Decision Weaving applied -The Canvas

Sequential focus is key to develop a successful emerging strategy while keeping an agile startup attitude in an uncertain market environment. Typical startup founders want to improve everything at a time, because they want to have a great product, a magic demand curve, and a geographically growing company all at once. This attitude leads directly into big failure. But there is a way out, how to be speedy, agile and strategically right at the same time?

Agility & Strategic Decision Making

The concept of Decision Weaving perfectly describes this marriage between operational agility and strategic decision making in uncertain or evolving markets. And there is a practical approach to identify the initiatives in each strategic area and even more how to identify their sequential focus in time.

Recently Frederika Walter and I applied this concept with ServiceOcean in order to define their strategic roadmap to support their mission: eliminate any waiting time in for customers in inbound and outbound service interactions. The ServiceOcean team has built a great core product, a compelling value proposition and is operating in Germany and Switzerland with a remarkable traction. But what’s next? Extending the product scope, entering new applications, changing the demand generation model or expanding already in other markets? And in what sequence then approaching all the strategic options?

Applicable Methodology

I was applying the concept many times in my board roles, but together with Frederika Walter we were able to make it applicable as a workshop methodology to build a sequential strategic roadmap. The methodology helped us to define the sequence of initiatives and the desired results in the four core strategic focal areas of a startup: The Product, the Demand Model, the Supply Model and the Geographic expansion. And we extended this view with another area we called “People & Organisation” to understand what cultural and organisational prerequisites have to be given to support the above-mentioned strategic areas.

The two day workshop program is designed to answer the following questions:

• Status & Maturity: What is the current status and maturity of the four basic strategic focal areas?
• Needed Initiatives: What are the necessary initiatives in each area to support our vision and mission?
• Sequential Focus: What are the dependencies between the initiatives in different focal areas?
• Stepping Stones: What easy and cheap activities to incrementally improve background domains without consuming strategic resources need to be done? (Stepping Stones)
• Learning Plateaus: What do we want to achieve and learn before changing the focus towards on the next area?

The Workshop Program

With Frederika's workshop experience gained over many years, we knew that we need a common understanding and motivation of every participant of what we want to achieve together. This is crucial to succeed. Luckily the ServiceOcean team is a very motivated and fun team that enjoys working together. And additionally they were always very concentrated on what we needed to achieve - No laptop or mobile phones were used even though we never explicitly mentioned this. So we were able to fully focus on gathering, understanding and synthesising to get to the results step by step.?

Step 1. Set the scene

Understanding the concept of Decision Weaving, Focal Areas & Learning Plateaus is the starting point. It is needed to navigate over the two days and to give everyone an understanding of why we focus also in the workshop step by step on different areas without loosing the overview. And of course all participants need to share the Vision, Mission, Core Values & Value Proposition to be able to define purposeful initiatives in each area.

Step 2. Gather & Understand

As in real live you have to start at some point to gather & understand the status of each focal area and to identify first initiatives that are needed to improve. Take the area first that seems to be the most mature. In our case is was the product but could have been the demand model as well.

On top of the gather & understand exercise we defined and describe in detail the strategic objectives and initiatives for each area. The result was a poster for each strategic area in order be able to work with it the next day. Additionally we already collected a list of easy and cheap activities to incrementally improve things that are not strategically important, but need to be done anyway - our so called Stepping Stones.

Step 3. Decision Weaving Canvas

On the second day we warmed up with a recap of each strategic area and the defined initiatives. Based on a Decision Weaving Canvas that we developed we started to discuss the dependencies between the initiatives and defined a timeline to come up with a first sequence that overarched all strategic areas and initiatives. In the next step we discussed and defined the point of time, after which a defined Learning Plateau should be achieved and how that learning plateau should look like. We tried to make each of these phases as short as possible.

Now it comes all together - the sequence of the focal areas, the learning plateaus and ultimately we added also the stepping stones to the canvas and defined the overall strategic roadmap. In a final discussion round we reassured ourselves that the overall picture makes sense with regard to the dependencies and the timeline.

Inspiring Environment & Team.

With the ServiceOcean team we have spent two days in a very inspiring environment that allowed us to fully concentrate on our mission to define a strategic roadmap. We were very satisfied that we achieved what we planned. But even more, we achieved a common understanding of how all areas in the company play together and why sequential focus does not mean that someone is not important anymore. So the methodology helps to plan but it even more helps to understand and align towards the Vision and Mission. And it was a lot of fun.

And of course we have spent enough time to talk in between, having a walk in the vineyards and to enjoy food and wine in the evening.? With the ServiceOcean team we have spent two days in a very inspiring environment that allowed us to fully concentrate on our mission to define a strategic roadmap. We were very satisfied that we achieved what we planned. But even more, we achieved a common understanding of how all areas in the company play together and why sequential focus does not mean that someone is not important anymore. So the methodology helps to plan but it even more it helps to understand and align towards the Vision and Mission. And it was a lot of fun.

If you are interested the details on the methodology or if you want to understand how Decision Weaving workshop based on our Canvas works, pls. feel free to reach out to Frederika Walter or me.