| Conversations Driving
Change: The Strategic Fitness Process
The Strategic Fitness Process (SFP) gives
leaders a platform for driving strategic,
organization-wide conversations that uncover
and help eliminate the hidden barriers to
implementing new strategies. To support
step-changes in organizational performance
and capabilities, SFP has been used in more
than 200 businesses for various strategic
purposes — including integrating global
organizations, shifting from product/sales
to customer/solution business models, and
improving performance and efficiency in
distributed service businesses.
The Strategic Fitness Process helps leaders
and senior teams:
Each step is explained briefly below, and
you’ll find case examples in Our
Clients. For more in-depth information
about SFP and organizations that have used
it, we also recommend reading more in “How
to Have an Honest Conversation About Your
Business Strategy,” the 2004
Harvard Business Review article by
TruePoint’s Michael Beer and Russell
A. Eisenstat, as well as their 2000 Sloan
Management Review article, “The
Silent Killers of Strategy Implementation
and Learning.”
Articulating
a statement of strategic and organizational
intent. TruePoint leads a meeting
to help the senior team develop a tightly
reasoned and concise “Statement of
Strategic and Organizational Direction”
that articulates the links among the competitive
environment, performance goals, business
strategy, and needed organizational and
cultural changes. This statement communicates
the strategy and its logic to the broader
organization, and stimulates organizational
feedback on barriers to implementation.
Creating this statement is a first critical
step in building senior team alignment around
a shared strategic management agenda for
the business. (See Strategic
Management Agenda and Leadership
& Team Development.)
Collect data
on barriers and strengths. The
senior team picks a task force — a
cross-section of the best managers from
different functions or businesses, one or
two levels below the top team. TruePoint
trains the task force to conduct open-ended
interviews inside and outside the organization
(including customers if needed) about specific
management practices and organizational
arrangements that help or hinder the implementation
of strategy. The task force chooses whom
to interview. In addition, TruePoint interviews
members of top management to get their own
views of strategic barriers and their effectiveness
as a team. The task force meets to analyze
data collected from interviews and synthesize
the key emerging themes.
Develop a
plan for change. In an intensive
three-day feedback and planning meeting,
the senior team receives a thorough and
candid account from the task force on key
themes that emerged from its interviews.
This information is reported back using
a “fishbowl” format that is
carefully orchestrated to allow the task
force to present an accurate and complete
picture of even the most politically sensitive
barriers to strategy implementation.
Using this information and
TruePoint’s analytic frameworks, the
senior team evaluates the organization’s
effectiveness — and its own —
and develops a strategically aligned organizational
vision and an implementation plan.
Refine the
plan. The senior team reviews and
refines the proposed plan with the task
force. The meeting serves as a reality check
on the adequacy of the senior team’s
plan. It also forges a cross-functional
partnership between the senior team and
its lower-level managers, fostering better
strategy implementation and learning. It
symbolically and practically establishes
a partnership between top management and
employees in managing change and learning.
The general manager also typically reviews
results with the next higher level of management.
He or she shares the feedback obtained from
the task force, the top team's diagnosis,
and plans for change. Corporate barriers
to unit effectiveness (policies or top management
behavior) are presented and discussed. Higher
management then has the opportunity to assess
progress made in improving organizational
effectiveness during normal business reviews.
Implement
the plan. Upon completion and validation
of the transformational plan, the organization
moves aggressively into strategy execution
(see Accelerated
Execution). Leaders and their senior
teams act upon what they learn, often redesigning
and aligning the organization to get the
right people working together on the right
opportunities (see Organization
Design). The human resources organization
often steps up to a new strategic role —
unleashing talent to build capability and
commitment required to achieve strategic
goals (see Strategic
HR Management). Members of the task
force are often asked to play leadership
roles in executing strategic changes and
to provide a “temperature check”
on the extent of progress in periodic task
force reviews.
Institutionalize
strategic conversations. Most fundamentally,
strategic conversations become a way of
life as organizations progress toward higher
performance and commitment. Many TruePoint
clients have repeated the SFP every one
or two years within the same organization.
Others iterate the SFP in different parts
of the company — to foster improvement
in other geographies or business units,
for instance, or to cascade changes from
the corporate level down to replicated sub-units
such as retail stores (see Unit-Level
Improvement). In all these ways, institutionalizing
strategic conversations moves the organization
towards a higher level of accountability
and discipline in the management of an organization’s
human and organizational assets —
as has long existed for financial assets.
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