Working Smarter

Mix of Work

Fred Nickols — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 08:36:00 GMT

Introduction

You wouldn’t manage a file clerk the same way you would a research scientist, would you? Of course not; you would adjust your management practices to take into account the fact that these two people perform very different kinds of work. Therein lies the central point of this post: Management practices must be adjusted to fit the kind of work being managed.

The Mix of Work: “Canned” Procedures and “Crafted” Responses

All work falls into one of two categories: routine and non-routine. Routine work consists of activities that have been prefigured, that is, specified in advance. They are essentially “canned” procedures. Non-routine work consists of activities that are configured or “crafted” by the worker in response to the situation at hand. The work of most people consists of some mix of canned procedures and crafted responses; however, the distribution of work between the two can be markedly different from job to job. For example, the work of a food server in a fast food restaurant or an assembly line worker or that file clerk mentioned earlier is marked by a lot of canned procedures and is significantly different from the work of a design engineer, a software programmer or that research scientist mentioned earlier, which consists mostly of crafted responses.

The diagram on the right illustrates the mix of work being discussed. On the left side of the diagram the bulk of the work consists of canned procedures. On the right side most of the work consists of crafted responses. These two kinds of work – canned procedures and crafted responses – pose very different management requirements and challenges.

There are four aspects to the requirements and challenges posed by these two kinds of working activities:

1. The main measure of performance.

2. The focus of control.

3. The location of control over working.

4. The role of the worker.

The appropriate management practice for these four dimensions takes a very different form depending on which of the two kinds of working activities is being managed. These are discussed next.

The Main Measure of Performance: Compliance or Results?

The main measure of worker performance when the work consists of canned procedures is compliance with or adherence to those procedures. But, by their very nature, crafted responses cannot rely on compliance as the chief measure of performance; instead of doing what someone else has figured out, the worker must figure out what to do. Consequently, the main measure of performance with respect to non-routine work or crafted responses is the extent to which required results are realized.

The Focus of Control: the Worker or the Work?

Because compliance with procedure is the chief measure of performance regarding routine working activities, the focus of control naturally centers on the worker. Control relies on supervisors ensuring that workers follow established procedures. But because compliance is neither feasible nor the aim with respect to crafted responses, the focus of control shifts from the worker to the work itself; more specifically, to the results required. The work of the manager shifts from ensuring compliance through supervision to supporting the attainment of results.

The Location of Control over Working Activity: Management or the Worker?

When compliance is the measure of performance and the focus of control is on the worker, the location of control over working activity rests with management, often with the direct supervisors of the workers in question. But because crafted responses are at the initiative of and under the control of the worker, the location of control over working activity shifts from management to the worker. This is a hard pill for some managers to swallow.

The Role of the Worker: Instrument or Agent?

With respect to canned routines, the role of the worker is viewed as an instrument or extension of managerial will. This is because the chief measure of performance is compliance, the location of control rests with management, and the focus of control is the worker. With respect to crafted responses, the role of the worker shifts to one of being an agent acting on behalf of and in the best interests of the employer. This is because the main measure of performance is results, the focus of control is the work itself, in particular, results, and the locus of control rests with the worker.

Implications

Clearly, the two different kinds of work present very different challenges for management, not the least of which is figuring out how to fashion an approach to management that will accommodate both kinds of work.

Many current management practices have their origins in times when most of the work of most people consisted primarily of canned routines. Automation, mechanization, and the shift to knowledge work have changed all that. Many workers, if not the majority of them, are in jobs where the bulk of their working activities requires them to figure out what to do. Yet, the workers and not the work itself are still the main focus of control; management remains the location of control (even if only as an illusion) and management insists on exercising control over the workers in the mistaken belief that doing so will give them control over the work and its results; workers are still viewed as instruments of managerial will instead of as agents acting on their employer’s behalf and in their employer’s best interests; and, worst of all, managers still act as though they can demand and obtain compliance from people whose work demands of them that they craft their responses instead of carrying out canned routines. If ever there was a “disconnect,” it is between management practices that rely on exacting compliance with canned procedures intended to produce uniform results under highly standardized conditions and work that requires workers to craft their responses so as to satisfy what are often varying expectations of results under widely varying conditions.

So what’s to be done? It would be awkward and inconvenient not to mention impractical to expect managers to use one approach for canned procedures and another for crafted responses. Yet, it seems doubtful that using compliance-based approaches will work with people whose work requires them to craft their responses. Fortunately, the approach that works with crafted responses will also work with people who are expected to follow canned procedures. Only one management approach is required; unfortunately, it’s not the one that is in place today. The challenge facing management is to overhaul its own practices, to shift from controlling people and exacting compliance to supporting people and eliciting contributions; to shift from directing and demanding to supporting and enabling; to shift from viewing workers as instruments of managerial will to seeing them as agents acting on behalf of their employers; to focus not on the worker but on the work, in particular, on results.

The diagram below serves to recap and summarize the discussion above.

