JODIE
Kia ora koutou, and welcome to today's webinar, "Strategy that Sticks." To those of you joining from Aotearoa, kia ora. And to those of you joining from Australia and anywhere else in the world, we wish you a warm welcome to today's discussion. I'm Jodie O'Neill, and with me today is my wonderful colleague, Sharlene Harvey. For those of you joining us for the first time, Allen and Clarke is a consultancy that helps organizations make complex, high-stakes decisions with evidence, defend them with confidence, and build them to work for the people and communities affected. We specialize in strategy, change management, evaluation, and policy, and in particular, helping organizations close the gap between a strategy that reads well and a strategy that actually changes how people work. I'm Allen and Clarke's New Zealand-based strategy and planning lead, and I specialize in all aspects of strategy, from planning through to execution, and the nitty-gritty details of business planning.
CHARLENE
Hi, and I'm Allen and Clarke's regulatory strategy and practice lead. And I'd say that I've spent 20-plus years designing all kinds of strategies and leading their implementation. So you could say that I've kind of learnt the hard way on what really works. We're here to talk today about making strategy stick. And when you registered for today's session, we asked you a question, "What's the hardest aspect for you about making strategy stick?" So on the screen, you'll see what you told us about your biggest challenge delivering strategies. So take a moment, look through all the comments on the slide. And as you're looking through, I'm sure you're going to see yourself in a few of them. Now, as Jodie and I were working through all the comments that came through, what we saw was that the hard part is not about writing the strategy. Almost every answer was about what happens after, the translation, getting buy-in, maintaining momentum, measurement, keeping it alive when priorities shift and resources get stretched. So what this tells us, and what Jodie and I see in our work, is that most organizations aren't bad at creating a strategy, they're bad at what happens between the strategy document and the work people do every day. And that's the gap. And the usual approach to closing the gap is for organizations to treat the strategy as something you produce, you hand down, and you implement. And that's where it falls over, because "implement" assumes that there's a finished product at the top, and the job is to just push it down through the organization. So the people who need to bring the strategy to life weren't part of building it. They don't own it. They don't see themselves in it. And they quietly get on with what they were doing before. So what we're offering you today is a shift or a reframe. So stop thinking about how you implement your strategy and start thinking about how you integrate it.
JODIE
Yeah, thanks, Sharlene. And when we use the language of integration rather than implementation, the reason why we do that is because implementation is quite a linear concept. It happens at a specific point in time after the document has been produced. But when you think about integration, that brings to mind more of a continuous cycle, something that's always happening. You're always developing, always embedding, always adapting. Because we think that strategy doesn't have a finish line, instead it has a rhythm. So today, we're going to talk about three different parts of the cycle of strategy, development, launch, and ongoing. So, as I said before, these aren't linear or discrete stages, but are kind of a more common and traditional way of thinking about strategy. At each of these stages, we'll talk about the common problems that we see with strategy integration, give you some questions to help understand those problems, and an example of a practical tool we use. We'll also share some examples from our own work where these tools have made a tangible difference. There are a whole range of tools out there that you can use for strategy integration. The key is knowing what tool to use when, and what you're trying to get out of the tool. So, let's start with development phase.
