Translating Clarity of Direction into Key Drivers of Success

Virtually all companies undertake some form of strategic and operational planning. Too often, however, it is a flawed ritual – at its core, a management control system centered on budgeting and negotiating financial targets. Few companies achieve genuine clarity of strategic direction, founded on a winning business model and a set of values that taps the commitment of employees and other key stakeholders. Even fewer translate that direction into the key drivers of business success and operating milestones that focus and coordinate execution within each unit of accountability.

TruePoint helps leaders to identify the key strategic “conversations that matter,” and frame strategic and operational planning processes that achieve:

• Robust plans, grounded in a realistic view of external opportunities and threats, as well as of the potential sources of marketplace advantage
• Ownership from the players throughout the organization who will be critical to implementation success
• Urgency through a results focus that highlights the near-term priorities critical to delivering the longer-term strategy
• Accountability focused on the key operational drivers as well as financial targets
• A systems view, providing managers with an understanding of how their part fits within a larger whole, and the capacity to contribute to ongoing adaptation of both the strategy and the approach to execution

In any company, there is always an existing body of current planning work (often captured in multiple binders of materials), as well as an implicit strategy that is being implemented on the ground through the decisions and actions of key players across the organization. Our work typically starts with engaging the leader and leadership team around the quality of their current strategic direction and its adequacy for driving organizational alignment and execution. Often, the senior team needs to synthesize its existing strategic thinking into a concise, logical story that can be used to engage the broader organization in testing the robustness of the strategy and the requirements for effective implementation (see Strategic Fitness Process).

In other contexts, we agree on the need to drive a deeper conversation, focused on “asking the right questions in the right order” in one or more of the following areas:

• Identity: What are the core values, mission and vision for the enterprise? Why is this a meaningful place for people to commit their working lives? What is the difference that we intend to make in the world? Why should customers, suppliers, shareholders, and other stakeholders commit to our success?
• Success model: What are the underlying foundations for our success to date? How can these be built upon to create opportunities and derive advantage in the future? What are the emerging external opportunities for which we could be distinctively positioned?
• Key strategic choices: What are the most important issues arising from external and internal dynamics? What are the strategic options for addressing them? What would you have to believe to select a given option? What data would enable us to choose between the options?
• Goals, objective setting and metrics: What are the overall goals that will enable us to achieve our aspirations and instill an appropriate degree of stretch? What is the shortlist of key outcomes that will deliver the strategy? How do these translate back into phased milestones that need to be achieved to ensure we are on track? (See Results-Focused Backplanning.) [link] What is the small set of balanced scorecard metrics that will give us the most meaningful view of progress?
• Operational planning: How can long-term and short-term performance objectives be reconciled consistent with our resources? What are the critical issues that need to be resolved? What are the key result areas that will simultaneously drive both near-term financial performance and build longer-term capability? What are the priority initiatives that will achieve those key results?

In any of these areas, we approach planning as not simply a linear process, but one that iteratively engages across multiple levels and multiple dimensions of the organization, and that draws in appropriate content resources.

Back to Top