Visioning & Strategy
With the pace of change and disruption we’re all facing, it can be daunting to think about vision and strategy. What do we want to be as an organization, and how on earth are we supposed to know how to get there?
The FlexPoint team doesn’t claim to have all the answers on either of these topics, but we’ve seen how a compelling vision, clear objectives, alignment, and setting teams up to do great work through accountability and innovation practices can have an outsized impact.
Visioning and strategy are about more than setting goals. They’re about creating a shared understanding of where we’re headed and why.
Here are the key elements in our approach:
Define a compelling vision. Together with our clients, we paint a clear picture of the desired future.
Create a strategic framework to achieve the vision. We identify specific pillars that are needed to accomplish the vision.
Align people, process, and technology for progress. We flag opportunities for the organization to generate value for stakeholders more effectively. This could include operating model updates, greater process clarity, or using new/different technology approaches to deliver for internal and external customers.
Embed accountability and innovation. We establish frameworks for feedback, measurement, and continuous improvement, making sure that organization-wide objectives are mapped to the teams that enable them.
Let’s get into each of these more fully.
In visioning, we define and describe what we aspire to be together. This often includes a north star vision – what we’re ultimately aiming for, even if we never fully get there. It may also include mission and values, since these are critical to a full understanding of our overarching goal.
What we’re not talking about is a 97-slide deck with shiny visuals and catchy acronyms that you look at once and then put away forever.
What we are talking about is a series of working sessions that generate easy-to-understand artifacts, plus walking alongside your team as you align, deliver, and learn together.
At FlexPoint Consulting, our vision is to make our clients the hero of the story. We do this in the context of envisioning, planning, and delivering business transformation with our clients.
Our aspirational culture is critical to understanding what we’re doing and why, so we include this in our visioning and strategy definition efforts.
Strategy means many things to many people, so let’s start big picture: strategy is how we organize our collective efforts to deliver on our vision and overarching goals.
We’re not purists here. Strategies can take many forms – and as long as they move teams forward toward your vision, we’re here for them!
What we’re passionate about is creating a strategic framework to achieve the vision. Using a framework our client is comfortable with or crafting one together, we’ll identify specific pillars that are needed to accomplish the vision.
For instance, if they’ve gotten traction using OKRs (objectives and key results), we’ll use that as our framework to achieve your renewed vision. We’ll envision ourselves several years down the road and on a productive path. We’ll set several objectives that we’re convinced will help us get there, and then we’ll identify key results that are forward-looking indicators of whether we’re on the right track. (We typically set objectives and key results for a year and then zoom in to specifics for each quarter.) Expect us to ask, “how will we know we’ve succeeded?” many times, since getting all the way to success criteria and critical metrics now will pay off later.
With a sense for the vision and strategic framework, we direct our attention to aligning people, processes, and technology to enable success. We consider the organization’s operating model – how and who delivers value for the firm – and work with client leaders to flag any areas that aren’t enabling the team. (Issues related to communication, customer experience, quality, and delivery often have their root cause in operating model gaps, so we tend to start there.)
Continuing with our OKR example, we work with functional and technical leaders to cascade organization-wide objectives down to each department, with specific metrics for each group that give a sense for how they’re performing against our goals.
As the final direction-setting step, we work with client leaders to embed accountability and innovation throughout their teams. Often this includes connecting the dots between department-wide metrics and which teams’ work directly impacts them.
If we set lofty goals but don’t connect the dots with how they’re achieved, we’re setting teams up for failure.
With department- and team-level priorities clear, we work with client leaders to establish frameworks for feedback, measurement, and continuous improvement. We’re partial to agile ways of working, since cadences for coordinating, looking back, and learning together are built into the approach. No matter what method of working they ultimately move forward with, we make sure to reserve time to review and refine the approach over time.
Interested in learning more?