CHARLENE
So, most strategy work always fronts in all that intellectual effort. What should the strategy say? What are the priorities? What's the vision? And organizations invest a lot of time and resource into getting the content right. But here's the thing we see over and over again. The content is fine. What's missing is the integration work, really understanding what it will take to make the strategy work. What needs to change, how will we know that we're on track and it's working? So these are four key questions you should be thinking about when you are developing a strategy, not after the launch, during the development, before it's signed off. So the four questions we've got on the screen are, how is this strategy going to change decision-making? So being really clear around what are the key decisions, what are the trade-offs, what are the priorities that you're expecting? What are the ways of working that need to shift, to fully implement the strategy? So what are the behaviors you're expecting? What are some of the key processes, that need to be in place? Is there any new capabilities that are required to effectively implement it? Thirdly, are the resources aligned? And by resources, we mean people and money. Are you clear on what's the investment that's required? And then how are you going to track progress against the strategy? So thinking about the key performance indicators, the metrics, the reporting cycles. Working through and answering these four questions before the strategy is finalized sets you up for making the strategy what we call sticky, because you're already considering the key components to just bring it to life. And without these key components or mechanisms, you've only got a strategy document. It's just a document. Now, this is one of the key common pitfalls we see when people are developing a strategy. The strategy development process can consult widely across the organization on what the strategy should say, but not on whether it actually can be executed. It's quite common for frontline staff and middle managers and operational teams to be asked, "What do you think our priorities should be?" But they don't often get asked, "What would stop this from working?" And those are two very different questions, and you get really different answers. So going back to the questions and comments, when you registered, this was quite a common theme. We were seeing comments like, "It's built without sufficient input from the people responsible for implementing it." "Too many priorities and not stopping things." "No one knows how important it is." And these all point to problems that you're experiencing that will impact whether a strategy can be delivered. So when Jody and I build strategies, with our clients, we always try and surface these problems before it's too late. And there are a couple of techniques that we use to force this quick check-in around what it will make and what it will really take to make the strategy live. But the tool we use most often is called the pre-mortem.
JODIE
Yeah, thanks, Charlene. So I personally love a pre-mortem because this is a session where you bring people together to imagine why this strategy has died. It normally takes place during the development phase, before the strategy is finalized, but before it's been launched. And you bring people together, and they need to be the people that are going to have to live with the strategy. So not the leadership team or the team that's developed the strategy, but managers, operational people, people from all across the organization. And you ask them, imagine it's, say, 18 months from now or two years from now, and this strategy has failed. It's dead. What do you think went wrong? What was the cause of death? Then you work backwards from there. For each, cause that people have identified, you say, "Well, what caused that? What barriers weren't moved? Why didn't people respond in the way that we wanted them to respond?" The power of the exercise is it gives people permission to think about things in a different way. So they get the freedom to name the things that are essential for success, the enablers of the strategy, but also the barriers, the things that people might not want to talk about, like resistance to change. It can create the kind of thinking and connection needed to bridge from the strategic intent back to the delivery. A good example of this was when I was running a pre-mortem with an NGO during their strategy development. The strategy was pretty strong. They'd consulted with all of the people across the organization, their partners, external stakeholders. Everyone was pretty aligned and heading in the same direction. But when we ran the pre-mortem with the people that would actually have to deliver the strategy, they raised an issue that hadn't really been considered from an operational context. Mm. They were proposing to change some of the ways that they worked in a way that would have a really big impact on one of their partners. And the strategy was going to require some pretty fundamental changes in the way that work was structured with that partner And the implications of this on an operational level hadn't really been carefully thought through, before, because the two organizations were broadly aligned in their strategic direction. So it wasn't visible in the strategy document because the strategy document was describing what they wanted to do, where they wanted to go, rather than what they needed to do to make that happen. So this didn't mean that there was anything necessarily wrong with the strategy, and the strategy also didn't need to immediately answer the question of how those organizations were going to work together. But it meant that leadership had a chance to think about this, to engage with their partner, and have a direction of travel ready for when questions got asked after the strategy was launched. Mm. It is quite a powerful tool, and I think what you've seen and what we've seen is, yeah, it's the opportunity for the leaders that have developed the strategy to really understand the implications. So they're kind of in step and aligned with the people that need to implement it. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the development phase, that integration work that needs to happen before you launch. So that's one example of a tool that you might use during that phase. Charlene's going to take us into what happens when the strategy goes live.
