On the radio the other day there was mountain climber that shared her experience standing atop Mount Everest. She said that while standing on that summit she was surprised to find that rather than revel in her achievement and enjoy the view that so relatively few people have seen, her thoughts were dominated by an unexpectedly unsettling realization: now, I have to get back down. Besides the fact that getting back down was in some ways physically harder than climbing up, the bigger problem was that her primary motivation – to reach the summit – had been achieved. Reaching that summit had been an inspirational goal driving her through each step of the journey; from the mundane strength training years earlier to those final few steps. Her simple primary motivating factor now would take a very different form: survival. This type of letdown is common to any major achievement or milestone in life. So it’s not unexpected that a similar phenomenon occurs in the strategic management world. Most commonly, this letdown occurs as soon as the big planning retreat event is over and the resulting documentation has been put together. Once the strategy team has formulated strategy, developed a strategy map, identified performance measures, prioritized initiatives, and rolled everything out to the entire organization, the team stands at the top of that mountain of work and thinks we did it, now what? Unfortunately, this is the point that too many organizations realize that the real work was not in writing the plan but in the execution of all of those grand ideas. They let the process run out of steam and begin getting too distracted by day-to-day problems and operational concerns to follow through. So how do you avoid the post-retreat strategic planning letdown?  Here are a few tips:

• Don’t think of strategy as an event: Many people still think that the only time you should talk about strategy is after playing golf during a big retreat.  Strategy management is about making strategy a part of day-to-day management. Try to institutionalize the strategic thinking process that was used to develop the plan. Make strategy everybody’s job instead of just the management team. Incorporate strategy into the day-to-day agenda.
• Prioritize & keep things simple: No organization can do everything for everyone. Select 3-4 high level goals to focus on to start and a few high-priority initiatives to support each goal. Manage your initiative list down to get to the select few.
• Focus on process improvement instead of judging people: ownership and accountability are needed, but if you want to develop a continuous improvement culture, employees cannot worry about getting punished every time they report bad news. Underperformance is more often than not the result of a process failure and so that’s where the focus should be.
• Use technology for analysis and information sharing: Some organizations fail to fully analyze the data they are collecting or short-circuit their strategy execution success by choosing to use spreadsheets for performance analysis.  Remember that it isn’t helpful for a single analyst to fully understand how the organization is performing. Information sharing and dialog are critical in helping turn information into knowledge and understanding so that leaders can make better strategic decisions.

For more suggestions on how to avoid this letdown, see the Sustaining and Managing with the Balanced Scorecard chapter of The Institute Way: Simplify Strategic Planning and Management with the Balanced Scorecard.

Has it ever dawned on you that you think you are headed in the right direction only to discover that you are using the wrong measure to inform your decisions? It feels a bit like navigating a truck using the fuel gauge instead of the GPS.

It was a lesson that I observed again last week while presenting at the McLeod Software Users’ Conference in Scottsdale, AZ. Between a golf tournament in the 106 degree heat, a bus ride for 600 participants for a night at the Rawhide Western Town and Steakhouse, desert Jeep tours and lots of great food and speakers, the software company put on a great show. 

The part that was most exciting to me was the official launch of the new Navigator product, which is the new strategic performance management solution that McLeod has added to its portfolio of transportation management and trucking software solutions. 

The highlight of the conference was a presentation by Lee Camden, the IT Director at Earl Henderson Trucking. Henderson was the first client for which McLeod and the Institute partnered together to help with strategic planning and measurement development. I facilitated the Henderson team quickly through our planning process and the McLeod team modeled the software after the results. In his presentation, Lee demonstrated the value of the Navigator product as well as the practical benefits they have received over time from improved strategy focus. He demonstrated how they used their strategy map to visualize and align around strategy. 

He also noted how they had stopped focusing on only driver retention as their primary organizational capacity measure. A key takeaway from the planning dialog was the realization that their strategy wasn’t dependent on having just anyonedriving their trucks. Simply having a driver turned out to be about as strategic as filling the gas tank.

Henderson’s strategy focused on adding specialized offerings and other premium services. In order to effectively deliver the services that they felt gave them a competitive advantage, it was critical that they have qualified “good” drivers. In order to improve on the Increase the Number of Good Drivers objective on their strategy map, McLeod has implemented an initiative around this qualification process and are now measuring their progress on this much more strategically important factor.