A client called us to assist with creating a strategy in a newly acquired company. The new ownership did not want to impose their own thinking, but they wanted the management of the acquired company to embrace some new methods for strategic planning and engaging employees.
We determined that this intervention had as much to do with the way in which the team members interacted, as it did with the quality of the end product.
In designing the intervention we used a combination of different tools to produce the desired result, viz.:
- Strategy mapping (a la Norton and Kaplan)
- Scenario generation and backward planning (the Merlin Process)
- Group facilitation to produce executive team alignment
The result was a one-page diagram of the strategy that could be shared with any employee and explained in less than 30 minutes. The issues were honestly and openly discussed (sometimes heatedly) in a way that produced a complete and full consensual agreement. To get to this point, all the participants had to do some hard work to courageously state their points of view, even when it ran against the grain of majority rule.
Also, the Merlin Process includes the creation of a detailed vision that’s at least 20 years into the future, so the company was able to list a set of values and cultural attributes that they felt would be critical to accomplishing the desired result.
One of the benefits of using the strategy map was that it allowed for the very easy creation of the balanced scorecard, which was the logical next step to be taken.
Consultant’s Notes:
For more information on this approach, read “An Executable Strategy for Every Employee” by clicking on the link below.