CHARLENE
Thanks. So, it's quite common, the strategy's developed, the document exists, and now you need to make it land. And this is where organizations typically think that this is the making-it-stick work, and this is where it all begins. But if you've done the development phase really well, and if you've already been testing those four key questions, then the launch is mostly a translation exercise. You're helping people see what the strategy means for their part of the organization. But if the development phase didn't include that step to understand the implications of the strategy and what it will take to integrate it into everyday operations and the way that we work around here, then at launch time, when the strategy is launched, it quickly becomes an exercise in persuasion. You're having to convince people about the future, and staff will just have to trust the organization that they'll get there somehow. And what we typically see is senior leadership, they'll launch a strategy. There could be an all-staff meeting, a town hall, maybe a roadshow. People hear about the strategy. Hopefully, they nod, and they, yeah, they agree with the direction, and they go back to their desks. But three months later, nothing has changed. The senior team is frustrated. "We communicated it clearly. Why isn't it sticking? Why aren't we seeing this come to life?" And the answer is typically because the focus of the launch was around communication, and communication is not translation.
JODIE
Yeah. The second thing that we often see is similar, but a little bit different.
CHARLENE
Mm-hmm.
JODIE
So what we see is that senior leaders know what's in the strategy, but then you talk to middle managers and frontline staff, and they describe their work plans with no visible connection to the strategy. Yeah. So that isn't their fault. They probably really want to align with the strategy. They probably are trying to take all of those communications on board. But they actually can't tell you what it means for what they're doing this week, next week, in the long term. And the registration data that you gave us is full of this, people saying, "Staff buy-in, getting other people on board, making it meaningful for frontline kaimahi." The middle keeps getting missed. So it's quite often referred to in that way, the missing middle. But if we look at those four questions again, applied to the launch phase, what you want to be thinking about is how you are setting up progress tracking that people at every level can see and contribute to. So not just those organizational-level KPIs, but how can the frontline people see that what they're doing every day is counted towards that or contributing towards that? How are the decision-making processes being changed to explicitly reference the strategy to make sure that you are actually going in the direction you've decided you want to be going? Are the ways of working actually shifting, or is it just the old way, but a new label or a new way of talking about it? And have budgets, roles, and time allocations moved? If the honest answer to most of these is, "Not really," you haven't launched a strategy, you've announced one. And that's the key difference between communication and translation. So the key insight here is that strategy is carried by people, not by documents. It lives in how people retell it, how you translate it for teams, and how each retelling adapts the story to the audience while keeping the core intact. Mm. What you want is everybody telling the same story, but telling it in their own way, in a way that works for their context. And so the organization is not hearing just noise about strategy- Yeah ... but rather, they're hearing an actual strategy, an actual direction. So the question then is how you actually equip people at every level to carry the strategy in their own words, without drifting into just phrases that people say all the time, or just that noise. So, we've got a tool for Charlene that you often use in this scenario.
CHARLENE
Yeah. My favorite tool when we get to this phase is what we call a meeting in a box. Now, this is really useful if you've got to get a strategy across a lot of staff. So, for example, a new organizational strategy that goes across multiple groups. So a meeting in a box is a structured conversation kit. It's not a set of slides for managers to present. That's called a cascade briefing. Now, these can be really useful, but when we think about the launch of a strategy There needs to be that little bit extra to make the strategy understood and be owned by people implementing them. So if we compare and contrast a cascade briefing and the meeting in a box. So a cascade briefing is when senior leaders present the strategy to the direct reports, who then present it to their direct reports, who present it to their teams. And by the third retelling, the strategy tends to get diluted and can turn into what we call background corporate noise, or even corporate wallpaper. Everyone's heard the words, but no one really owns the meaning. It's just been told to them. And again, there's a time and a place for