same goals even if their contribution is marginal. How many of you employees can tell the same story? do the test and reflect on it.
We found also that it’s great to have certain “themes” or topics to create a sense of purpose on each discussion… a motif. Imagine starting a planning session telling your team that this quarter the main mission is to improve the quality of your product, even if they need to have tons of discussions and micro-objectives to achieve such a purpose, the sense of a theme will leave them aligned towards what to prioritise in a day to day basis.