About the Author: My name is Fred Nickols. I am a writer, an independent consultant and a former executive. Visual aids of one kind or another have played a central role in my work for many years. My goals in writing for SmartDraw’s Working Smarter blog are to: (1) provide you with some first-rate content you can’t get anywhere else, (2) illustrate how important good visuals can be in communicating such content and (3) illustrate also the critical role visuals can play in solving the kinds of problems we encounter in the workplace. I encourage you to comment on my posts and to contact me directly if you want to pursue a more in-depth discussion.

SmartDraw.com’s Strategic Planning Process from Start to Finish

Aaron Stannard — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:22:00 GMT

In my last post I introduced “Visual Strategic Planning,” a simple methodology that improves any strategic planning process by making it easier:

To organize work among the members of the strategic planning committee or team by using mind maps, project charts, and org charts;
To organize the large amounts of data using mind maps;
To analyze external and internal issues using PEST analysis, issue maps, analysis maps, and other types of visuals;
To synthesize strategy using SWOT analysis and generic strategy matrices; and
To tie strategy back to execution using mind maps, project charts, flow charts, and org charts which you present to your implementation team members.

SmartDraw itself followed this Visual Strategic Planning process during fall, 2009 and we found it to be immensely valuable. Like most companies, we didn’t have a regular strategic planning process and it had been a while since we had done any.

What prompted us to start a new strategic planning exercise for the company? Everyone in the company had a clear idea of what our mission was and still is, “to make visual communication as commonplace as written communication,” but we had very conflicting ideas on how to accomplish it. Additionally, a number of external factors (mostly technological ones) needed to be formally addressed in our operations less those factors transform from opportunities into threats as a result of inaction on our part.

The Strategic Planning Cycle

Although every strategic planning process is different for every business, the Visual Strategic Planning process is modeled off of this cycle, where the steps are followed in this order:

Propose mission
Propose goals
Examine internal issues
Examine external issues
Summarize findings in a SWOT analysis
Formulate strategy

Strategic planning is an iterative activity; you might begin the strategic planning process with one mission and end with another. It really depends upon what your findings are during the process.

Pre-Planning

Before the strategic planning process can begin in earnest, a number of items have to be resolved by the organization’s management – namely who’s going to lead the strategic planning effort, who is going to be involved, and what the strategic planning process will look like.

Strategic planning facilitators

Before SmartDraw got started with its strategic planning process, the executive management team selected an external consultant who was going to act as our strategic planning facilitator. In hindsight, I think it’s always best to have an outside perspective when you’re discussing your company’s strategy and direction; our facilitator was excellent in helping us avoid myopic issues and keeping the process moving. In many businesses, the CEO acts as the strategic planning facilitator if the company chooses not to hire a third party.

Setting up a strategic planning team

The strategic planning team consisted of all members of upper management as well as some key middle managers, me among them, and our facilitator – about ten people in total. The members of upper management represented the whole of the company’s operations, but the middle managers were brought in simply because the strategic planning facilitator wanted some perspective from people who are actually going to have to execute the gory details of the strategy.

For example, the upper management team could make all the theoretical strategic decisions it wanted to about the direction of our product, but ultimately they’d need a reality check from our Director of Product Engineering, who’d be the one actually making those product development decisions happen.

Additionally, having some extra people available to collect data and research for the internal and external analysis portions of the strategic planning process helped expedite everything; ultimately, the upper management team would have had to get much of its raw data from those middle managers regardless.

Establishing and communicating a strategic planning process

Before SmartDraw held its first strategic planning meeting, our facilitator drew up a strategic planning process flowchart to show us how the process would flow, how long it would take, and where it would ultimately lead us. At our first meeting this was communicated to us, thus we always had a sense of where we needed to go next throughout the process, which made us realize how much progress we were actually making on it after each meeting.

Step 1 – Propose a mission

This step doesn’t take long for most companies. Indeed, SmartDraw completed this step in approximately ten minutes during our strategic planning efforts during fall of 2009. Our mission didn’t change during the course of the strategic planning process although it can from some businesses; our mission was, and still is:

“To make visual communication as commonplace as written communication in business, government, and education.”

We simply debated some semantics of it and then agreed that this still most closely aligns with our organization’s competitive advantages and interests.

Step 2 – Propose goals

Based on our mission, SmartDraw selected a number of big, hairy, audacious goals (BHAGs), mostly pertaining to the adoption of the product, the product’s ease of use, and its perception.

Using these goals and mission as our initial frame of reference for the strategic planning session, we jumped into organizing data collection efforts for the internal and external analysis portion of our strategic planning process.

Step 3 & 4 – Internal and external analysis

The first step was organizing our key analysis areas on an Analysis Map, a special mind map template we designed specifically for strategic planning. Here’s an example below:

In order to proceed with our analysis we needed to collect data specific to each of these areas, so we decided that responsibility among a number of our strategic planning team members and made a number of “working groups.” These people collected data and met independently over the span of a few weeks until the strategic planning facilitator. We used a Team Chart to organize our analysis groups and to assign them to each critical issue; here’s an example of our chart below:

Click here for a full-sized version of this Strategic Planning Team Chart.