cascade briefings, but I do not use them for integrating a strategy. I only use them as a communication tool. So a meeting in a box is different. What it does is it gives every manager a facilitated conversation they can run with their team. So not slides to present, but prompts, exercises, and discussion questions that help each team answer, "What does a strategy mean for us?" Specifically for them, what do they need to do differently, and what does it look like in their work? Now, the output isn't a briefed team. It's a team that has built their own understanding of the strategy and what does it mean for them. One that the manager can speak confidently to, because the team has helped shape it, derive it, and you've got local ownership as opposed to top-down compliance. Now, I use this tool quite a bit, especially when launching larger organization-wide strategies. And the way I use it is to break down the key components of a strategy that you want the teams to really understand and digest and work through. And I design a set of exercises for them to work through within a typical team meeting time, so bite-size pieces. So, for example, with one organizational strategy we had just designed, there were four key shifts identified as part of the strategy, so we designed four meeting in a boxes, each one with an exercise for the team to explore what shift means for them. Yeah. It's a really cool way to get the teams kind of involved in that- Big time ... in that implementation, right? We're also really mindful, because you time box when you want this to happen as part of the launch. So, in that example, all the leaders within the organization, so I think that was about 600 odd, were expected to work through the exercises within a certain timeframe. So it meant that you had critical mass of conversations about the strategy happening as part of the launch, right across the organization. And by leaders facilitating these conversations, it was also showing their support and endorsement for the new strategy and their buy-in. What we also did was we segmented the various stakeholder groups or the leadership groups, as part of the strategy launch planning, and designed particular exercises for them. So, the meeting in the boxes that the senior leaders were getting were slightly different because of their role and the expectations that they were taking in leading the strategy, as opposed to frontline staff, who needed a different kind of interpretation and understanding of it. So meeting in a box is really powerful. It does take some effort and design work, but done right, it can be really effective. The key is that you're designing a conversation, you're not designing a communication. And most organizations, they'll invest heavily in traditional launch comms, the all-staff email, the internet page, a lovely, glossy CEO video. But almost none of it is invested in giving managers a structured way to have a conversation with their team, and that's what this tool, the meeting in the box, fills.
JODIE
Thanks, Charlene. That's really interesting. Before we move into the ongoing phase, we wanted to check something with you. So we're going to put up a quick poll on your screen. The poll question is, how often does strategy come up in your day-to-day decision-making? So you should have three options. So regularly, it's a live reference point. Occasionally, when someone remembers to mention it. Or rarely, it sits on a shelf. So take a moment. It's an anonymous poll, so hopefully you can be honest. But we'll share the results with you in a moment or two. I'm thinking that the split between the three answers will be about 10% regularly, and then kind of split between the two. Yeah. Well, I reckon most people will say occasionally. Occasionally? Yeah, but- Yeah, kind of in between. If you're one of the people that are ranking this as regularly, please throw into the chat why you think that is and what your organization has done to make it a regular occurrence, because I think that'll be handy for us to understand, but also for everyone else that is on the webinar today. That would be a great wee tip for everyone else, because actually, this is the topic of the webinar, how do you make strategy really, we use the term sticky, but yeah, how do you embed it into everyday operations? So that will be really insightful. Yeah, it's an interesting poll that I wonder if organizations should run themselves more often to find out- Oh, good idea ... how often their people are talking about their strategy. Right. So the results are in, and about 50% of people said occasionally, 28% said regularly, and 7% said rarely. That seems like a pretty standard- That's nice. I'm impressed that there's almost 30% are regularly. That's really great. Yeah. That's probably surprising, I think. Yeah. You know, I don't think that would be what most people would say, but it's nice to know that there's some people out there who are really referencing their strategy a lot. I think it also says that 70% of the respondents, actually, it's never happening or sometimes happening. Yeah. So that's the majority. Yep.
