We’ve come from a place where senior management sit together in a room, in lengthy meetings, to make their business decisions. They have all the necessary data, which has been collected and distilled over many weeks and months. They analyse what is happening, they make appropriate decisions and then they roll out the results into the business.
But this isn’t enough anymore
As information and data are now in real-time, we need to be continuously collecting and reacting to customer feedback. We need to be making real-time tweaks to what we’re doing. The rate and volume of information that we’re collecting means that spending months evaluating and crafting a strategy isn’t just time-consuming, by the time it’s rolled out, it’s potentially already out of date.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that strategy, at a high level, is totally generic. Every company in the whole world is trying to do the same thing:
- We’re all trying to get bigger - more customers and more revenue
- We’re all trying to get better - better customer satisfaction and engagement
- We’re all trying to get faster – increasing productivity
- We’re trying to do things cheaper – saving costs to increase profitability
The way we achieve these things (bigger, better, faster, cheaper) is also completely generic – at a high level. We do this by getting, keeping and growing relationships with customers and employees. So understanding that, in this, we’re all really the same, we have to create the competitive difference in the way we execute.
And, the way we do this is also generic. We start with an awe-inspiring ‘Vision’ - a reason for being. Then we have our ‘Mission’ – something with a start and an end date, which we can actually achieve. Below this, we have out ‘Goals’ – how are we going to make the mission happen.
In terms of how this is actually ‘done’, it could be one of two ways:
- First, it’s by following systems and processes
- Second, it’s by completing projects
This applies to the organisation, as a whole, to individual departments and to individual teams.
But, even with identical strategic frameworks, it’s possible to get completely different results. We all have different values and different principles that guide the way we do things. These are the things that will make the outcome different.
Why organisational clarity on strategic direction is the key to getting there
Getting this information to filter through the entire organisation, so that every single person knows exactly how their tasks help the organisation to meet its strategy, is hard. In fact, it – organisational clarity - is the holy grail of 21st Century business. Without organisational clarity, it can feel as though we’re headless chickens trying to do too much at once. There’s no focus, no sense of prioritisation and no sense of what is really urgent.
This whole approach is very easy to say, but it’s very difficult to do. We’re never going to stop being overwhelmed with information. So we need to make sure that we’re doing the right thing and that we focus.
Every single day project, teams and whole companies fail. This isn’t because they’re lazy or not working had enough. It’s because they’re not doing the right work. Without organisational clarity, you have no filter. So you don’t know what to look at and you don’t know what to do.