We compiled all of our data for each of these categories into an Issues Map for that category. Here’s an example:

N.B. – this is an issues map for an example company from my Introduction to Visual Strategic Planning presentation.

On the left-hand side of this mind map we list the statuses of this area, operational efficiency & capacity in this case. On the right hand side we list the critical strategic issues in this area, shown below:

As each team compiled its issues maps, we hyperlinked to each one from the company-wide analysis map. This made it really easy for us to navigate from issue to issue during our breakout meetings and group discussion.

This process works for both internal analysis and external analysis – it allows us to get a clear idea of what all of the critical issues are in each area.

After each team was done with its data collection, we got together and compiled an overall Critical Issues Map. Some of the “critical issues” from each analysis group were, inevitably, not actually that critical, so the critical issues map reflects the group’s collective decision on what is critical and what isn’t with respect to the company’s strategy. Here’s an example:

N.B. – this is a critical issues map for an example company from my Introduction to Visual Strategic Planning presentation.

The critical issues map gave us a clear idea of what really needed to be addressed in our strategy, thus we moved onto our SWOT analysis to summarize our findings about our company and how it’s currently prepared to address these critical issues.

Step 5 - Summarize findings in a SWOT analysis

Our SWOT analysis was simple – all we had to do was take our critical issues and sub-issues and categorize them as internal strengths, weaknesses, external threats, or external opportunities. Below is an example SWOT analysis matrix:

N.B. – this is a critical issues map for an example company from my Introduction to Visual Strategic Planning presentation.

What happened following our SWOT analysis was nothing short of amazing – as soon as we were done with our SWOT analysis we could instantly see what our strategies and sub-strategies should be.

Step 6 – Strategy formulation and developing an operating plan

Once we had our SWOT analysis in-hand, we drew up a strategy on-the-spot and discussed its merits, and the discussion didn’t last long as the entire strategy was demonstrably validated by our findings in our internal and external analysis as well as our SWOT analysis.

Over the next couple of weeks the members of the upper management team worked on a high-level operational plan with some blanks-to-be-filled-in by members of middle management. Our operational plan looked something like this:

Using SmartDraw’s mind map to project chart feature, we converted this into a project chart and hashed out a detailed Q1 2010 plan with measurable tasks and milestones in a matter of minutes.

Click for a larger version of this Operational Plan Project Chart.

Using this project chart along with the other visuals we produced in the process, we were able to put together a presentation and easily communicate our plan and how we arrived at it to the rest of the company.

The visual strategic planning process we used is excellent, and I’d recommend it to any organization that’s searching for a new strategy but doesn’t know quite how to get there. If you have any questions about it, feel free to ask SmartDraw on Twitter or in SmartDraw’s LinkedIn group.

Strategic Planning for the Strategically Impaired

Fred Nickols — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:30:00 GMT

As a former head of strategic planning and management services at a $500M company, I can say without equivocation that the topic of strategic planning is an absolute quagmire of competing and conflicting models, concepts, and practices. For many people, especially for those working in smaller companies that don’t have armies of staff specialists with nothing to do but master and promote the arcane art of strategic planning, what is needed is some ruthless simplification. As I’ve written before, planning is nothing more (or less) than the formulation of a set of intended outcomes accompanied by a set of activities intended to lead to those outcomes. Results and Actions: those are the key elements of any plan. How then does one establish them?

A simplified view of strategic planning (or any other kind of planning for that matter) suggests a three-stage process:

1) Taking stock of the situation

2) Picking your targets and setting your objectives

3) Formulating your plans

In some circles this three-stage process is referred to as “STP” (standing for Situation-Target-Plan).

Taking Stock of the Situation

The STP Model

Taking stock of the situation can range from some informal discussions focusing on the conditions confronting or existing within the company through more formal, structured exercises, all the way up to carrying out sophisticated analyses of the business environment and internal operating circumstances. The classic SWOT analysis (an assessment of external opportunities and threats as well as internal strengths and weaknesses) can be part of taking stock of the situation, as can the externally-focused PEST analysis (a look at the political, economic, social and technological segments of the company’s business environment).

How structured should you be? How formal should you be? Should you conduct a SWOT analysis, or a PEST analysis, or do both (or conduct some other kind of analysis)? Well, the honest answer is that you probably should look into all of the available tools but don’t consider yourself obligated to use any of them unless doing so makes sense in your situation.

Picking Your Targets and Setting Your Objectives

There is a useful distinction to be made between Targets and Objectives. In this context, “Target” refers to that which is the focus of your attention. It might be sales (dollars or volume); it might be profits or profit margin; it might be share of market; or it might be productivity rate. By contrast, the term “Objective” refers to some specified value for a Target. You might set an objective that calls for an increase in gross sales of 20% per year for the next four years. You might set an objective that calls for capturing 40% of a particular market over the next five years. Or you might set an objective that specifies a minimum net profit margin of 18% for each of the next three years.