CHARLENE
So what can you do on an ongoing basis to integrate your strategy? This last phase is where we know where most of the angst comes in. We had comments like, problems sticking with it, keeping momentum, shifting priorities that derail focus. The executive set it, then all forget about it. And as the poll results you've just seen suggest, this isn't really someone else's problem. Most of us are living it. So it's really common that after the buzz and the hype and the enthusiasm of the new strategy, somewhere between year one and year two, the document and the everyday reality quietly start to drift apart. Things happen in the environment. Ministerial priorities shift, funding pressures tighten. People leave, new people arrive, and the world that the strategy was written for stops existing, and no one quite notices until someone in the meeting says, "Hang on. What are we actually doing? Are we actually doing what our strategy said?" So what we've seen is the usual response is a bit of a, "Oh, no. Oops, we're not aligning to our strategy." Maybe we need a new one. Maybe we need ... Oh, yeah, that's the response. We'll commission a new strategy. But we'd suggest a different response. The drift between the document and the lived strategy isn't a failure of execution. It's a sign that the organization has been adapting to the new environment. The question isn't whether the strategy will drift. It's going to. The question is whether you're noticing it, learning from it, and adjusting deliberately, or whether you're letting the strategy and the organization quietly come apart while the document gathers dust. So if we come back to our four key questions one more time and apply it to this ongoing or embedding phase, so it'd be asking questions around how are you actually tracking progress against the outcomes you're seeking to achieve, and are you measuring actions completed or behaviors change? Does the strategy feature in how decisions are actually being made, or have things quietly reverted? Have the ways of working actually shifted, or have people gone back to what they were doing before the strategy? And the last one, which people think are the most important, is that are resources still aligned? Do you still have the time, money, and effort aligned to the needs of the strategy, or have they drifted back? If you don't have good questions to those answers, then you need two things. One, a way to monitor what's actually changing, and a way to keep the hard conversations occurring.
JODIE
Yeah, one of the tools that I've used as a way to monitor what's actually changing, but also to help in that translation exercise that we talked about before, is outcome mapping. So you might also hear this referred to as intervention logic, results change, theory of change. These are all slightly different tools, but fundamentally, they all kind of live in the same family, and what they're trying to do is create a visual map from where you are now to where you're wanting to go. These tools are really useful for organizations that are either undergoing a significant level of change or are trying to take what's a really aspirational vision and make it real for people on an operational level. They're also useful for other organizations. Yeah. But those are the times when it really, really hits home. So what you do is you break down your long-term vision and strategic objectives into short and medium-term goals and explanations, and you ask the questions, what are you going to track and measure at each stage? What are the things you're going to expect to see at those short and medium-term goals? And those aren't just things like outputs that you're going to track. You might also be wanting to look at, are you seeing internal behavior change? Are you seeing a change in how your customers interact with you? How are things going to feel and look different as you move towards that long-term vision? This gives you a whole range of different metrics and markers that you can track and work towards along the journey that is your strategy length. The key then is if the expected outcomes or behaviors aren't appearing, that's a signal that something isn't working and needs to be adjusted. I often use this with organizations undergoing fundamental change, to help them to translate, like a five or 10-year vision into, okay, what does that mean for tomorrow, for two months, six months? You can really break it down into whatever time period you think is going to be most helpful. It's also a really handy tool to align strategic priorities down to your business planning. What's useful is that you map the activities that you're going to do and how they contribute to different strategic objectives and outcomes. So that's where it's really useful in that translation, because people can see how what they're doing every day is going to lead to this strategic outcome or that strategic outcome. It's also really great for flagging when activities that you're currently doing aren't going to contribute to any of your strategic objectives, and that's the time when you ask, "Why are we still doing this?" Yeah. "Is this something that we should be stopping doing?" Because it's not contributing to where we're trying to go. Mm. It's always really difficult for organizations to make the decision to stop doing something. Yeah. So tools that flag up that things aren't mapping through to the strategic outcomes are actually really, really useful, and that's where I often use outcome mapping. Charlene, I know you have some other tools- Mm-hmm ... to use in this space.
