Exploring PROJECTIFY with Mykel Dixon – Creating A Strategic Roadmap

So how do you effectively initiate your business’s strategic journey? How do you transverse the uncertain terrain of the future business environment? Most importantly, how do you ensure that your people join you on that journey and contribute in a meaningful way?

In the fifth installment of my interview series with Mykel Dixon, we get into the nitty-gritty of undertaking the strategic journey. We talk about the initial steps you need to take to begin projectifying your strategic journey and how to motivate your people to be a part of it. Like any journey it starts with a clear idea of where you’re going and how to get there – it starts with a strategic roadmap.

But strategy-making is not a journey that’s undertaken on well-charted roads and clearly defined paths. As discussed previously, it is a constantly changing journey over uncertain terrain. So this ‘roadmap’ looks more like a topographical map than a Melways directory. Navigating it is more route-finding and exploration than reading street signs and following directions Siri’s directions.

In this episode, Myke and I discuss how an effective roadmap connects the project framework to your strategic intent via the improvement opportunities that will lead you to your long-term strategic objectives. We talk about how creating a strategic roadmap that links the initial strategic steps to your long-term strategic objectives generates intrinsic motivation within your workforce. Motivation that will not only sustain your strategic activities. It will make them more creative, more productive and more collaborative the further you journey into your business’s future.

Putting in place a strategic roadmap that commits your organisation to the strategic journey, yet acknowledges the uncertainty of that journey, ensures that your strategic activities provide valuable insights into the next leg of that journey. It ensures that your strategic resources are invested in the most important activities for progressing your strategic aims. It also allows your people to clearly see how the strategic work they are being asked to do, shapes the future direction of the business and their workplace.

In the upcoming episodes of this interview series, we discuss what you need to do once the strategic journey is underway. How to effectively use that journey to shape your organisation into the business you hope to become.

As always, I also hope you’ll share the thoughts and experiences that come from your strategy-making activities – your challenges, your successes and what you’ve learned in shaping your business for the future.