The Importance of Themes in Developing and Communicating a People Centric Strategy

Last week I explored different thinking models and how to apply them to get the best out of teams. This week I will look a little further into deriving strategic themes and how they can help shape and communicate a strategy.

Imagine this, you’ve been given the challenge of developing a strategy to meet your organizations objectives. You’ve spoken to everyone, gathered the data, started filtering through sometimes vast information about your market, competitors and your internal capabilities and need to get to ‘what to do’ and ‘why is it important’? You may have used one of the strategic frameworks I discussed a few weeks ago to guide your thinking?

But how do you ensure your team is agile, focused, and aligned in their efforts to execute and the strategy doesn’t become something that sits in your drawer never to be seen again? One of the most effective ways to achieve this is through the development and communication of strategic themes.

What Are Strategic Themes?

Strategic themes are broad, organization-wide areas of focus that provide a framework for decision-making and prioritization. They serve as the pillars of a strategic plan, linking various initiatives and activities to the overarching mission and vision of the organization. Strategic themes are high-level, typically long-term in nature and encompass multiple functional areas, ensuring that the entire organization is working towards a common set of objectives whilst ensuring all actions are aligned with its long-term goals. Understanding and leveraging strategic themes can significantly enhance an organization's ability to develop coherent strategies, remain agile and effectively communicate them across all levels of the business.

Identifying strategic themes from the data gathered sits firmly within mystery to heuristic in Martin’s Knowledge Funnel. Using emergent thinking and analysis techniques such as filtering, pattern recognition, pairing and diametric opposing can help practitioners’ synthesis volumes of data into a couple of key themes that describes what the data is saying.

However, a word of caution. To see patterns and understand what the data is telling you one must remove cognitive bias by asking the question, “do I understand what’s going on and why?” This is better framed before data collection. Particularly when you are framing the ‘research’ question and sub questions. But if you are inheriting the data gathered by someone else, pausing and leaning in to ask yourself “do I understand” questions can help you from making premature conclusions.

Why are Developing Strategic Themes Important?

Put simply, summarising large quantities of data into a few easily understood themes is the primary importance. However, thematic development provides solid foundations to build upon as the strategy is developed but more importantly as it is executed. In my opinion this is a continually learning exercise where the strategy is continually iterated and updated.

1. Focus and Alignment - Strategic themes help organizations maintain focus on what truly matters. By identifying key areas that are critical to success, organizations can channel their resources and efforts towards activities that have the greatest impact. This alignment ensures that all departments and teams are working towards the same goals, reducing redundancy and enhancing efficiency.
2. Clarity and Direction - Clear strategic themes provides a sense of direction for the entire organization. It helps leaders and employees understand the priorities and the rationale behind various initiatives. This clarity is crucial for making informed decisions, setting realistic goals, and measuring progress.
3. Resource Allocation - Strategic themes facilitate better resource allocation by highlighting the areas that require the most attention and investment. Organizations can allocate budgets, personnel, and time more effectively, ensuring that critical projects receive the necessary support.
4. Risk Management - By focusing on a few strategic themes, organizations can better manage risks associated with strategic initiatives. It allows for a more thorough analysis of potential challenges and the development of contingency plans, ensuring that the organization is prepared to navigate uncertainties.

Benefits of Strategic Themes

I am a big believer that if it isn’t written down, it is not communicable or measurable. Therefore, it doesn’t exist. How many times have you heard, "there is a strategy' but never seen anything that describes it? To me the main benefit of strategic themes is to make something tangible, quantifiable and eventually measurable.

The other benefits of developing strategic themes include:

• Consistent Messaging - Effective communication of strategic themes ensures that everyone in the organization understands the priorities and their role in achieving them. Consistent messaging across all communication channels helps embed these themes into the organizational culture, making them a part of everyday operations.
• Engagement and Buy-In - Clearly communicated strategic themes can inspire and engage employees by providing a sense of purpose and direction. When employees understand how their work contributes to the larger goals of the organization, they are more likely to be motivated and committed to their tasks.
• Visualisation – As I will explain later strategic themes form the foundations to build upon. However, to benefit from the communication of strategic themes once must understand different learning styles, to benefit from the people in the organisations latent ability to be innovative and make creative leaps. I call this stage “riffing off, of each other.” This is an amazing situation where things start to accelerate, and the team operates in what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a flow state. This is where the magic happens. One where positive outcomes are the result of a highly synchronised state of creativity.
• Performance Measurement - Communicating strategic themes enables organizations to establish objectives and key results (OKRs) and key performance indicators (KPIs) that are aligned with their long-term goals. I will explore OKR’s, KPI’s, their differences and when to use them in a later post. This resulting alignment ensures that performance metrics are relevant and meaningful, providing a clear picture of progress and areas needing improvement.

