Strategy Workshop

Intro

Today we’ll cover an approach I’ve used for running strategy workshops. It leverages a combination of VMOST (vision, mission, objectives, strategy, and tactics) and the North Star Framework, which I was introduced to by my friend John Cutler. To then build it all out I use techniques I learned from Christina Wodtke and Kate Rutter. This results in a process that gels well with organizations already using MBOs or OKRs, while simultaneously shepherding them toward outcome-based roadmaps.

The Strategy Workshop

Start with vision and mission. The mission statement says why the org exists. The vision, on the other hand, is future oriented. It says where the organization aspires to go based on the mission. If the org you’re working with has a mission they’re open to improving, focus there first. Do they still like their stated mission? Does it still resonate? How might they improve it? Capture suggestions and facilitate a conversation.

Some orgs won’t have a mission statement and that’s fine. You’ll probably focus more on the vision anyway. It best embodies Ackoff’s notion of an “ideal”—the highest-level goal currently being pursued. As Roman Pichler stresses in Strategize, the vision should be big, shared, inspiring, and concise. In the North Star Framework, the vision can be treated as synonymous with the “North Star”.

Moving on to objectives, you will find that many organizations have too many. As Andy Grove stresses in High Output Management, you should get this down to about 3 objectives with no more than 3 measures tied to each. If using the North Star Framework (shown above right), these can be used as the inputs to the vision statement (which may itself also have 3 measures tied directly to it). To build all this out, try the following sequence of exercises.

1. Freelist Objectives

Start by gathering existing objectives. If there are different groups or verticals within the organization, they may each have their own objectives. Capture them all, writing one per sticky note (or virtual sticky). Have the group review them and add any objectives they feel are missing. Focus on quantity not quality. If this is a virtual workshop, then it might be better to assign this exercise as prework.

When completed, don’t be surprised if you have dozens of objectives. (The first time I ran this workshop, the organization I was working with had about 100!) Place each on its own virtual sticky of the same color and size. If the org doesn’t have objectives already, then follow a discussion of their vision with freelisting the objectives they feel are most important for making progress toward it.

2. Affinitize Objectives

The next step is for participants to cluster or “affinitize” like objectives. If you are doing this virtually and participants cannot drag and drop the virtual stickies themselves, you can always just use PowerPoint, share your screen, and have participants state which objectives they feel go together. Debate about which objectives belong in the same category is fine, but most other conversation at this point is a distraction.

3. Identify Buckets

Each resulting cluster is a “bucket” of like objectives. What do the objectives in each bucket have in common? What is the overarching theme of each bucket? Label it and voilà! You just had the group perform a magic trick. You had them zoom out past early opinions, fill perceived gaps, and surface the higher-level objectives they were really going after. That’s right—the blue labels are now the objectives.

4. Select Inputs

The previous step may have cut the number of objectives from about 100 to about 8…but that’s still too many. If there are 8 objectives with up to 3 measures per, that could still be 24 measures! In this step you will facilitate the group selecting 3 or 4 of the buckets as the inputs to the vision statement (getting the total number of measures down to 9 to 12).

Here you can use discussion and stack ranking, dot voting, or whatever technique you prefer. Which inputs are the most aligned with the agreed vision or North Star? Which will create the most value for customers and the company? Which are most directly tied to customer needs and expectations? Which should be the org’s strategic priorities? This achieves a couple important things.

First, as Michael Boricki of Firms Consulting states, the main objective of any strategy workshop is to force participants to reduce scope. This can be like a junk removal service coming to a hoarder’s house, only it’s a hodgepodge of old goals being cleaned up and organized. Second, even if the org only had 20 objectives to start with, you didn’t just reduce the scope. You also tapped the group’s collective knowledge to surface what should be prioritized after first aligning on a crisp vision.

5. Distill Measures

Now that you have an agreed vision and 3 or 4 objectives (or inputs, goals, or buckets—pick your fav term), what measures would be the best needles to move? The group can now revisit the original yellow stickies and surface the most important ideas to convert into metrics. They may even create new ones based on the clarity gained from the preceding exercises (which might be preferable). Have the group choose no more than several measures for each prioritized objective. They can also tie the 3 most important measures to the vision statement itself, thereby making it more concrete and actionable.

