Validating Strategies

Linking Projects and Results to Uses and Benefits

Phil Driver

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317002857
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Stratégie commerciale

Organisations continue to struggle with their strategies; even when they have a strategy development process, their plans rarely have the impact that was intended. Too many of their people don't know about the strategy, don't understand it or can't translate it into what it means for their role. Validating Strategies addresses the taxonomy, syntax and semantics of strategies; in other words: what does the strategy say, how does it relate to other plans, what are the causalities between the strategy and successful business outcomes and how should this all be expressed in a language that everyone in the organization can understand. The model at the heart of this book - Organisations run Projects that produce Results and enable people to Use them to create Benefits (PRUB) - offers an intuitive approach that links collaborative strategic planning and validation to project and programme management so as to create, validate and implement strategies. The strategy development and validation model offered by Phil Driver addresses the struggle of organisations to realise their strategy, replacing endless projects that don't quite seem to deliver what the organization needs with an easy-to-understand, implementable methodology that can be validated with evidence.

Chapter 1
Introduction

1.1 What Is This Book About?

Most strategies have limited impact.

The OpenStrategies approach will guide you in an objective diagnosis of your existing ‘strategies’ and help you develop effective, validated strategies – ones that get implemented and have impact.

That’s essentially what this book is about.

When you diagnose existing strategies to determine if they are meaningful and can be implemented, you may well discover that a large majority are not. Many are no more than aspirational outcomes which masquerade as strategies by adding vague verbs such as ‘optimise’ and ‘ensure’ in front of the descriptions of the desired aspirational outcomes. No wonder so few have any impact.

This book uses a system called OpenStrategies to diagnose traditional strategy statements and convincingly demonstrate their effectiveness or ineffectiveness. It then shows how to create and validate effective strategies, especially in large-scale multi-stakeholder environments.

We’ve created the simple yet robust OpenStrategies system that can be easily understood and used by almost all stakeholders in almost all strategy environments. OpenStrategies will enable you to:

1. diagnose existing strategies;

2. refine and validate existing strategies so they can be implemented;

3. create new, validated strategies which can be implemented.

This simplicity is a defining feature of the OpenStrategies system and distinguishes it from more complicated systems such as Kaplan and Norton’s Strategy Maps (Harvard Business School, 2004) and Bradley’s Benefits Realisation Management (Gower Publishing, 2010). These systems are more generic, flexible and less prescriptive than the tightly defined OpenStrategies system and, as a result, they have wide applicability in the hands of experts who fully understand their intricacies. In contrast, the OpenStrategies system, with its unrelenting emphasis on simplicity, has been designed to immediately be effective in the hands of large numbers of strategy stakeholders who have had minimal training in either the general principles of strategies or in the OpenStrategies’ system.

This book defines the concepts of Projects, Results, Uses and Benefits (PRUB) and ‘OpenStrategies’ and demonstrates how these simple yet powerful tools enable the diagnosis, development and implementation of effective, validated strategies.

The book addresses the pressing need for a simple, common strategy language and then shows you how to use precise strategy language to guide the development and implementation of effective, validated strategies.

Along the way we will address the concepts of strategy taxonomy (the classification of strategy concepts), strategy syntax (the linking together of strategic ideas) and strategy semantics (the meanings of strategies) and demonstrate how important it is to be precise and succinct when creating and implementing strategies which you need many stakeholders to understand.

Almost anyone can write a wordy and worthy strategy document, but unless it is validated, understood and implemented by the relevant stakeholders it will have minimal impact. That requires simplicity; a long-winded strategy is unlikely to be understood or even read by stakeholders.

Just as Pascal (1912) noted that it takes more effort to write a succinct letter than a long one (but that a succinct letter is more effective), so it takes more effort to create a succinct strategy than a long-winded strategy (but a succinct strategy will also be more effective):

Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parceque je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.(I have only made this letter rather long because I have not had time to make it shorter). (Pascal, B. Lettres provinciales, December 1656. In: Cassell’s Book of Quotations, London, 1912, p. 718).

Have you:

• heard senior managers say, ‘I do high-level strategy, I don’t do details’ and have you wondered if they are avoiding something?

• read high-level strategy documents and concluded that they contain almost no evidence or rationale that they will actually work, that they are little more than motherhood and apple pie?

• concluded that anyone could write such documents and that it is working out the details and validating a strategy that requires the hard work and an ability to handle complexity?

• tried to work with a high-level strategy to get into the detail of exactly what needs to be done to implement a strategy and then backed off because it became overwhelmingly complicated?

• been completely overwhelmed by huge amounts of strategic data and information coming in from many sources in dozens of different formats and magnitudes?

You are not alone.

How can we possibly communicate effectively if we all use a myriad of strategy jargon:

Projects, outputs, results, outcomes, themes, topics, high-level, low-level, generic, specific, measures, targets, missions, visions, schemes, cross-cutting themes, strategies, plans, platforms, collaboration, cooperation, competition, goals, objectives, frameworks, aspirations, values, structures, KPIs, performance indicators, tasks, accountabilities, responsibilities, tactics, strands, action plans, criteria, parameters, directions, issues, factors, priorities, principles, benefits, impacts, purpose, roles, capacity, capabilities, responsibility, expertise, resources, constraints, opportunities, boundaries, requirements, drivers for change, forecasts, data, information, knowledge, wisdom … and … maybe one day … implementation …

around which there is little consensus on actual meanings?

