"In spite of all our efforts, employees still don't seem to understand and buy into the strategy."
"Our senior team just can't seem to get on the same page."
"We have a strategy, but everyone interprets it differently and goes his own way."
"We don't have clear leading indicators warning us when things first start to get off track."
If any of these comments sounds like your organization, you should consider Strategy Mapping. For almost a decade Metrus has helped its clients strategically align their organization with this powerful technique.
What exactly is strategy mapping and how can it help my organization?
Strategy Mapping is a technique for helping an organization clearly define - and communicate - the causal links among different components of its strategy. It involves reducing strategic complexity to a core set of key outcomes and drivers that are graphically represented to show how they causally relate one to another:
A Strategy Map and supporting materials are used to help an organization:
- Align the organization leaders around a single interpretation of the strategy
- Communicate the strategy to employees
- Identify leading indicators of strategic success
- Validate and test assumptions about what core capabilities that drive bottom-line performance
- Structure a core set of strategic performance metrics
- Accelerate strategy execution
Any size organization - from a small cross-functional team to a billion-dollar enterprise. Any group with goals and strategies for achieving their goals can benefit from Strategy Mapping. The process of designing the map helps the leaders align themselves with the core strategic elements. It subsequently creates a powerful tool for communicating the strategy to others and for tracking strategy execution.
The following six steps are involved in Strategy Mapping:
- Review the existing strategy for completeness and focus
- Identify difference in individual leaders' interpretation of the strategy and ideas about the causal links among different strategic components
- Review existing data or information pertinent to resolving these differences in perspective
- Work with the organizational leaders to resolve differences in perspective and build a prototype Strategy Map with associated behavioral definitions
- Validate the map with key stakeholders and agree on ways to evaluate its successful implementation
- Establish mechanisms for using the strategy map to guide strategy execution
The entire process can typically be completed in one to two months depending on the availability of the leaders to work on the project.
A leading technology company invested heavily in creating a new market strategy, including hiring a leading strategy development firm. Even so, the leaders of different divisions and project teams continued to argue and to hold very different interpretations of how the strategy was to be implemented. Employees throughout the organization viewed the discord at the top as reflecting weak leadership and poor executive teamwork. The leadership team chose strategy mapping as a mechanism to help align both themselves and the rest of the organization.
Through interviews and a brief questionnaire Metrus consultants were able to identify where the leadership team members interpretation of the strategy differed and where conflicting market and organizational assumptions were driving divergent perspectives. This information was then shared with the leadership team during 1 1/2 - day meeting. During the workshop key differences in perspective were resolved and the team was able to develop a series of agreed-to hypotheses concerning the cause-effect relationships among various components of the strategy. These relationships were next captured in the graphical diagram below. The team went on to develop precise behavioral definitions for each component in the map that served as the basis for evaluating the degree to which the strategy was being effectively executed.
Finally, the map and definitions were used as the basis for communicating messages about the strategy to employees, as well as a focal point for quarterly reviews held by the leadership team to evaluate strategy execution. Of particular value was the role that "driver" elements in the map served as leading indicators, providing early warning to the leaders if core capabilities they expected to drive financial performance did not improve. Minutes of these quarterly reviews were posted on the company intranet to inform employees on a regular basis were the organization stood in terms of executing the strategy. Increased understanding of the strategy and its execution lead to much greater employee involvement in executing the strategy and to an acceleration in both top- and bottom-line financial improvements.
To see additional examples of strategy maps, click here (if you want to save the PDF file on your hard drive, right-click and select "Save Target As...", "Download Linked File As...", or a similar option.
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