So, as a result of taking stock of the situation, you pick your targets (e.g., productivity rate) and you set an objective (e.g., 15,000 units per day).

Formulating Your Plans

With your grasp of the situation in hand, your targets selected and your objectives set, now you have to figure out how you’re going to realize them. What avenues are open to you for influencing the targets you’ve selected? Can you influence them enough to reach the objectives you’ve set? What kinds of actions and resources are required? Who does what when?

Do you need GANTT charts? Maybe; maybe not. Do you need exhaustively detailed schedules? Maybe; maybe not. Will MS Project or some other planning/scheduling software package be necessary? Maybe; maybe not. It all depends on the scale, scope and complexity of the organization and the initiative; the challenges confronting it; the associated risks; and the actions being contemplated.

Here is where your first important reality check occurs? Does your company have the resources and the capabilities to achieve the objectives it set? Can it in fact carry out the actions it is contemplating? If so, keep going. If not, perhaps you need to rethink matters. Such rethinking might lead you to revise your objectives, pick a different target or set of targets, or perhaps go all the way back to the beginning and take a fresh look at the situation confronting you and your company. Hence, the little circle of arrows in the center of Figure 1.

Recap

Sometimes, people are overwhelmed by the apparent complexity of the strategic planning process. Two pieces of advice: (1) Relax, because it isn’t really all that complex once you strip it down to its essentials, and (2) No company has ever been known to fail for lack of a strategic plan (although more than a few have been known to shoot themselves in the foot with one).

Bottom Line: Simplify; simplify; simplify. And one way of doing that is to make use of the STP Model (Situation-Target-Plan).

Visual Strategic Planning from Start to Finish

Aaron Stannard — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:01:00 GMT

Let’s face it – although most companies have probably heard of strategic planning and have done some on occasion, most do not have a well-defined process for doing it. And that’s understandable – strategic planning is a fuzzy and often painful process.

When SmartDraw itself undertook a strategic planning initiative in fall, 2009 we designed a new, simple, and effective strategic planning process that we have since dubbed Visual Strategic Planning. The VSP methodology made it a breeze for us to sort out our company’s critical issues, and eventually it lead us to a robust strategy that could be clearly and easily transformed into an operational plan, which in turn was easy to communicate to the rest of the company.

I tried to capture the essence of what we did, how it worked, and how strategic planning processes in general worked in a PowerPoint presentation, which I’ve uploaded to SmartDraw’s SlideShare channel and embedded below.

Introduction To Visual Strategic Planning

View more presentations from SmartDraw.

What do you think? How does this compare to what your company does or has done? Please feel free to ask questions in the comemnts below or in SmartDraw's LinkedIn group.

Introduction to Visual Strategic Planning

Aaron Stannard — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:50:00 GMT

I spent most of the space in my most recent post, “Four Reasons Why Productive People Hate Strategic Planning,” decrying the barbarically tedious nature of most strategic planning processes.

To recap, most strategic planning processes:

Take too long to complete;
Focus on issues that aren’t easily or clearly actionable;
Produce plans that are hopelessly long to read; and
Produce plans that are filled with so much corporate jargon that they are essentially unreadable.

If your company is like ours, then you want:

To be over and done with the strategic planning process in the shortest timeframe possible without producing a sub-par strategic plan;
To be able to see all of the strategic factors in front of you without having to read through heavy tomes of business literature and documentation; and most importantly,
You want to produce a strategic plan that’s easy to communicate to the rest of your organization.

Most modern strategic planning processes impede organizations from reaching these goals, which is why they suffer from the four problems l listed earlier. Thus, the solution to these problems is obvious: organizations need to try a different strategic planning process.

What is “Visual Strategic Planning?”

This is what SmartDraw.com did beginning in September, 2009: we engineered a visual strategic planning process and then implemented it within our own organization. Over the next few weeks I am going to outline how the visual strategic planning process works and share some documentation from SmartDraw.com’s own strategic planning efforts.

Obviously I can’t and won’t divulge sensitive information about our company, but I can certainly share the details of our strategic planning process with you.

Let’s start with the visual strategic planning methodology. Below is a high-level overview of a typical strategic planning process:

Most strategic planning processes contain these components, and the visual strategic planning process is no exception. What the visual strategic planning process does differently, however, is how it organizes and communicates information at each step during the process.

As we’ve discussed before, when you combine powerful visuals with written or spoken language, the outcome is up to six times more effective than written or spoken language alone. The visual strategic planning process leverages the power of visualization to produce strategies which are easy to communicate and easier to produce.

Examples

I’m going to go through the visual strategic planning process in detail over the next weeks, but allow me to give you a quick glimpse at some example visuals we used to help expedite the strategic planning process.

