The “Art of Action” by Stephen Bungay stresses the importance of making your strategic intent clear and simple. Intent is what you want to achieve and the reasons why. You should limit you strategic intent to defining and communicating your intent. Then allow allow each level to define the intent of the next level up …
This pair of brass plaques in the medieval castle at Boulogne-sur-Mer in France caught my attention. I was perplexed at how a simple but elegant plaque in French had been so poorly translated in the English version. The English plaque is poorly worded, misses one vital piece of information and adds information which may not …
Successful sports athletes all have one thing in common and that is their will to win. It doesn’t matter what kind of challenge it is or who they are competing against. What matters is that they give their very best to achieve victory. Business leaders can learn a thing or two about success from these …
Read the latest quarterly newsletter “Ideas for Success” from Mindshop There are three thought-provoking articles in the February 2012 edition: Business Maximizer Opportunities Using your Strengths to Leverage your Opportunities 3 Key Ideas for Business Success in 2012 I hope these articles are of interest and l look forward to getting some feedback. Do take …
How often does your “Help Desk” provide helpful and practical advice? The service you offer through your Help Desk is a good indicator of the value you place on your customers. That is the true value, not the hype from your advertising campaigns. As a business you will be calling the help desks of your …
Don’t try and tackle more than 3 issues at a time!
Taking on several things at a time could prevent you from focusing on more important issues. This mind map guides you through a simple 6-step process:
Coffee Agenda
After you have identified your top 3 issues, answer the following questions:
Where are you NOW with each issue? Define the nature of the problems you are facing, such as low sales.
WHERE do you want to be in a given time period? Define what you consider a successful result, such as monthly sales by units or currency.
HOW will you get there? What are the three main actions you will take in the next three months?
What are the BENEFITS of resolving each issue?
What are the main BARRIERS that might slow you down ?
What are the CONSEQUENCES of not resolving each issue?
Be brief so that your answers fit on the one page. This helps you to focus on what is important. Once you have resolved one issue, you have time to address another one.
What is your vision for WHERE you want to take your business?
HOW you will get there? What are your top three actions?
You can ask these questions to the business as a whole, as well as parts of the business or a specific project. You may also need to make some difficult decisions about what you will not do.
Mindshop offers great tools to help you rank your issues and show which ones you should address first.
Most organisations suffer from too much planning that does not achieve the desired results.
Increase the size of the organisation, the number of management layers and departments, and the problem only gets worse. Technology is changing at an ever-increasing rate and markets change more rapidly too. More planning and more detailed plans are not the answer to address the issue of improving the implementation of strategy!
Stephen Bungay’s latest book “The Art of Action” shows how leaders close the gaps between Plans, Actions and Results.
The three main components of planning outlined in the book are Plans, Actions and Outcome or Results. You develop your plan to get you from where you are NOW to WHERE you want to be, defined by the Outcome you want to achieve. The Actions then show HOW you will get there.
There are three critical gaps you must recognise and then handle correctly. The Prussian general von Moltke outlined a way of closing the three gaps in his Memoire of 1868.
Problem
Usual Reaction
Von Moltke’s View
Knowledge Gap
The difference between what we would like to know, and what we actually know
More detailed information
Do not command more than is necessary or plan beyond the circumstances you can foresee
Alignment Gap
The difference between what we want people to do and what they actually do
More detailed instructions
Communicate to every unit as much of the higher intent needed to achieve the purpose
Effects Gap
The difference between what we expect our actions to achieve and what they actually achieve
More detailed and often tighter controls
Everyone retains freedom of decisions and action within bounds
His solution to each gap runs counter to our intuition and to common practice. To overcome the Alignment Gap, he recommends cascading plans, united by a common intent and in more detail at lower levels. As for the Effects Gap, to what extent do you need to reduce autonomy to achieve greater alignment? Von Moltke’s insight is that there is no choice to make. “Alignment needs to be achieved around intent and autonomy should be granted around actions.” Do set the boundaries, that is the freedoms and constraints that guide the next level down.
Intent is what to achieve and why. Actions are how to achieve the intent. The difference between strategy development and strategy execution disappears. It is replaced by a “thinking – doing” cycle of learning and adapting. You do not need to know everything, but you do need to be clear about the intent and to communicate this clearly.
