Linking Mission to Strategy and Action

At a recent  team retreat, Jen Pahlka identified a problem that crops up at Code for America (a non-profit she started that I am an adviser to), and that I immediately recognized from O'Reilly Media as well.  We're mission-driven organizations, and it's easy to think that anything that supports our mission is worth doing.  But in fact, there can be many things that are consistent with our mission that don't advance our strategy or our programs.

Jen provided a way of thinking about organizational priorities that is extremely useful. She drew a pyramid with four layers:  Mission at the top, then Strategy, then Programs, then Activities as the broad base.

So, for example, Code for America's mission is to help government work better for everyone.  Its strategy for doing that is to bring best practices from the technology industry into city governments as a way of making them more agile, more transparent, and more engaged with citizens.  Its programs - the concrete embodiments of that strategy - include the Fellowship, a volunteer Brigade, the Peer Network, and the Civic Startup Accelerator.  Cities were chosen as the focus because they are the most tractable level of government, with the most immediate impact on citizens, and because demographic trends are making them the most important level of government in the 21st century.

The Fellowship recruits talented technologists for a year of service working with cities that present interesting problems that will make government work better, but more than that, have the potential for re-use by other cities.  The Brigade recruits technologists and activists who can't give a year of service, but can do occasional volunteer coding, documentation, open government activism, or other work to spread the applications developed by the Fellowship or other civic innovators to cities that are not yet part of the program. The Peer Network is a way for innovators in city government (including past and future participants in the Fellowship program) to share ideas and best practices, to work together on standards, and to share applications that are developed by the Fellowship or by other government innovation efforts.  The Civic Startup Accelerator works to support an entrepreneurial ecosystem (including, potentially, startups developed by Fellows who want to continue to build and support applications created during their Fellowship year), so as to create a richer environment in which civic technology innovation can flourish.

You can see how these programs complement and support each other.  And you can also see how each of them in turn rests on a set of activities.  Each year, Code for America needs to recruit new Fellows (in 2012, 550 applications for 26 Fellowship spots), new cities (in 2012, 30 applications for eight city partner spots). The organization, like all non-profits, needs to raise funds to operate.  (Though participating cities pay for the direct costs of their Fellows, the rest of the organization's operating funds come through grants and donations.) Brigade members need to be recruited and deployed on useful projects. Accelerator companies also need to be recruited and supported.  And the Peer Network needs to be nurtured through a set of activities supporting professional networking, including regular working groups and an annual Code for America Summit. 

Now, here was Jen's key point:  "We're a small organization.  We can't do everything.  And we're constantly being asked to support open government activities that don't fit with our programs. While helping to launch a Code for Europe or Code for Africa, or working with the Federal or State government, would be consistent with our mission, it is defocusing because it doesn't support our strategy, which is to start with cities. And it doesn't help build any of our programs."

Even activities that might seem consistent with our mission and our strategy may not be appropriate unless they are tied to specific program outcomes.  And what is appropriate changes over time.  For example, sending a staff member to run a hackathon in a particular city might have been a great way to recruit cities or Fellows early in the organization's history, when it had limited visibility.  But now, the organization has a fair amount of national visibility, and the key role of staff is to recruit local Brigade members to run events like that.

Finally, in a growing organization, the pyramid is also growing, both in terms of the scale of programs and activities, and sometimes by the development of new programs.  For example, Code for America began with one program: the Fellowship.  The Brigade grew out of the dual recognition that there were hundreds of Fellowship applicants who had to be turned away but who still wanted to contribute, and that there were hundreds of cities that wouldn't be reached by the Fellowship for years, but that could still benefit from its work.  The Peer Network likewise grew out of the recognition that we needed a way for cities to continue to work together once they had worked with the Fellowship.  And the Accelerator grew out of the conviction that one of the best ways to make sustainable change in how cities use technology to improve government for all citizens is to grow the commercial ecosystem of companies providing civic services in new ways. Jen made the strategic decision not to scale the Fellowship program to include more cities and Fellows, but instead to find ways to scale and spread the impact that each of the city/Fellowship partnerships was making.

Applying This Thinking to O'Reilly

At O'Reilly, our mission is to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.

Our core strategy is to find interesting people outside the company who are at some kind of cutting edge of innovation, and to amplify their effectiveness.  We initially did this by capturing their knowledge and best practices in books, so that others could learn from them.  We later realized that we could powerfully advance our mission by creating events that bring innovators together at conferences and other types of meetings, including "unconferences," small-scale working groups, and massive public events like Maker Faire, where they can share their enthusiasm.  We also realized that we could help them build startups - hence our early stage venture capital business, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.  O'Reilly is a much bigger and more complex organization than Code for America, so I won't recount all of our programs, but you should be able to see the pattern.

Because people are at the center of our mission, we've recently reorganized from a product-centered organization (Books, Conferences, Online Learning, Video, Research, Investing), into what we're calling "Practice Areas" focusing on particular cutting edge communities and the technologies that bring them together - for example, Strata for data science, Velocity for web performance, and Tools of Change for Publishing.

Our second core strategy is to identify "big ideas" that frame the work of the innovators we discover, to show how they are part of a broader movement.  We don't market our products: we make heroes of the people at the cutting edge of innovation, and tell stories about what makes them important. The transformation of media by the World Wide Web, the Open Source Software movement, Web 2.0, Open Government ("Gov 2.0"), and the Maker movement are all examples of broad technology trends that we've named and nurtured. (I wrote about this in my earlier post, It's Not About You.)

And of course, each of our programs has activities that support it.  We need to range broadly at the frontiers of innovation to discover people who are shaping the future. We need to recruit them as authors, conference speakers, and startup founders. We need to build channels for distributing our products.  We need to find attendees and sponsors for our events.  We need to transform our book publishing program to the ebook era. And so on.  And so on. 

But it's easy to do things that support our mission without driving the activities that support our programs to implement our strategy.  For example, when we run an event like Foo Camp, an unconference designed to help us suss out interesting futures and people at interesting edges, it's easy to over-weight our friends (forgetting the research and outreach nature of the event), or to fail to invite people who would advance specific strategic initiatives at the company.

And it's easy to fall into silos, so that we support only one part of the pyramid rather than the whole thing. We've had many a missed opportunity because we didn't realize that one of our authors would be a terrific conference presenter, or that one of our conference presenters was cooking up a startup that we would have wanted to invest in.

What I love about Jen's notion of the strategic pyramid is that it reminds us that mission and strategy aren't enough. Yes, as they say, execution is everything. What the strategic pyramid helps you to do is to identify the foundations that support your mission, and to make sure that the whole thing adds up. So many of us build organizations that look like Rube Goldberg devices, with unsupported activities that fit with the mission but have no chance of success because they are under-resourced, activities left over from past strategies, and programs that don't actually support where we're trying to go.

What's also wonderful about the pyramid is that it reminds us that the base is always broader than the top. All of the activities of the organization need to hang together.  So many times, a company's new strategic initiatives get lots of attention, but the execution depends on the work of many people who run supporting activities at the company. A true understanding of the strategic pyramid requires constantly valuing and investing in the base of the pyramid as well as in new programs and strategic initiatives.