During the data collection stage (precursor to environmental and situational analysis), we decided to break out our key internal and external factors using a mind map; we began with a generic mind map like the one above. These are issues that virtually any business needs to consider during the course of its strategic planning.

The way a mind map works is thus:

You begin with a central topic, “data collection,” in this case;
You proceed to add new topics which encapsulate high-level concepts such as internal and external analysis; and then
You and your strategic planning team flesh out the mind map with related sub-topics beneath each topic.

There’s no limit to the number of sub-topics you can use. Below is an example of how we fleshed out the “Operational efficiency & capacity” section of our data collection for internal analysis.

As you can see, this is as elegant as it is simple. Within an hour or two your strategic planning facilitator can flesh out all of the high-to-mid level concerns that need to be addressed in your organization’s data collection efforts. Compare this to say, painstakingly writing down a list of every possible concern on paper and you’ll see the difference; mind maps are easier to organize, easier to rearrange, easier to communicate, and easier to produce.

Our solution is thus: strategic planners need to effectively and conscientiously use visuals to help facilitate better and more productive strategic planning. In our formal solution we outline some explicit strategic planning activity to type of visual mappings (say, mapping data collection to mind maps) as well as some ways to integrate the different visuals at each stage into the greater process. Over the next weeks I will lay out some documentation that explains how SmartDraw.com’s own visual strategic planning process helped us produce an excellent (well, at least we think so) strategic plan in a relatively short period of time.

You will not be disappointed.

In the mean time, if you would like to learn more about the principles and practices behind visual strategic planning, click here to download our Visual Strategic Planning whitepaper.

Update: I was asked in the comments for a copy of this template in SmartDraw format. I've attached it as an .SDT file which you can download from here: strategic planning - data collection mind map.SDT.

This template will only work in SmartDraw 2010. If you have SmartDraw 2010 installed and run into some difficulty with this template, please download the latest SmartDraw maintenance patch.

To use the template, all you have to do is just double click on it and it will open a new instance of SmartDraw with the content shown in the picture above already pre-canned and ready for your use.

Four Reasons Why Productive People Hate Strategic Planning

Aaron Stannard — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 00:40:00 GMT

I have a confession to make – I consider myself to be extremely productive employee; even on days when I’m off my game I probably accomplish twice as much as the average person (and twice as modest about it.) Like most diligent people, most of my fulfillment from work is from the satisfaction of a job well-done. If I feel like I’ve spent my workday doing something productive that advances the company’s goals and my personal goals, then I go home feeling pretty good. And this is precisely why I hate strategic planning with every fiber of my being.

Allow me to explain: nobody questions the necessity of strategic planning – companies need to routinely reevaluate their activities and objectives to see if they are on-course for success. If a company isn’t on the best heading for success, then strategic planning is the process by which it can find a better way to fulfill its missions and achieve its goals. The outcome of strategic planning, if done right, is invaluable for companies.

What productive people hate is the strategic planning process itself. Here’s why:

Problem one: the strategic planning process is heinously time-consuming

Strategic planning consists of hours upon hours of data collection, analysis, followed by endless meetings to discuss said data and analysis. Every external threat or internal weakness requires hours of discussion and debate, followed by more data collection, followed by more debate, and so on.

Once you’re organization is done done deciding what its most pressing problems are, the fun part begins: determining how to resolve them.

In preparation for writing this article, I innocuously asked some folks via LinkedIn Answers how long their average strategic planning process takes. Aside from the smart-aleck answers I received (which, admittedly, I probably deserved given how poorly worded the question was), the loose consensus seemed to be that strategic planning can take anywhere from four weeks to three months. Three months. Wars have been started, fought, and won in less time.

Strategic planning processes can take months to execute, and it’s no small wonder why – there’s a lot of moving parts in play for any organization, but that doesn’t make it any less agonizing for the members of the company who have to sit through endless meetings for painfully long stretches of time.

Problem two: most strategic plans focus on items that are not easily actionable

Strategic planning would be a lot easier for the average businessperson to swallow if they could connect the dots between their daily work and the corporate strategy which precipitates from the strategic planning process. However, too many strategic plans focus on items that aren’t appreciably actionable by the average businessperson – they focus on elements such as predictive financial models, cost estimates, market trends, product adoption rates, and other business abstractions.

Although those concepts are important, what’s an entry-level employee in the R&D department supposed to make of it? Is he or she supposed to look at those models and go “oh, of course! I know what I exactly need to do differently in order to support the company’s new strategy! I need to make my department’s operations increasingly value added while simultaneously decreasing overhead. It’s all so clear to me now!”

Many organizations make the pound-foolish choice to leave the so-called “implementation details” of the strategic plan up to the “individual contributors,” and thus they never fully address what the company’s employees are actually supposed to do in accordance with the new strategy.

One major reason why corporate strategies fail is because the strategy is planned and conceptualized in a space where it is conceptually disconnected from the action required to execute it. The executives in the ivory tower conceptualize some brilliant strategy, but they never address how the contributors in their organizations are supposed to actually execute it. And as Fred Nickols has pointed out on this blog before: strategy IS execution.