We can now fast forward to the 1980′s and to Jack Welch, Chairman and CEO of GE. Bungay quotes a letter published in Fortune magazine in full, as it had a major impact on Welch, who called the approach “planful opportunism”. The salient part of the letter is the observation that the Prussian general staff “did not expect a plan of operations to survive the first encounter with the enemy. They set only the broadest objectives and emphasised seizing unforeseen circumstances as they arose.”
Bungay’s term is “directed opportunism“.
The “back brief” is critically important. Firstly, it checks the understanding of the intent. Secondly and more importantly, the superior gains clarity about the implications of the intent and this may lead to changes. Thirdly, it facilitates alignment across the organisation.
Bungay stresses that “what cannot be made simple cannot be made clear and what is not clear will not get done.” This is a critical message that should underpin successful strategy implementation in your business.
How will you overcome these gaps and make sure you stay on track?
Let’s bring this together with some practical guidelines.
Your intent must be simple and clear. Avoid multiple intents, as this is likely to lead to confusion.
Do have cascading plans, when the next level down develops plans that are more detailed. The top level “what” becomes the “why” of the next level down.
Use the “back brief” to make sure the next level down really does understand the intent.
Be clear about the boundaries, that is the freedoms and constraints that guide the next level down.
Remember that intent, alignment and autonomy go hand in hand. If the intent is clear and understood, the teams become aligned because they understand their role in achieving the intent. They have sufficient autonomy to work within the boundaries.
Give it a go. Remember that “common sense” is not always common practice. Even small steps can have a big impact.
A simple and powerful tool to determine your key opportunities for increased business Growth and Profit over the coming 12 months as well as the strategies to address each of them.
Click on the graphic to get started. The on-line diagnostic should take just 10 minutes. The new version 2 is even easier to follow.
The YouTube video show how easy it is to to fill out the GPS Diagnostic.
Contact me if you have any questions. I look forward to discussing your top issues with you.
How you define the problem can have a major impact on the solution. Too often an elegant or clever solution is developed without sufficient analysis of the problem and the underlying causes.
Engineers are renowned for wanting clarity. “Tell us what the problem is and then we will devise a solution”. What appears to be the problem may be a symptom of a deeper and more pervasive problem.
The solution may also have little to do with the problem no longer existing. Several factors may be at play. A good example of this is the dramatic fall in crime in New York City in the 1990’s, which Malcolm Gladwell discusses in “The Tipping Point”.
So take time to probe. The Mindshop tool “the Five Why’s” can be an effective way to do this. By repeating the question “why” you can peel away at the layers of symptoms that are hiding the root cause of the problem. You may need to ask more than five questions before you get to the root cause of the problem.
Once you think you have got to the underlying problem, check this with other people including those who are not too close to the problem. You are then in a far better position to start working on possible solutions. This is where creativity can play an important role, but that will be the topic of another post.
Don’t be distracted by myths. The Million Dollar Space Pen Myth is, according to Dwayne A. Day, just that, a myth. The pens never cost a lot of money and the resource-strapped Russians were not smarter. The multi-billion dollar space pen and the Russian pencil is folklore, no matter how appealing the story may sound. As the saying goes “never let the facts get in the way of a good story”.
So put far more effort into probing until you are confident you have identified the underlying problem. Then check and double-check before you start to consider possible solutions.
This van caught my attention and inspired me to share some observations.
Indian Weddings
Why did this catch my attention?
A catchy headline that clearly conveys the main business offering: Indian Weddings.
An eye catching design that is consistent with the Indian theme.
Easy to read information about other services.
A website address that you do not need to write down.
Legible contact details
This prompts three important questions to anyone in business:
Do you have a clearly defined offering of your products and services?
How well have you defined your target market?
Are you clear about your point of differentiation?
If you cannot answer these questions, how on earth do you expect to attract the attention of prospective customers?
Once you have answered these questions, check that your answers make sense to others. Include “friends, families and fools” as well as some of your customers. You then need to decide how best to communicate your offering and how to reach your target market. It might also be a good idea to test how well your messages are being understood. If you are really keen, you might even want to measure the results!
Tip: keep your eyes, ears and mind open when you are going for a walk! You can learn from others without taking anything from them.
Disclosure of Interest: none. I was walking past the van and decided to take a photo. I have not had any contact with the company.
These questions come from Mindshop:
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