Strategy comes from a military tradition and was based on the knowledge that to successfully pursue your objectives in highly uncertain and constantly changing environments, you need future-focused thinking that’s fluid and activities that constantly adapt as conditions and events unfold. It’s an ongoing process of ‘execute and learn’ where purposeful thought informs action that looks for threats, advantage and opportunity in the shifting landscape.
Yet, despite the increasingly dynamic environment, business strategy has become a very static, analytical ‘plan and measure’ discipline where having something to show for your strategic efforts – plans, blueprints, pillars and ‘yes’ even roadmaps – is valued over the work of adapting to an uncertain future.
As a result, business-speak has made ‘strategy’ a noun – something you have – when it needs to be a verb – something you do – if it is to make a meaningful difference to the future of your organisation.
In today’s constantly shifting business landscape, the thriving organisations will be those that are nimble enough to adapt at the pace of change. To create this fast-paced adaptability, business leaders need to establish and maintain a meaningful connection with their people. The most powerful way to create that connection is by engaging them in the business’s strategic journey.
Projects – the right kind of projects – are the best vehicle for undertaking this journey. They allow you to be intentional about engaging your people in shaping the business and the workplace for the future that it aspires to. By using a project mindset to adapt and evolve the business, you create a bridge that connects the business to your people…in a way that generates opportunities for both.
In today’s highly-dynamic world, strategy-making needs to be more than just strategic planning, although planning is certainly involved. It’s not simply high-level strategic thinking because thought alone doesn’t drive business outcomes. It’s not even just strategic execution because plenty of strategic activity fails to produce strategic value.
Good strategy-making is the work of consistently and persistently evolving your business toward the future that it aspires to.
This includes evolving every aspect of your business. Not just your annual financial results and business KPIs but how you decide what services you offer your customers, how you improve those services, how you better serve those customers and how you shape the workplace that underpins your ability to implement those decisions.
This makes business strategy a future-focused activity and strategy-making a journey into your business’s future.
To thrive – or perhaps even survive – in today’s highly dynamic environment, requires future-focused thinking that’s fluid. It requires anticipatory activity that will allow you to adapt to conditions and events as they unfold. It requires that you and your people devote deep thought to what might lie ahead in an effort to prepare for that future.
Yet, the ‘business of busyness’ – our obsession with being constantly productive and maximising efficiency – is a major obstacle in getting this future-focused work done. Because, all things being equal, future-focused work will always lose out to the immediate and urgent unless that work is set apart through distinction. And to distinguish strategic activity from other operational expectations it needs to have importance and priority – people need to see that it’s valued by their leaders.
“What can a business leader do to future-proof their business?”
This is a question I’m seeing and hearing everywhere. It pops up in the questions that I get from clients, interviewers and audiences. Authors and thought leaders are posing it in their content and in publications.
This has made me start to think more deeply about the question and, importantly, the pre-conceived ideas that sit behind it. And as a result, I’ve reached the belief that…
You should NOT try to ‘future-proof’ your business.
It’s Monday morning and you want to start projectifying your strategy, but then the questions start to come…
Where do I begin? What’s the first thing that I do? What do I want to avoid? What does it mean for my business’s culture?
In final episode of the PROJECTIFY interview series with Mykel Dixon, these are the questions that we explore.
I discuss how starting has to begin with ‘purpose’. You need to know where you want to take your business or you have no direction for the strategy journey. It can be ethereal and aspirational or as straightforward as continuing to do what has been successful for you. However, you need a strategic model from which to build.
From there it’s as simple as identifying the 3 projects that will allow you to realise the improvement opportunities that will unlock that strategic purpose. Not just any 3 projects but the most important 3.
Then you appoint 3 teams of 5 people with the skills, knowledge and experience necessary to create valuable strategic outcomes from those projects…and get started! By doing it, you will gain clarity around what you need to do next. You’ll also learn what will make you better at your strategy-making activities – you build ‘project muscle’.
Myke and I also talk about the ‘C-word’ – is what we’re trying to shape a Projectified Culture?! I share my perspective that what you’re actually doing when you projectify your strategy is ‘cultural gardening’. As a business leader, you’re creating an environment where a certain type of culture will thrive. You’re creating fertile ground for your people’s culture to flourish and bear fruit that nourishes opportunity for both the business and the people in the business.
We wrap up our discussion by talking about the sort of thinking that needs to be avoided if you want to move your strategic activity from the static, ineffective world of traditional business strategy to a dynamic, adaptive world where strategy-making is driving the business forward. Where you’re nimble enough to not only respond to emerging and disruptive forces but become the disruptive force that your competitors are responding to. Where you become remarkable in your customers eyes and those ‘remarks’ draw new customers to your door. Where you shape a workplace that not only attracts and retains the best and brightest but makes all of your people their very best.
Whether you’ve watched every episode in this series, caught the majority or only managed to see one or two, it’s my profound hope that you found some tidbits of value among our ramblings. Above all else, I truly appreciate the gift of your time and attention – I know that it doesn’t come cheaply in today’s world.
Of course, if the idea of projectifying your strategic endeavours intrigues you and you’d like dig a bit deeper – want to learn more – then you can get in touch here. We’ll work together to see what approach might be right for you and your business or team.
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.
As we near the end of my discussions with Mykel Dixon, this episode explores what I’ve learned in developing the concepts contained in PROJECTIFY and in applying those ideas in the real world. How the power of this approach isn’t in the projects – projects are the just the key that unlocks the power of people.