This approach helped me develop the strategic measurement framework at VRP:

1. Control Plus - global standardisation and control
2. Value Delivery - delivery as a value creator not cost to serve
3. Inspire and Retain - people centricity, L&D, succession
4. Target 50 - commercial, service profit chain
5. Base 30 - utilisation and reduction of context switching
6. CSAT 5 - customer centricity, retention and renewal
7. Practice Growth - differentiation and our why and what we are known for.
8. Summit - pushing the boundaries and deepening Salesforce relationships

From this measurement framework I was able to develop OKR’s and KPI’s that fed into these groupings.

• Transparency and Stakeholder Confidence - Transparent communication of strategic themes can also build confidence among external stakeholders, such as investors, customers, and partners. It demonstrates that the organization has a clear plan and is committed to achieving its goals, which can enhance its reputation and credibility. As explained in a previous post, building credibility in a consulting and professional services business is difficult, has many levers that need to be considered and takes time. Strategic themes helped us accelerate up the maturity curve to win recognition from the likes of ISG as a ‘Leader’ in their magic quadrant as well as being selected on some wonderful enterprise transformation programmes.

To bring this to life, at VRP Consulting, I developed 4 broad groupings that I categorised all data against. The themes included:

1. Roadmap and communications – people wanted to see how things would transform and how they would be impacted/benefitted
2. Structure, roles and goals – people wanted to understand their place and what great looked like. ?
3. Process, utilisation and value optimisation – this was all about ways of working, financial metrics and ensuring that in the pursuit of positive returns how people work was considered so diminishing returns can be avoided.
4. Learning, growth and retention – this was all about the WIFM – what’s in it for me? Or in a more holistic sense what’s in it for us as we evolve and build on the shoulders of the giants before us as a community of practice.

In the early stages of the global strategy development this was an imperfect logic and became my ‘heuristic’ in case I surfaced something that was an outlier. I continually asked myself “do I understand” questions. It meant I was able to filter large amounts of what was often opinion into something that could be tested. The four thematic groupings covered the full value chain including HR, finance, operations, marketing, consulting, and delivery.

Over time this was refined into what became strategic pillars that became the basics of a strategy map. I will explore strategy maps in further detail in a later post. The pillars became the foundation of a people centric strategy.

Strategic themes are essential for developing and communicating a coherent strategy in any organization. They provide focus, clarity, and direction, ensuring that all efforts are aligned with the long-term goals of the organization. By effectively communicating these themes, organizations can engage employees, allocate resources efficiently, manage risks, and build stakeholder confidence. In an increasingly complex and competitive business environment I hope my explanation has resonated. I hope that people will be able to interpret ways to make sure that once a strategy is developed it doesn’t stay in the practitioners head or reside on a shelf or draw to be forgotten.

Previous Post - Doing the Right Thing - The Power of Structure and Thinking Models

Next Post - OKRs and KPIs: linking to performance management and continuous improvement

Richard Sharp is a high impact leader adept at shaping teams to deliver transformational operating models, new product and service capabilities. Proven ability to cut through the noise to lead, inspire and empower teams to deliver scalable platforms for success.

He has a history in technology management consulting, digital transformation, and ISV product development / commercialisation across professional services, logistics, manufacturing, energy & utilities, not for profit, and government industries in UK, Europe, USA, and Asia Pacific. He holds an MBA, Master of Information Systems Management, DipAppA (Graphic Design) and multiple project management certifications.

He is known as the glue who brings it all together:

??Work across functional silos to build collaborative ways of working

??Servant leadership - Work through others and lead through whitespace