Problem three: strategic plans are too hopelessly long to read

You know what’s worse than too little documentation? Too much.

Strategy can be expressed succinctly, but the data and documentation necessary to validate and implement that strategy often cannot, which leads strategic planners down the path of inevitable documentation explosion.

The resultant strategic plan document itself is often a collection of tedious Word® documents where every piece of minutia is written out in long-form prose and a hodgepodge of unreadable models depicted via Excel® charts; the plan and its supporting data is often large enough to fill a giant D-ring binder.

So what happens when members of the implementation team, who were not privy to the discussions of the strategic planning committee, actually try to learn the strategy by reading the darn thing? Well, if they don’t suffer a severe back injury in the process of carrying the printed strategic plan back to their desk due its massive size and girth, they usually scan over the table contents, cherry pick some items of interest (I’m being generous,) then give up trying to get a sense for the overall strategy and their particular parts to play once they realize that the executive summary of the plan contains nothing more than a morass of buzzwords. No productive person has the time for this, and if they did, they would certainly opt not to spend it in this manner.

Problem four: most strategic plans aren’t understandable

IBM captured this concept best when they produced their “Buzzword Bingo” commercial:

For reasons that are beyond me, some authors of strategic plans insist on using language that never enters the lexicon of normal human beings. If I started referring to my friends as “value-added persons of interest,” I might very well be committed. We know why buzzwords exist – they exist purely for the benefit of the people writing the strategic plan in order to make it sound modern and “cutting-edge.”

But all it really does is compound the primary problem strategic planners face: buzzword-crammed language makes it harder to translate strategy into action, because it muddies the top-down communication required to implement said strategy.

So is there a better way to do strategic planning? Is there a method that avoids the gruesome headaches of traditional strategic planning practices? Perhaps, and that is something that I will be posting more about in the very near future.

A Strategic Planning Tool: The Goals Grid

Fred Nickols — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:02:00 GMT

One of the major products of any strategic planning process is a set of strategic goals and objectives. In this regard, the Goals Grid (see Figure 1) is a useful and flexible strategic planning tool. Below are listed some of its many uses:

prompt and facilitate discussion aimed at setting goals and objectives;
document the results of such discussions;
provide a visual array and means of organizing goals and objectives;
classify, clarify and analyze an existing set of goals and objectives

The purpose of this post is to illustrate the flexibility, utility and value of the Goals Grid by describing some of the different ways in which it can be used.

Setting Goals & Objectives

As the structure of the Goals Grid suggests, there are four basic categories of goals and objectives: Achieve, Preserve, Avoid and Eliminate. This structure can be used as a framework for generating goals and objectives. Here are two different sets of questions that could be used for this purpose.

From a strategic perspective:

What is it we want and don’t have? (Achieve)
What is it we have and want to keep? (Preserve)
What is it we don’t have and don’t want? (Avoid)
What is it we have and don’t want? (Eliminate)

A similar yet simpler set of questions might take this form, again from a strategic perspective:

What do we want to achieve?
What do we want to preserve?
What do we want to avoid?
What do we want to eliminate?

Clarifying Goals & Objectives

The previous sets of questions help in setting or generating goals and objectives. Another use of the Goals Grid is in clarifying goals and objectives. Suppose, for example, that as part of your tentative strategic plan you are contemplating a reorganization of your division, department or company. The structure of the Goals Grid can be used to formulate a set of questions useful in clarifying the goals and objectives of such a reorganization. Consider the following list:

As a result of the reorganization, what do we hope to achieve?
In the course of reorganizing, what might we want to preserve?
In the course of reorganizing, what do we want to make sure we avoid?
What, if anything, are we hoping the reorganization will eliminate?

The preceding set of questions shows how the Goals Grid can be used to clarify the intended outcomes of a particular course of action or other initiative.

Here is a good place to make a key point: You are not bound by the questions presented here. The usefulness of the Goals Grid as a tool lies in the ease with which you can adapt it to fit your circumstances. To illustrate, consider again, the reorganization issue. A different set of questions might be as follows:

What will the reorganization give us that we don’t already have?
After the reorganization is complete, what do we want to make sure is still with us?
What do we not have now that we don’t want after the reorganization?
What is the reorganization going to get rid of?

In other words, play with the framework of the Goals Grid and use it to formulate questions in different ways, using different words in order to examine the issue from different perspectives.

Analyzing Goals & Objectives

A third use of the Goals Grid is as a check on the comprehensiveness and the distribution of a given set of goals and objectives. You can assign each objective to the appropriate quadrant. When finished, you have a visual array of your goals and objectives which you can search for patterns.

