Five key principles of strategy development (CLIMB)

In my last one-minute read, I set out why I believe strategy development is as critical today as ever.

We know powerful visions unleash organisational creativity and energy. As JF Kennedy famously said in 1961, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept”. The rest, as they say, is history.

But vision can only just be ‘pie in the sky’. The problems of today are real and pressing. If we don’t address them, there will never be time, space or resources for things to be different.

We need both a firm grip on reality and a vision of how things can be different. And in the gap between them, we will find creativity and energy released in us and those we work with to close that gap.

But how we do strategy development is critical – here are 5 key principles, summarised under the acronym CLIMB.

1. Collective sense-making. Everyone must be part of the process that often takes outsiders to bring diverse minds together across the organisation in a collaborative journey that creates a common language and narrative everyone can embrace. As the old maxim says, ‘people own what they help create.’
2. Listen to the voice of the customer. The strategy must meet the needs of customers or service users, including internal users. Listening can build relationships and bring difficult conversations to the surface. Here’s a helpful mental health strategy example – Essex MH Strategy case study.
3. Inside out and outside in set the context. Anchor strategy in the organisation’s enduring purpose; it’s ‘why’. However, start with the external environment and how it might change. What’s ‘outside’ and what’s ‘inside’ will vary according to whether it’s a system (such as an integrated care system), a service, a person or a facility.
4. Mine for insights. A good strategy makes implicit and tacit knowledge visible and shares it, sometimes the most useful outcome of any review. Here is a politically sensitive example – East of England Boundary Review  case study.
5. Be clear and explicit, but plan for unpredictability. There is no predictable future, so we need to combine clarity of the future we are planning with insight into the future we cannot.

The final strategy must set out the long-term aims, the plan for getting there, and the context, insights, and choices underpinning it. How many strategies have you been involved in that do all this?

Next week, we will explore uncertainty in strategy development.

Greater insights for leaders at our FREE webinar

Join us on 26th March, from 3pm to 5pm, when we will host a FREE webinar on Strategy in Complex Systems with collaborators Terry Young and Andrew Liles.

To register for this FREE webinar, please email office@tricordant.com. Feel free to extend this invitation to colleagues interested in this topic.