The art of strategy (Chapter 1: The Vision)

Preface

Recently in peer company exchanges there was vivid interest in our way of driving transformation, in particular the strategic piece of it. I took this as motivation to share our approaches with the wider community.

You want to transform your function or your business for the better and wonder how to best approach it?

The answer is not completely a surprise: You need a strategy ;-) And indeed within large organizations we have a strategy for almost everything. Truly. The crux is that there is quite a wide variance of strategies in terms of how closely they guide execution, how present they are, how much focus they establish and thus how efficiently and effectively they produce business results.

With this article I want to summarize my experiences and observations during 10 years of writing and driving strategy in the form of a sort of manual. I hope the experiences shared in this writing will also be valuable for you and help you achieving your goals faster.

Introduction

A good strategy is first of all not the paper on which it's written. It is a set of choices you achieve through discussion with your stakeholders, choices that are ideally internalized by the entire concerned organization. And choice is even a better word than "decision", because choice explicitly indicates that you will NOT have all of what the other options contained. My only ask of a strategy is that it helps me deciding what is not important. The performance of an organization hinges on its ability to focus on value. And the ability to set focus hinges on knowing what you deliberately don't do. That's the job of strategy.

The performance of an organization hinges on its ability to focus on value. And the ability to set focus hinges on knowing what you deliberately don't do. That's the job of strategy.

A good strategy is made of three pieces. A vision, a target state and a roadmap. That's it. This series of articles will dedicate one article to each of these three chapters of strategy.

So let's take a deeper look at vision.

Chapter 1: The Vision

You need to start with an idea how a better world looks like. Imagining an entire world with all it's complexity of trillions of life forms, hundreds of million of businesses, etc is impossible. You need to choose an aspect of the world - in many cases also an aspect of your world - that you desire to change and you need to choose what you want it to change it into. These are actually the first two choices you make. Choose the context and what it should look like in future.

Examples: Excellent visions are for instance the simple "Immortality" by Alphabet's Calico (i.e., context: health; future: no death caused by age) , "Enabling people to live on other planets" by SpaceX, actually also pretty good our new vision of Bayer "Health for all, hunger for none". In our recent HR transformation strategy we set the vision in the area of Automation & Experience "Click, Smile, Done" (credits go to the great creative mind Tom Beyer ).

The first choice

All these visions are highly activating. Many visions don't get you out of bed in the morning. They don't speak to the audience they are for. So what's the difference? It's the first choice you take. To make the vision inspirational, emotional, worth striving for (well actually also to make your endeavor more valuable), you need to wisely choose the context for your endeavors and thus strategy: choose a big problem/opportunity relevant to your target audience. For instance, linking to above examples: the human mortality, the risk that our planet becomes less habitable or too small for the population, the hunger and sickness around the globe. Having a strong WHY at the foundation of your strategy, will attract more investment and talents, motivate the teams to give their best and will ultimately make the realization of your strategy more successful.

The second choice and how to write the vision statement

Then, the second choice is what you want to do about the big problem or opportunity. And usually the vision statement itself is precisely this high level WHAT you want to do about the problem. This needs to be worded in a very simple way yet paint a clear future state. So it's not the process of getting there, but it needs to be the state at the end. Also this state needs to be worth striving for. For that, make it bold. It's not the vision's job to be realistic. Plausible with fantasy is good enough. Your vision statement is supposed to talk to the emotions and activate people for your cause. Bold statements are simply more inspirational. "Increase the foot supply by 23.5%" vs "Hunger for none". If your vision is not grabbing for the stars, how should the people you lead ever do so?

Given that the vision statement is the WHAT, the second choice, how to incorporate the WHY? Playing with what is common knowledge within your target audience and cleverly choosing the words the why will be explicitly implicit, it will shine through. For instance, "Health for All, Hunger for None" requires no explanation. It's common knowledge that people get sick and that many don't have enough to eat.

The power of the vision

Common among great leaders who unite loads of people behind one goal is that they give people a powerful reason to act, a powerful WHY, as well as a powerful call for action, the WHAT. A typical picture that might take shape in your mind when reading this, is a stirring speech by a great leader laying out why something needs to be done. The vision statement has the potential to carry the WHY & WHAT beyond these speeches, and thus scale the message and its effects. Scaling in terms of reaching more people but also scaling in terms of sticking around in your head over time. The clearer and more compelling you have WHY & WHAT in your vision statement, the better the scaling will succeed. And the larger your organisation, the more important that the message scales.

Link to OKRs

A comment for those of you who work with OKRs (I highly recommend doing so): In this inspirational 11min talk John Doerr talks about the value of OKRs and especially the need to add a WHY to the Objectives (WHAT) and Key Results (HOW). I personally like to marry the OKR framework with strategy. As illustrated above, make your vision statement carry the WHY. Yes, it also is a WHAT, but so high level, that I'd focus here more on the WHY side of it. I'll come back on the exciting wedding of strategy and OKRs in the upcoming articles.

With this I wish you fun, assessing your current vision and/or creating a new one!

Continue here with part 2 of this article series.

Follow me if you are interested in more posts on strategy, leadership and agile.