Growing & making an Impact
A process for creating more value
Is your organization driven by a cohesive strategy, with projects that are moving the needle toward achieving your goals? Instead of having a clear direction for growth and impact, you might be struggling with an outdated strategy that’s causing flat or declining revenue, leadership conflicts, operational waste, customer attrition, or just spinning your wheels on intractable challenges.
As your organization’s playbook for winning, your strategy needs frequent refreshing to keep your offerings and your operations ahead of the game. There’s no standing still; only moving ahead or falling behind. Achieving success in today's complicated world requires not just a sound strategy, but strategic innovation.
Align’s Strategic Planning Process
Strategy Scorecard - a holistic and objective look at where you are and what needs to change
Stakeholder Insights - Objective reframing of market gaps and external needs
Teaming for Valuable Ideas - Facilitating creative ideas and collaboration
Strategic Priorities - A framework of 3-4 objectives to create unique stakeholder value
Strategic Plan Development - Milestones & metrics to track the impact of the strategic plan
Strategy Scorecard
The strategic planning process is a closed loop beginning with an objective view of gaps and opportunities for improvement. Where do you want to be, and what’s getting in the way? We’ve developed a Strategy Scorecard to look at where your organization is creating and leveraging value and where it could do better. It’s like a SWOT, but through the lens of a balanced scorecard, with an emphasis on driving external stakeholder value. This is a great exercise for getting internal leaders on the same page about the issues that strategic planning needs to solve. The Strategy Scorecard is revisited at the end of a project to make sure measures are identified to assess progress in the key areas where the strategic plan needs to generate results.
Stakeholder Insights
It’s important to gather perspectives from internal stakeholders to surface issues that might be obscured from senior leaders, and form an objective view of what’s causing any challenges. This phase helps your team gain clarity and consensus about where you’re starting and overall, what issues need attention.
Critically important to charting your future is gaining objective insights on where more value could be created for external stakeholders. The only way to get this information reliably is to engage stakeholders in a meaningful way. Surveys are good for counting, but if you’re curious about what’s really going on, focus groups, interviews, and interactive sessions with stakeholders are the best ways to go beyond surface-level complaints and expectations. The problem behind the problem (sometimes a blindspot to folks inside the organization) can be the hidden key in unlocking new and novel sources of value.
Where’s the disconnect? The priorities of customers and stakeholders change over time. Customer demographics shift. Challenges get more complicated. If things aren’t clicking with your target audience and you’re not moving the needle in the ways you’d like… get curious. Understanding the changing mindset and values of your core audience can truly become a competitive advantage. Once you better understand who they are and what makes them tick, you’re over halfway there in creating a meaningful impact for your stakeholders and customers. This work clarifies market gaps and problems worth solving for your target audience.
Prioritizing Ideas as a Team
Teaming to Create Valuable Ideas
Align emphasizes value creation in strategic planning through its entrepreneurial process. Once you’re clear on the pressing challenges for stakeholders & customers, you’ve got the proper starting point for generating ideas worth building. Bringing team members (and possibly some external stakeholders) together for creative ideation can be an inspiring goodwill experience, as well as an effective way to cross-pollinate knowledge from within and outside the organization. These Spark Sessions produce lots of material for future opportunities, whether or not it all makes it into the strategic plan. Themes emerge forming 3-4 strategic priorities that represent what to offer customers and how to make that possible (from the operations perspective).
Strategic Priorities and Plan Development
The strategic framework will close the loop by identifying the strategic objectives that will move the needle, strengthen your value proposition, and enhance the internal capabilities needed for delivering value and reaching your goals.
The result is a measurable and cohesive roadmap, rooted in market opportunities to create more value and the vision and capabilities that define your organization. You’ll have your answers to what to offer, who to focus on, and how to organize your team for success.
Start the process by using the Strategy Scorecard to identify areas for improvement.