THE PLAN

Strategy - meet Planning! How many businesses start here rather than review their vision and journey? The Plan must have an agreed Vision and Journey in place to have a hope of ensuring a sustainable organisation. With a strategic direction defined, we have covered the Why? and most of the What? - we now come to the How? and the Who? and the When?

Just as Vision and the Journey make up the Strategic Direction, The Plan and the Execution make up the implementation. for most organisations the Plan is the #1 role of the Chief Executive ( I mean role - not the title some people have) The CEO is accountable for developing the Plan and the Executing it.

Horizon 1 - The Thematic Goal

Patrick Lencioni, in his great book, The Advantage, talks about creating great clarity by having a “Thematic Goal”.

The Thematic Goal concept is liberating; it gets out of meaningless KPI discussions into “what are we (collectively) trying to achieve over the next horizon?” Then, “what are the elements that make up that theme?” Now we introduce some concepts around OKR (Objectives and Key Results). Define success for each objective, then, what do we need to do?, then how do we know we are making progress along the way?

Lencioni also emphasises there are some standard operating objectives that are not Horizon dependent - Sales, Profitability, utilisation, cash etc. The concept here is the senior team is not choosing between change and improvement initiatives and the day to day - they need to do both.

How will we behave?

The idea of “Culture” has now become accepted as very important. My perception is most business leaders understand that but haven’t linked their statement of values back to why culture is so important.

To achieve the desired results we need our people to make decisions based on two basic elements:

• They need to understand our strategy - especially on a day to day basis on how we serve customers

• They need to understand how they are expected to behave in certain situations

Values are not nice to haves. Lencioni talks about categories of Core, Permission to Play, Aspirational and Accidental. I have added the categorisation of Core being “Distinctive vs Generic” and “compelling vs Supporting”

The purpose of this is a useful framework for BEHAVIOURS

Accountability not Titles

This usually is the hardest challenge for CEOs putting together an executable strategic plan. Most businesses in my experience have appointed people to titles. But the Horizons approach is emphasising that priorities change over time. Roles are what counts not titles.

In Australia, where I live, employment law is enshrined around detailed duties and tasks. It is depressing. Gino Wickman, who wrote the book “Traction” and introduced the EOS system ( a simpler version of the models in Scaling Up by Verne Harnish) talks about roles and accountability structures. A team, that genuinely embraces the concept of roles (which then vary over time as the business evolves) will allow alignment betwen the strategic needs of the business and getting it done .

Which leads nicely onto……..