what stops our strategy ending up in a drawer?

I once joined a company with plenty of drive and a thousand good ideas a day. the management team knew what they wanted. the headline was growth, and they were growing nicely too. the bottom line just wasn't quite keeping up.

it didn't take many questions before the picture was clear. everyone agreed that growth had to come. nobody agreed on where it should come from. further down the organisation people didn't know either, and there was a nervousness that new proposals from management would be squeezed into a working day that was already full.

the classic answer would have made it worse

the obvious move is to revisit the strategy and lock it in for the next three years. in this company that decision would have been a guarantee that nothing changed. the plan would sit in a drawer, and everyone would carry on exactly as before.

a guiding star, not a number

we set growth as the guiding star without putting a concrete target on it. not because numbers don't matter, but because a number at that point would have started a discussion about the number instead of about the road to it.

then we found five tracks. two drivers we needed to cultivate more, and three barriers we had to work on before growth was possible. five is a number a management team can hold in its head.

initiatives with an owner

within each track we generated initiatives, large and small. some became ways of working and mindset. some were placed in the organisation as projects. some stayed with management. every initiative got an owner, a group, a budget and a plan.

the hard part

and then came the part that made the difference. we couldn't do all of it in the first quarter.

prioritisation is where a strategy stops being an opinion. as long as everything is important, nobody has taken a position. the moment the management team had to choose what would not happen in the next three months, it became clear what they actually meant by growth.

the plan wasn't followed to the letter

it was never meant to be. we revisited both the initiatives and the order along the way, and that gave us some of the best conversations of the whole process. the results came quickly.

not locking ourselves in a hundred per cent suited that company. in my experience it suits most.

what an initiative looks like

every initiative fits on one page. not because the format is magic, but because one page forces a decision where ten pages allow a reservation.

the headline isn't the important field. the two that decide whether the initiative comes to anything are who owns it and what is blocking it. most plans have the first and skip the second.