In episode eight of this interview series, Mykel and I discuss how the most surprising thing that came out of the research that I did for the book was the ‘Progress Principle‘. The often misunderstood quality of meaningful progress as a driver for human endeavour. It is all the more intriguing as I’ve started to see the intrinsic motivation that progress brings, manifest itself in the people and organisations I’ve worked with.
We also talk about how the most rewarding thing I’ve experienced in applying these approaches in the business environment are the truly amazing business outcomes people deliver when we trust them to make a difference. When we give them the freedom to shape the future of the business. We discuss how these outcomes are not just confined to their strategic project activities but also filters into other aspects of their working life.
A subtle part of what I’ve uncovered in developing and applying this strategy-making approach is that becoming a nimble and adaptive business requires something more profound than a structured framework for pursuing your strategic objectives. Sure, projectifying the execution of strategy allows you to consistently and persistently pursue your strategic aspirations and adapt to emerging changes in the business landscape. But the most important aspect of strategic projects – when used effectively – is they allow the organisation to tap into your people’s skills, experiences and innate human desire to be part of something bigger. They create workforce motivation by giving people a purpose to be motivated by – motivation that manifests itself as ownership not just compliance. It creates engagement by giving people meaningful work to be engaged in and a sense of progress that makes them want to engage more deeply.
When you unlock the power of people they drive your strategy forward because they experience the difference that future-focused work makes. The business not only progresses the strategic agenda, but business leaders can base that agenda on better insights into what will make the business stronger – for your shareholders and in the eyes of your customers.
In next week’s final episode of this interview series, we touch on some final thoughts around how to lead a projectified strategy-making approach.
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.
What does a projectified approach to business strategy look like in practice? How does it look for your people? How does it impact you as a manager?
The seventh episode of my interview with Mykel Dixon explores these questions…and a few more. We discuss how the effective use of projects to execute your business strategy manifests itself in the business – how it empowers your team and leverages leadership across the enterprise. We talk about how projectifying your strategy-making starts by creating consistent and persistent strategic activity. But, in its highest form, it makes your people the strategic engine that drives the business forward and allows its leaders to be the navigation system that directs that strategic momentum.
Myke and I chat about the liberating nature of a strategic environment where your people are empowered to move the business toward the future it aspires to. How it creates leadership bandwidth that spreads the heavy-lifting of leadership across the organisation. It frees up the business’s senior managers to blaze the future direction of the strategic journey. It gives your people the platform and ‘permission’ to lead…with their skills, their commitment, their experience or by enabling others to be their very best.
Finally, we talk about the power of circles over triangles when tapping into the capabilities and knowledge of your staff. This ‘tribal perspective’ on the relationship between the business and its people allows you shift from a Pareto world where 20 percent of the effort yields 80 percent of the strategic value toward one where 90 percent of your strategic activity satisfies 100 percent of the needs of your business and its customers. Where your people are the greatest source of strategic opportunity as well as the driving force behind translating that opportunity into business practice.
In the final episodes of this interview series, we continue discussing how to lead a projectified strategy-making approach. How, once on the strategic journey, you extract ever-greater mileage from your strategic activities.
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.
So, your business has carefully created a strategic roadmap and now you’ve embarked on the strategic journey…
How do you sustain that journey? How do you ensure that it remains relevant with a laser focus on your strategic goals? How do you pivot when the strategic landscape changes and you need to respond to emerging issues or opportunities?
The sixth episode of my interview with Mykel Dixon is a discussion about how you maintain the strategic journey. We discuss how the best way to make your strategic endeavours perpetual is to ensure that your strategic projects are not. We talk about how using short-duration projects as stepping stones toward your strategic goals allows you to break those objectives down into manageable, achievable steps. We riff on how it creates an immediacy to your strategic execution that allows it to compete with the daily urgent and important – the business of busyness.
Myke and I chat about the fact that the strategic journey shouldn’t just be meandering in the business wilderness. It should be something that business leaders create forward momentum around. To do that you need to be intentional about not only initiating strategic projects but also bringing them to a powerful conclusion. You need to constantly re-connect your strategic activity to the business value that a nimble, adaptive strategy can deliver.
For individual projects this means declaring clearly defined endpoints from the outset – what strategic outcome you’re looking to deliver and in what timeframe. Importantly, you want the project team to shape this endpoint so they feel a sense of commitment to its realisation. When that endpoint is reached you want to look at it from 3 perspectives:
- Look back. Determine if the intended outcome was delivered and what the team learned from its delivery that can be applied in the future.
- Celebrate and communicate. Celebrate any accomplishments and communicate the project outcomes more broadly across the organisation.
- Move forward. Determine what you do with what the project has told you – do you continue to develop the project idea, do you operationalise it or do you shelve/kill the project because it doesn’t create the business value you’d hoped.
For your overall strategic portfolio – the strategic projects that you’re undertaking at any given time – you want to create a routine where you regularly assess that project mix. You want to ensure that:
- Your projects have forward momentum and aren’t foundering,
- The portfolio is made of the projects that represent your highest strategic priorities, and
- You capture any new project ideas that are emerging out of your strategic activities.
This not only connects the projects your business is undertaking to the strategic outcomes that you want to deliver, it also connects your people to your business’s strategic purpose.
In the remaining episodes of this interview series, we discuss how to lead a projectified strategy-making approach. How to effectively use the strategic journey to shape your organisation and your workplace into the business you aspire 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.
