2019 was joining the dots

One of the most valuable exercises in an organisation is joining the dots, which is the theme for my annual retrospective. There are lots of different ways you can connect all of the myriad activities taking place within a business, but I am yet to witness a situation that suffered due to "too much context".

Mission Informs Strategy

The mission statement from my previous organisation was one of the best examples in the industry of how you generate energy around a goal:

"working together to eliminate road death and serious injury" - DriveTech

When you have a strong vision of what you want your business to achieve, every activity - no matter how small - can be linked back to that mission. It can inform decisions, qualify what success means, and provide that spark to energise every task. The organisation-wide strategy has to fit the published mission, otherwise there is confusion.

Joining the dots between your strategy and your mission is a tool for clarity and decisiveness.

Strategy Cascades

As the mission manifests itself in the organisation's abstract strategy, this enables groups of people to assemble around increasingly concrete manifestations of the strategy at division and team levels. The master plan is decomposed into smaller game plans, which provide the context needed for teams to work with autonomy towards the mission.

At each level in this cascade, the strategy must be connected to the more abstract levels above it, and to the mission.

Feedback Loops

If you want to get things done, the real skill exists in the ability to identify the next small task that can be achieved to move an activity forward. Each time one of these small tasks is completed, you need to generate a genuine feedback loop. Did we genuinely get closer to the goal?

In particular, we want to ensure each feedback loop is genuine. For example, in software development it is common for a team to demonstrate their progress to an internal stakeholder, such as a Product Manner or Product Owner. This is not a real feedback loop, as it doesn't validate the connection between the internal stakeholder and the marketplace. After six months of this proxy feedback loop, you could put all of your hard work before real customers and find that it doesn't solve their problem.

The feedback loop needs to be real and it needs to be connected up to the strategy and mission. In the past, I used impact mapping to help join the dots. This year, we deployed the DITE cycle in our organisation. This provides a disciplined overlay for impact mapping that joins Data, Insight, Theory, and Experiment in a continuous loop.

If you imagine the mission as lightning, and the strategy as the lightning rod, the DITE cycle grounds the connection to encourage the energy to flow in the desired direction.

Mission ? Organisation Strategy ? Concrete Strategies ? Impact Map Goals ? DITE Cycle ? Small Task

Everything needs to be connected from top to bottom to allow the charged particles to flow unimpeded.

So What?

Can you join the dots between your mission, through your strategy, goals, and experiments, all the way to a concrete task? If not, you are missing out on the potential energy in your organisation. Try and map it out to discover if you have missing pieces, or if you haven't connected them. Join all the dots to make the complete picture.

Data-driven decision making doesn't reduce or remove the importance of a mission that humans can get behind, it's all connected... or at least it should be.