CHARLENE
Thanks, Jody. As Jody was saying, a good strategy should direct the organization's decisions in order to achieve the end state. And, because there is not unlimited resources, it involves making hard choices. How often do we see a strategy expecting to be delivered on top of BAU, and then wonder why it's taking so long to shift things? So, as Jody was just talking about, we need to think about how do we support leaders to have those hard conversations. The conversations about trade-offs, what to deprioritize, about what to stop doing now to make room for the strategy. You can have those conversations happen in the first couple of months, and then they tend to drift off, and everyone goes back to adding things without removing anything, and the strategy gets buried under competing priorities. One technique that I've used in an organization is to create a dedicated planning space for leadership teams to support those strategic planning conversations. The conversations that you use to bring the strategy to life. And so, this was a dedicated room, and on every wall, there was a different set of information for leaders. So, the strategic direction, the organizational expectations and priorities, the key metrics regarding current state, future scenarios, and the key questions that were expected leadership teams to answer. So, leadership teams would deliberately hold their regular leadership team meetings in there, so they were literally surrounded by the key information that they needed to make decisions, and test their thinking, and keep their work plans aligned with the organizational strategy. So, in some ways, it's similar, or a similar concept to a war room, for those of you who understand and know what war rooms are, but this is for planning purposes. So, it's quite a powerful way to embed the strategy into everyday leadership conversations. Yeah, I can imagine that would be really helpful to leaders, just to have those kind of visual reminders. Yeah. It's something that sounds a little bit cringey, but in reality, when you actually do it and you're sitting there having to make the decision surrounded by- Literally surrounded by it. And, I'm a visual person, so I loved it, so I'm biased. But- ... we'd be in a leadership meeting, and we'd literally be pointing to different parts of the wall, or different parts of the room. And so, that's always something fun that I like to encourage. I'm also really mindful that, when we talk about strategy, there's so many different kinds of strategies. System strategies, organizational strategies, functional, product, customer. And the way that you make it live and embed it is going to be linked to the type of strategy it is. So, you want to be really deliberate and bespoke. So, I know for a workforce strategy I developed, we developed a series of workforce principles that leaders were expected to be applied to key workforce decisions, and then we had an escalation process for any exceptions. When I've developed customer strategies, I've used customer personas to bring the strategy to life, and we've used them for the subsequent design of new processes or products or interventions. And we even went as far as using the personas to really test our decisions. What would this person think about X? Now, on the slide that you'll see, we've thrown up a whole bunch of other tools to consider. The key thing is that you do consider them as part of this phase. What are you doing to ensure that people know what we're trying to achieve and why? That there are structures in place to deliver it, and there are mechanisms to track, learn, and adjust. And I always know that so much effort goes into developing a strategy, and I always say that there should be just as amount of time, and if not more, that should be putting into being really deliberate around what are the ways to effectively integrate it. Because actually, like we said before, otherwise it's just a document. Yeah, definitely. That's a reflection I have, too, that organizations think that implementation will just kind of- Happen ... magically happen, yeah. Yeah. But if you're putting as much effort into developing as you are into integrating it- Yeah ... then you're going to be in a really good place, regardless probably of the tools- Yeah ... that you use. Yeah. And we've used these tools in all sorts of situations.