6. Freelist Outcomes

In this step you’ll help the group build out the outcomes they will go after to advance their objectives. It helps to define some terms here. The work people or teams do is their output. Outcomes are the real-world consequences of the output created. Whether the output is a policy change, a redesigned workflow, or new software, how is the world meaningfully different as a result? If it’s not, then moving on to the next thing risks turning what could have been valuable learning into waste.

This step requires breaking objectives, which are essentially longer-term goals, down into outcomes, which are nearer-term goals, and then exploring multiple ways they can be advanced, which are output ideas. Have participants take an objective and freelist or ideate ways the world would need to be different for it to be achieved. How would the world need to change for the measures tied to the chosen objective to be significantly impacted?

This will require some facilitation. People will want to dive into solutioning here, into output and tactics. That’s not what this step is about. If someone says they need to build some dashboard, how would the existence of that dashboard change the world? Perhaps it is meant to do away with the need to prep for and hold a meeting that regularly gets called. If so, then that is the outcome, not the dashboard itself.

If the organization already has feature-based roadmaps, then this step will entail specifying the outcomes the planned features are meant to achieve, and then mapping target outcomes to the roadmap in place of the original features. This will help the group organize their thinking, as well as later explore alternative ways to achieve the surfaced outcomes.

7. Dots and Checks

This optional exercise can be helpful when there are a lot of outcomes to consider. Here, everyone gets 3 dots and 3 checkmarks as votes. For the dots, participants are voting on the outcomes they think will create the most value if achieved. For the checks, they are voting on how likely they think it is the outcome in question will be achieved. This can be sent as homework with the outcomes on a PowerPoint slide and the dots and checkmarks included off to the side. Participants can then dot-vote and check-vote by dragging and dropping the icons.

This isn’t done to automatically prioritize what to go after but to better sort and make sense of what can otherwise be a daunting jumble of ideas. After tallying the dots and checks, you can then map the outcomes on a graph with value on the Y axis and uncertainty on the X. Most outcomes will likely land on the lower half of the graph, with a small minority clearly separated from the rest in terms of value. You can then view the graph as a 2 x 2 matrix.

The few outcomes that emerge at the top left of the graph are the ones the group collectively sees as both high value and low uncertainty. These are good candidates for prioritization. The ones at the bottom right are viewed as low value and high uncertainty. Pass on those. Top right is high value viewed as harder to pull off. It might be worth doing some research there, digging into what made people think the uncertainty was so high.

The bottom left is interesting. These may have been viewed as relatively low value in the grand scheme of things, but some of them could be quick wins with high value relative to the size of the undertaking. It can help to think here in terms of two questions: “Is this low-hanging fruit?” and, of these, “Are there bigger fish to fry?” Combining these, what we’re looking for here are those elusive “low-hanging big fish”, or, to paraphrase Joshua Arnold, the “tiny big wins”.

8. Map It Out

This is the last step. By now your group or org has an agreed vision statement with several prioritized inputs, each with several measures associated with them. They also now have a list of prioritized outcomes aimed at moving the needles on those measures. Mapping this out doesn’t need to be complicated. Just pick a format you like. Here is one I’ve used before:

Conclusion

Putting everything together, the organization would have something akin to what is shown below. The vision statement, or North Star, is something to navigate by, even if not ever really achieved. (Sailors, after all, don’t actually arrive at the North Star!) The vision helps with goal setting. Big goals, the objectives, are how the org decides to move toward the vision. The measures are the needles they think will show progress toward getting there.

The outcomes are nearer-term goals that should make progress toward the larger objectives, that should move the needles on the measures tied to the prioritized objectives. For whatever reason, the outcomes are usually the most difficult part of this whole process. Perhaps that’s to be expected. In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt observes that goals and tactics are what people are used to focusing on, not strategy. It makes sense then that people will want to focus on what they’re used to and comfortable with.

Here you might need to gently remind people that big, audacious objectives are great—but they’re goals, not strategy. And great big solutions that tend to get all the funding are big bets—that’s tactics, not strategy. Strategy proper is about the layers connecting the two. It’s both bottom-up and top-down. It’s the simultaneous identification of obstacles that emerge as you see what’s happening and the ongoing coordination of tactics against them, occurring in real time.

If you cave and let participants skip outcomes, then they will resort to just focusing on goals and tactics gain. There is still value, of course, in aligning an org on a crisp vision, cleaning up its goals and prioritizing a small, clean set of objectives and measures, but there is even more value in helping the organization up its strategy game.

Until next time.

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