Ask any group of people what the word ‘outcomes’ means and you’ll get many different answers. Even in the public sector, which often claims to be ‘outcomes focused’, it is difficult to find anyone who knows what an ‘outcome’ actually is. Frequently it seems to be something that people hope will happen somewhere downstream in the strategy implementation process but for which no one wants to take responsibility.

If the primary reason for creating strategies is to guide the creation of outcomes, then if people aren’t in agreement about what an outcome is, how can strategies be effective?

Try finding a common understanding of words such as ‘frameworks, structures, outputs, tactics, values, vision, strategies …’

Most strategy documents contain large amounts of information which contribute to the strategy but which are not the strategy itself. Typical of such information is demographic data, drivers for change, economic constraints, environmental factors, legislation, political persuasions and so on.

A strategy is not the background strategic information or the external information or the scenario planning which feeds into a plan.

The strategy must state what will actually be done and support these actions with sound, evidence-based rationale.

As Freek Vermeulen of London Business School puts it:

Let me not tire you with some real strategy textbook definitions but if I would just put it as ‘you know what you are doing, and why’, most firms would already fall short on this one. (Vermeulen, F. 2012. ‘So, you think you have a strategy? Five poor excuses for a strategy’. The European Business Review, 14 January)

Therefore, to be effective, a strategy development system and process must guide the development of rationale-based strategies.

What information does constitute a strategy? Surely it must be:

the information which defines how the core functions of an organisation will be refined to produce better outcomes.

Figure 1.1 identifies what organisations actually do and hence what their strategies should focus on. Fundamentally:

organisations create assets (products, services and infrastructure) and enable customers and citizens to use these assets to create benefits (outcomes) for themselves and others.

This ‘doing’ is influenced by external factors (shown above the central box in Figure 1.1) and is supported by internal factors (shown below the central box in the figure). Strategies should define and provide a rationale for the way an organisation creates infrastructure, products and services and enables customers and citizens to use them to create benefits.

This describes what organisations actually do irrespective of whether they are in the private sector, public sector, voluntary sector or any other sector.

On this basis, the fundamental role of companies is not to ‘make a profit’. Certainly a profit is a worthwhile outcome for a company, but there is no known machine or tool or process that ‘makes a profit’.

The same basic rule applies to ‘creating value’. There is no known machine or tool or process that ‘creates value’.

Certainly there are machines and tools and processes that create valuable assets (products, services and infrastructure) for which customers pay and which they then use to create worthwhile outcomes. In the process, their payments contribute to the company making a profit.

So if a company wants to ‘make a profit’ or to ‘create value’, it can only do this by improving its core processes of creating assets and enabling people to use them to create worthwhile outcomes.

The same logic applies to the public sector that creates assets that citizens use to create beneficial outcomes and for which they pay their taxes.

While strategies need to take into account external factors – such as politics, legislation and global finance markets – and internal factors such as finance, human resources management, leadership and procurement – the strategies themselves should focus on improving what is happening. Have a look at the central box in Figure 1.1:

Figure 1.1 Organisations create products and services and enable customers and citizens to use them

It has not been possible to amend this figure for suitable viewing on this device. For larger version please see: http://www.ashgate.com/pdf/ebooks/9781472427830_Fig1_1.pdf

organisations create assets (products, services and infrastructure) and enable customers and citizens to use these assets to create benefits (outcomes) for themselves and others.

So a strategy needs to define succinctly what organisations do, how their customers and citizens respond to what organisations do and why and how the organisation will do things better in future.

OpenStrategies thinking encapsulates this core function of organisations through a sequence of logic represented by the acronym PRUB: organisations run Projects which produce Results which individuals and communities Use to derive Benefits (see Figure 1.2), that is, Projects create assets (Results) which customers/citizens use (Use) to create benefits (Benefits) for themselves and others.

This neatly represents the core of what organisations actually do. Therefore strategies should aim to improve an organisation’s PRUB sequences and these should be at the core of every strategy.

Figure 1.2 shows how the PRUB sequence forms the core for any strategy to which other information contributes. Therefore, in order to strategically improve the core functioning of any organisation, a strategy should be based on PRUB. PRUB should be the core information structure for any strategy.

Given that the desired output of a strategy development process is ‘a strategy’ (that is, a plan supported by a rationale), the OpenStrategies approach involves starting any strategic planning process by defining the taxonomy, syntax and semantics of the final strategy. OpenStrategies uses this PRUB sequence to guide the strategy development process.

In particular the Projects-Results-Uses-Benefits sequence guides the strategy development process to first find robust information on Uses and their associated Benefits an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Author’s Note
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Projects, Results, Uses and Benefits (PRUB) and OpenStrategies
• Part I Why Most Strategies Fail to Have Any Impact
• Part II Creating and Validating Strategies
• Appendix 1 Projects, Results, Uses and Benefits and OpenStrategies Glossary
• Appendix 2 Analysis and Specification for an Integrated Strategic Information Management System
• Index