JODIE
Yeah. And as Charlene was saying, the key is to know what tool to use at the right time, thinking about the problem that you're trying to resolve. Yeah. So, let's bring it back to where we started. When people think of strategy as something that you produce and then implement, what often emerges is the gap between strategic intent and the reality of delivery. But if we start to think about strategy as something that you integrate continuously throughout the organization at every level, we don't tend to see those gaps. That means asking those four questions wherever you are in the cycle. How are you tracking? How is decision-making accounting for the strategy? How have the ways of working shifted? Are the resources aligned? Yeah. We've also talked about a range of tools that you can use in different situations, when it would be good to use them, and given you guys a few examples of where we've used them. If you'd like a resource to take back to your teams from today's session, we'll share the slides with everybody after this And with that, that's all for us from today. So Charlene and I are both here for the next 10 minutes or so, and we'd love to hear any questions that you might have. Right. Shall we just work through a couple of them? Yeah. Okay. Are the right people aware of these priorities, and what reallocation of resources actually means in practice? Are the right people aware of the priorities, and what reallocation actually mean in practice? Yeah, so that's a tricky one because it is
CHARLENE
a lot that you need to be communicating to different people. Mm. But that's part of why those kind of translation and communication cascades are really important, right? Yeah. Because it's not just about answering the questions in the box and going away and... You need to then be feeding those things back up through the organization- Yeah ... and to the different business units that you work with and- Yeah ... so that everybody knows that those resources and the funding- Yeah ... what's happening with all of those things. Yeah. It's actually, I read it, I only took a little bit of the question, but the full question is, it's actually quite a big one. Ensuring you have the resources, e.g. time, capability to commit to delivery is important. If not, how does it affect critical path? Where does the funding come from? What are the trade-offs does it create? Are the right people aware of the priorities and what reallocation of resources actually means in practice? I think it's more of a comment than a question. It's really great. I think what it shows is the amount of work to actually work through the impact of the strategy. Mm. And I think what you're calling out is, as we said before, this isn't a handover to middle managers. And why we're so deliberate about asking those questions in that first phase is because you want senior leadership also owning the impact of the strategy. Mm-hmm. Because they might not be aware, like you pointed out with the postmortem example, of there might be some big issues that they need to be aware of in terms of implications. So, I think what you're pointing out is quite great.
JODIE
So we've got a question from Pavana. Mm. Is there a way to measure how things are before the strategy is launched or implemented? That's a really good one.
CHARLENE
Mm. Because often when strategies are commissioned, it often starts as a new exercise, so beginning from scratch rather than looking at what was there before and what was- Yeah ... actually delivered under that strategy. Yeah. What were the kind of key constraints and barriers that meant that you weren't able to deliver on that strategy? But also, how big is the change from that strategy to this- Mm ... new strategy? That's something that's really important to understand when you are- Yeah ... developing and translating and integrating that new strategy. So it's always really great to have a strategic review as kind of part of your context setting for- Yeah ... for the strategy. Because it helps you to make sure that you've looked back at all of those things and answered those questions before you...
JODIE
I think also that as part of the development of the strategy, you'd be understanding that baseline in terms of the current state. So you'd have a bit of a sense of, well, this is current state, and you'd always be using that as a bit of a baseline to test. Another question from, I believe, Dana. When an organization is so broad or vague that can fit any project or deliverable, can be framed within it, what does that tell us? Is this a poor strategy, a poor implementation, or both?
CHARLENE
I love this. Or could this be purposeful from leadership to maintain status quo to avoid stuff in a new approach? Actually, we see this quite a bit. Mm-hmm. I remember working in an organization, and I was actually handed an organizational strategy, and the three priorities were so vague. I think the comment at the time was, "This could fit a fish and chip shop." Underneath it. Anything could fit. And that comment was from a senior leader, and they were committed to tightening it up. I think strategy leveling, which is probably a topic for another session in itself, but the level and what goes into the strategy document is always kind of bespoke to what it is, and is always quite tough. I actually think that you need to be really clear on the so what. So what are the other things? So, is there an integration plan? Is there a strategic plan that sits underneath it? Is there- Mm ... some outcome mapping? It's not just the strategy anymore. I think that's what we're saying. It should always be strategy plus. Yeah. Because especially when you have a high-level vision, there is no way people can effectively integrate it into how they're going to work if they can't kind of understand the guide rails.
JODIE
Okay, that's all the questions that we have time for today, and probably a good place to wrap up. So thank you so much for staying on, and for all of the thoughtful questions. There were some really good ones in there. Yeah. These are the kinds of discussions that make these sessions valuable for everyone. And remember, if any of today's discussions have sparked ideas for your own work, Charlene and I love to talk strategy, like all the time. Yeah. We'll stay here, but happy to continue the conversation, just get in touch with us. Thanks again for joining us. We really appreciate it. Have a great rest of your day, everyone.