Figure 2 displays the actual goals set by the CEO of a $500M company. There are some pronounced patterns. Except for customer satisfaction, all the goals are financial in nature. There is nothing in the Avoid quadrant and only one each in the Preserve and Eliminate quadrants. Clearly, the CEO’s goals cluster in the Achieve quadrant. Does this mean the CEO sees no threats to be avoided or has something been overlooked? All but one of the goals are financial in nature. Is there nothing of an operational nature or do those goals fall under the aegis of the COO? These kinds of patterns shed useful light on a set of goals and objectives. They draw attention to the nature of the goals and objectives, they expose areas that have been overlooked and they raise questions about empty quadrants.

Making Use of the Goals Grid

Finally, you can use this framework alone or in a group setting. It can be used to facilitate discussion and to record and communicate the results of such discussions. Individuals can use it separately and then compare, discuss and integrate their individual efforts. A consulting colleague of mine who uses the Goals Grid on a regular basis as part of a facilitated strategic planning process describes his use of it as follows:

“The process I use to facilitate groups of 12 or more people is to have smaller groups of 3 or 4 participants discuss and arrive at the top 3 responses for each of the quadrants using the basic questions: What do we want to achieve? What do we want to preserve? What do we want to avoid? What do we want to eliminate?

“Using one quadrant at a time, I ask each group to present one response and take turns among the groups until they have identified all the responses that come to mind for a given quadrant. Duplication is prevented by asking each small group to give a response that is different from any response already listed. Often I ask the groups how many of them had the response just voiced by a different group. When the quadrant is populated the group discusses the list. The process is repeated for each quadrant. The result is a populated Goals Grid that has great utility for a board struggling to make decisions about their organization.

“I’ve found that the question, ‘What do we want to eliminate?’ is very effective in triggering group discussions of issues that exist. The question, ‘What do we want to avoid?’ focuses the group’s discussion to anticipated issues and/or threats to the organization.”

In short, as I said at the outset, the Goals Grid is a very flexible and easy to use tool for setting, clarifying and analyzing goals and objectives (as well as issues) as part of the strategic planning process. If you’d like to experiment with using the Goals Grid, you will find a blank version in SmartDraw.

How Visual Aids Facilitate Strategic Thinking & Planning

Fred Nickols — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 18:28:00 GMT

The title of this post suggests that visual aids can facilitate strategic thinking and planning and indeed they can. They can help focus thinking and discussion; they can clarify complex relationships; and they can illustrate abstract concepts. As the old saying has it, “A picture is worth a thousand words” (or at least that can be the case).

But focus for a moment on the word “facilitate.” Visual aids can help and in so doing add considerable value but they are no substitute for thinking itself. It is also the case that strategic thinking and planning are not just important areas of endeavor, they are also quite complex and they cover a lot of ground. No single blog post can cover all that ground. So, in this post we’ll focus on a classic component of strategic planning: SWOT analysis.

SWOT is an acronym derived from four words: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. All are related to that phase or stage of the strategic planning process in which the planners take stock of or assess the situation. Strengths and Weaknesses are identified based on an internal assessment and Opportunities and Threats are determined from an external assessment. So far so good; but what do you assess? Well, there is where a visual aid can help.

Consider Figure 1 below. It is the first stage of a mind map that we will build using SmartDraw’s built-in mind map capability.

Figure 1 - Situation Assessment

As Figure 1 shows, a situation assessment has two main components: (1) an internal assessment and (2) an external assessment. In this diagram, shapes and fill colors are used to distinguish between areas or levels of the analysis.

Figure 2 - External Assessment

Figure 2 illustrates an elaboration of the external assessment. Again, shapes and colors are used to distinguish between levels or areas. Each additional area was easily added. More important, the ease with which they were added facilitated quickly generating a list of areas in response to a basic question; namely, “What is it I want to know about the external situation?” Well, I want to know about the quality and nature of our customer relationships. Ditto for suppliers and the community. I want to know about the competitive situation. What are our competitors up to? Where are we gaining ground and where are we losing out? What’s the political situation? Is there any pending legislation that might impact us? Are there regulations coming down the pike that we will had to accommodate? I want to know about the economy. What’s going on with interest rates? Inflation? The availability of capital? Spending patterns? I also want to know what’s going on with technology. Where is there technology available that we could be using but aren’t? Where are breakthroughs imminent? And, of course, I want to know about my company’s brand strength, its general reputation (e.g., for service and quality) and where we might be vulnerable.

In short, I want to know a lot about a lot of things and a mind map is a great visual aid for generating my “wish list” if you will and for keeping things organized. It is simple matter to “drill down” even further and add the specific questions I (or some other planner or group of planners) wants answered.

Figure 3 - Internal Assessment

A similar approach can be taken to the assessment of internal factors (see Figure 3). Again, my thinking is helped along by the ease with which I can generate and organize possibilities. What’s my financial condition? How good are our operational capabilities? What is the caliber of our people? Where and how are we making use of technology and how current or out-of-date is it? What’s the condition of our plant and equipment? Is it antiquated? Held together by chewing gum and baling wire? Do we have any noteworthy intellectual property such as patents? What’s our product mix or our mix of service offerings? On and on go the questions and making it easy to generate, capture, organize and display them is a big benefit.

