Leaders in a Context set a path towards a desired future via Strategic Visioning. They interpret the goals of the parent context that provides their funding, and shape a vision of how they can bring it to life, within the scope of their responsibilities.
This strategic visioning iteratively refines parent goals into concrete targets to drive short term execution plans. While it can take many forms, one approach steps through four stages of refinement:
For each stage of refinement, leaders make decisions that set the path forward. Some of these decisions are made quickly with strong conviction, while others are more difficult and worthy of collaborative deliberation. When the refinement step exposes a long list of open questions, that’s a good signal that the uncertainty present (or need for learning) can justify a more structured decision making approach. We will cover the common mechanisms for decision making in the next section.
Any context serves a customer (internal or external) by delivering value to help their customer thrive and improve.
“What would the future look like for my (internal or external) customer, if we achieved these goals?”
The role of the leadership team is to imagine the possible futures that could unfold, and describe a preferred one, as the context’s Vision. In a compelling vision, the context has delivered specific value to a specific customer segment to enable customer satisfaction. Choosing the key value drivers and choosing the specific customer segments helps clarify the scope of the context.
There are many excellent strategic frameworks to help leaders ask and answer the tough strategic questions. Whether your context is for a product, a business, a service organization, or in the corporate strategy office, seek out strategic thought-leadership to leverage as Prompts for strategic visioning. Use these prompts to drive a conversation across the extended leadership team, perhaps using techniques like the Mini-Delphi Method.
Exercise:
With a vision to serve as a beacon, the leader can define mileposts on the road to the future in the form of goals.
“What target outcomes or goals could realize this vision?”
Getting specific and measurable on these mileposts will require Tradeoff decisions, and these tradeoff decisions (expressed as Even-Over Statements) can influence the concrete target value for KPIs.
Exercise:
Using the Beliefs and Tradeoffs, establish some Criteria for success to drive goal-setting, in support of the Vision. Create a two-week window of time to identify and commit to Goals. Enlist the extended leadership team to try Nominal Group Collaboration to work asynchronously (or in meetings) to brainstorm, then converge on viable Goals.
Exercise:
These goals will be mid- to longer-term in horizon, and timeframes should vary based on the overall uncertainty in the environment. Goals are usually expressed as desired outcomes in a format like OKRs
Exercise:
With tangible desired outcomes that target improvements for either internal customers or external customers, leaders can now start the creative ideation process.
“How can we achieve Goal #1?”
Form a diverse group of SMEs and collaborate over a two-week window to collect a divergent set of ideas.
Exercise:
Then vet the ideas to rally around a core set of promising opportunities. Explore the opportunities by collecting open questions for each. Adopt the taxonomy of the Rumsfeld Matrix to explore uncertainty as a group.
Exercise:
With a prioritized set of opportunities, we can craft short-term sub-goals for the next quarter that should provide meaningful insights.
“How should we pursue Opportunity #1?”
Form a nominal group across the context leaders and sponsored team leaders. Over a two-week window, identify and commit to quarterly sub-goals.
Exercise:
Quarterly sub-goals are the means by which the context leadership influences the work in the teams, without defining the work. It keeps the autonomous teams empowered and aligned. To insure the alignment, context leaders show where the sub-goals implement support for the 1-2 year Goals, with a parent-child relationship.
Exercise:
These goals can authorize the teams to dream up ways to define work and drive changes to achieve the short-term goals. The plans created and executed by the teams can be assessed for risks, and monitored by the leaders in the context. When the uncertainty is low, the opportunities yield short-term goals and work easily.
