Old School Strategy, New School Success
I recently spent two days with one of my great clients assisting them with a strategic planning session. As with any organization that has smart and creative leadership, the session was quite dynamic. For some people new to the organization, or new to the healthy ambiguity associated with strategic visioning, it might have seemed overwhelming or even confusing.
All normal and all expected.
Over the years, we’ve come to understand that the effort of defining strategies, positioning, and offering architectures is usually highly frenetic, emotional, honest, collaborative, and always demanding.
The client spent most of day one generating insights from outside sources in terms of platforms and process. This is always good as it helps to drive participants down the “what could be” path of thought. By the end of the day (albeit late into the evening) the team had made great progress in honing in on what they wanted to offer to the market and why.
While good progress was made however, it was our job to facilitate day two’s session to drive the group toward an action plan on how to achieve their goals.
While many designs for this session had been created and revised, none of them ended up fitting the outputs of the first day. This is not uncommon and was in no way surprising. As organizational leaders do the work to align their intentions, priorities and focus often shift. It is the job of a good strategy firm to allow this process to unfold, work with what is created and enable the organization to move to the next steps of implementing on their vision, mission, strategy and objectives.
What was designed for the second day was an interactive gap analysis work-session. Gap analysis is one of the most traditional and highly-used approaches to strategic planning. At its simplest form, a gap analysis asks your organization, “where are you today,” and, “where do you want to go,” or, “What do you want to be?” At first take, this may see fairly straight forward, but for gap analysis to be truly effective, more focus, structure and support is needed.
The primary factor in performing a successful gap analysis is defining what are you analyzing. You could be analyzing a product, a region, or the entire organization. Even if it is at the overall organizational level, what are aspect are you analyzing – performance, product offering, or perhaps a marketing strategy? It is crucial to identify and understand the intent of the analysis.
Specifics beget the parameters of performance and measurement.
Once the focus of the analysis is identified, an additional level of success is achieved by establishing a set of criteria by which to define the current state with, so that we can build a corresponding desired state. If you simply define the before and after states in a narrative paragraph, you risk defining scenarios that don’t match up. The ability to directly correspond your current state to your desired one is a key aspect of successfully performing a gap analysis – here is the reason why: The true essence of performing a gap analysis is not solely to define a the new and improved state – it is developing a specific and achievable action plan to enable the organization to succeed at change and close the gap. This is why a strong level of structure must be built into the process approach.
So, the next time you apply a gap analysis to a scenario in which your wanting to approve, remember the following:
– Clearly identify the focus of the analysis – what specifically do you want to change or improve?
– Establish a set of criteria when defining your current state and use the same criteria for defining your desired state. This assures that the structures of your scenarios correspond. What are your criteria; Revenue, retention, market share, employee count, quality, etc.?
– Spend a majority of your time defining the criteria-based actions that need to take place to close the gap. Understand the resources needed, who owns the action, and in which priority they will be completed. This is the critical path to achieving your desired state and the criteria are what you will measure your success upon.
It’s a cliché, but change is the only constant. However, pro-active change is the only change you have control over. By identifying an aspect of your business and organization that needs to change and improve, you are managing the strategic direction of your company. By using the tips in this post, to make a traditional gap analysis more successful, you can manage that change at a deeper level.
One last item to mention concerning this, or any change in an organization is communications and collaboration. The more people you include in defining the current and desired states, the more people that will be engaged in helping drive the change. Clearly communicating why the change is necessary and why everyone has a part helps to reduce resistance to change – the number one challenge of an organization’s successful evolution. Combined, communications and collaboration can actually accelerate the well crafted change plan that comes from your structured gap analysis and increase the likelihood of success.
Plan your change. Include everyone that has a stake. Build and execute a detailed action plan to reach your desired state. Measure often. Course-correct. Succeed and celebrate success.
As always, we appreciate your feedback and thoughts.
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