Figure 4 below shows both components of the situation analysis.

Figure 4 – Internal and External Assessment Framework

A logical next step would be to elaborate upon the mind map in Figure 4, adding specific questions at the next level, all the while keeping it organized. (Contrast in your imagination the diagram above with all the prose it would take to describe it.)

And what can you do with this? Well, for one thing, you can use the mind map component in SmartDraw to create a similar visual that fits your company. For another, you could elaborate upon that and “drill down” to specific questions your company needs answered as part of its situation assessment. Finally, you can keep in mind that there is no ready-made SWOT analysis, or PEST analysis, or Situation Assessment (SA) lying around that you can simply pick up and use. You must fit the tool to your company and visual aids, especially a easy-to-use graphics software package like SmartDraw can get you off and running on that score.

In future posts I’ll be taking a look at some other ways visual aids – and SmartDraw in particular – can facilitate strategic thinking and planning. For now I encourage you to bring up your copy of SmartDraw, open up its mind map template and see what kind of internal and external analyses frameworks you think fits your company.

Fit & Fitness: The Yin & Yang of Organizational Sustainability

Fred Nickols — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 17:59:00 GMT

Figure 1 - Sustainability

Nowadays there is a great deal of talk about “sustainability” as it relates to organizations. Yet, for all the talk, it sometimes seems like wishful (or wistful) thinking. I think it’s an eminently practical concern. In this post I’ll set out what I see as the two key elements of sustainability – the Yin and the Yang as it were. They are Fit and Fitness (see Figure 1).

Sustainability, simply put, is the capacity to endure, to keep on going. The Fit and Fitness of an organization are the key elements of its ability to endure; and, more important, to not just survive but to also thrive. Consider the diagram below in Figure 2. It depicts a rather high level view of an organization as an open, adaptive system. In the course of reviewing it we’ll get at the notions of Fit and Fitness in more detail. Take a moment to look it over.

Figure 2 – The Organization as an Open, Adaptive System

As the diagram in Figure 2 indicates, organizations receive inputs which they transform into outputs by way of transformation processes (e.g., manufacturing). Organizations obtain the inputs they require by way of transaction processes (e.g., payments to suppliers, salary and wages to employees, and return to investors to name some of the more obvious ones). Organizations also exchange their outputs via transaction processes (e.g., goods and services to customers in return for revenues). It is this ability to carry out transactions – to import inputs and to export outputs – that makes the organization an “open” system.

An organization’s transformation or production processes and its transaction or exchange processes cross over the boundaries of typical organizational functions such as sales, manufacturing, research, HR, finance, etc. The organization’s executive cadre is ostensibly “above the fray” so to speak and in a position to ensure that cross-functional squabbles and boundary disputes do not impair these vital cross-functional processes.

Fit comes into play in the context of the organization’s alignment with its environment. Is it producing goods or services that are a “fit” with customer expectations and requirements? Are its prices competitive or does it have a particular feature or benefit that supports premium pricing? Are its sources of inputs secure and reliable? Is it attractive to investors? Can it attract and retain the talent necessary to its ongoing operation, expansion, improvement and innovation? Can it accommodate and adapt to economic ups and downs? Does it perform better than its competitors? These questions and many more like them can be used to assess the Fit of an organization with its environment.

Fitness comes into play in the context of what goes on “inside” the organization. Are its processes productive and efficient? Are its people engaged? Can it flex and adapt to meet changing internal circumstances? Does it continuously improve upon how it does what it does? Most important, does it keep track of and manage both its Fit and its Fitness?

As Figure 2 also indicates, in addition to its transformation or production processes and its transaction processes, there is a third set of processes – those that focus on the organization’s ability to align itself with its larger environment, to adapt to changes or maintain that alignment, and to innovate – to drive changes internally and externally. These processes ensure Fit and Fitness on an ongoing basis. Thus they ensure sustainability.

Again, the executive cadre comes into play. It has the primary, direct responsibility for the alignment, adaptation and innovation processes. It relies on internal and external intelligence as the basis for driving the changes needed to ensure alignment, adaptation and innovation. In this way, the executive cadre is also responsible for the sustainability of the organization. And that is as it should be.

So there you have it – sustainability in a nutshell. Fit and Fitness are the keys and, ultimately, it falls to the organization’s executive cadre to see to it the organization’s alignment, adaptation and innovation processes ensure its sustainability. Sounds simple enough, eh? Well, actually, getting started is simple enough; all you have to do is ask yourself a couple of questions and work hard to get good answers to them:

1. What provisions (e.g., policies, standards, procedures, processes) do we have in place for assessing the quality of our organization’s Fit with its environment and the Fitness of its internal arrangements?

2. What do we have and what do we need in the way of intelligence, processes and change management capabilities that focus on alignment, adaptation and innovation?

If you have really good answers to those two questions then you’re probably in pretty good shape. If you don’t, you might want to dig a little deeper to see just how sustainable your organization really is.