When your board wants a strategy and you have three weeks

Your CEO and board have asked for a strategy and you have three weeks to deliver it.

They have something in mind and are thinking in terms of:

• transformation
• business automation
• enhanced product innovation
• a means to improve your risk and governance posture
• business growth

The board has five different interpretations of what "strategy" means.

From the very start, you must resolve that ambiguity. If you do not, you will deliver something correct that is still wrong when presented to the board.

Using the three weeks effectively

Consider:

• What is possible
• What is not
• Where to focus

Also determine what output will be best to communicate your findings to the business. In any strategy, there will be significant nuance and different parts of the business will perceive and interpret this differently.

Therefore a crisp, focused document should be delivered that captues the strategy, documenting it for the rest of the business.

It would be useful if this was online so others in the business can easily refer to it. It should also contains a short summary of the overall strategy.

Any presentation you write should be based on this summary. It will not be possible to present all the detail and nuance. This should be left to the online document.

Keep the goal in focus

The outcome of your timeframe is to define an agreed, relevant strategy that can support your organization in the aligned delivery of its goals.

How you achieve that is by agreeing the nature and impact of the strategy while achieving alignment with your colleagues.

Your goal is not to work in isolation for three weeks. Taking this approach is likely to lead to failure when what you produce comes into contact with the rest of the business.

During the process always keep your goal in mind. This will help you achieve the necessary focus and its gives you a mechanism through which to consider anything that comes up. You can assess any item that comes up by asking: "does it affect getting to your goal?" If the answer is yes, you will need to consider the issue as part of either the strategy itself or its subsequent implementation.

In this situation it can be worthwhile to include the issue in your document. You have captured it so you can refer to it later. It also frees you up to focus on other matters, without having to expend the effort to remember it.

What to avoid

In the three weeks, it is important for you to:

• avoid technology-led conversations
• avoid vendor-specific sales material
• not focus on the strategy as a document outcome
• not ignore delivery constraints

Technology-led conversations will narrow your scope too finely. Technology is a tool to help you address an issue. It will help you reach your goal but deployment and use of technology is not your goal. Technology is a component of your strategy, not the strategy itself.

Solution vendors will entice you with all-encompassing sales narratives where their product will solve all of your problems. Avoid these as they are too technology focused. Your goal is to define a strategy for your business not understand what a specific vendor's product can do.

The outcome of your timeframe is to define an agreed, relevant strategy that can support your organization in the aligned delivery of its goals. Your goal is not to write a document.

In the delivery of the strategy it is important to explicitly acknowledge any constraints you are currently working within, during the three weeks, or constraints that will affect any strategy implementation. You must get a shared understanding and agreement on such constraints.

The risk of misalignment at the start

When a board asks for a strategy, it is unlikely everyone concerned will automatically share a single meaning of what that is. You must establish a single meaning for the whole of the organization by taking into account what such a strategy means for the heads of other parts of the business.

Within business functions, when presented with the idea of a new strategy, product hears innovation, sales will look to revenue, engineering thinks in terms of architecture, operations shoot for automation, finance will focus on cost reduction.

The risk is that everyone feels aligned because the words are the same but the meanings are not. You must establish an agreed single meaning for the business. Meanings within various functions of the business will naturally differ but what the strategy means for the business as a whole must be agreed.

Any new strategy will affect initiatives already in flight. Boards think in quarters, product teams use horizons, engineering delivery is focused on week-based sprints. The strategy must satisfy all the different clocks simultaneously.

As such a strategy must bring everyone along together, you must be clear on what success looks like. Some leaders optimise for speed, others for reliability, while others may optimise for risk reduction. Without a shared and board-agreed definition of success, the strategy will fragment without ever achieving a single vision for all.

So that there are no major surprises during strategy implementation, a shared view of readiness must be established. Others in the business may believe they are ready to scale parts of the business that the strategy impacts, while others may think that the data estate is not ready, and that delivery is already at capacity.

The strategy must surface these issues as they are the conditions in which any delivery plan will operate. Everyone must be attuned to internal business reality and industry and market context. Without this, surprises may derail any implementation.

To smooth the change of any strategy implementation, all parts of the business must be aligned. If such an alignment is not in place from the start with unequivocal CEO and board-level agreement and backing, performing the level of change necessary to implement the strategy is prone to failure.

Introducing a strategy is going to disrupt ongoing initiatives. As resources are finite, current and future projects may have to be rethought in the light of the priorities placed on the implementation of the new strategy.

In short, at the start you need to define and have everyone agree the rules of engagement. Without this, any strategy you produce is likely to fail on contact with reality.

Your three‑week plan

• Week 1: Alignment and definition
• Week 2: Assessment and structure
• Week 3: Synthesis and communication

Alignment is crucial for such a strategy that will have far-reaching implications across the whole of the business.

Assessment lets you gauge how receptive the business is to the introduction of the strategy.

Synthesis takes all the ideas you have heard from the various voices of the last two weeks and puts them into a coherent whole to benefit the business.

The output after three weeks

Your goal for the end of the three weeks is:

• Clarity
• Defensibility
• Executability
• Alignment

Are you clear on your path of travel, can you defend that path, is it possible to have the organization go in this direction, does this direction align with what is already in flight?

Clarity comes about because you have spoken with all concerned and you have considered what the new strategy can deliver for the business given its current situation and ongoing initiatives.

The work is defensible as it is based on a collective view. Major agreement should be reached before the strategy is documented or else it may be derailed during the communication phase.

The strategy is executable as the current set of in flight initiatives has been taken into account, creating the room necessary for the new strategy.

Everyone is aligned as a significant proportion of the three weeks has been dedicated to understanding the differing needs of everyone, and the impact of this on the strategy for the whole business.

The conversations that matter

To establish clarity of what you need to achieve you must have conversations with:

• the board
• the executive team
• product, engineering, including QA and any Agile, and any data functions
• delivery and operations
• sales
• legal
• HR

Getting time with enough representatives of the above is going to be a challenge in three weeks but it is crucial to sit down with enough individuals to understand what they think the new strategy is, before they can surface for you what they need from such a strategy and what one might bring to their part of the organization.

Where are you after three weeks?

What has been achieved is:

• alignment where none existed
• a shared and agreed definition has replaced ambiguity
• constraints have been surfaced early enough to avoid failure later

The three-week window forced focus and conversations that might otherwise have been avoided. The organisation has had to confront reality rather than aspiration.

What is now possible:

• a strategy implementation that can survive contact with business realities
• a plan that reflects acknowledged constraints and not wishful thinking
• a direction the organization can commit to without internal fragmentation

The real value of the work is not the strategy document, not the presentation or the summary, but the alignment, readiness and shared understanding that makes execution possible.

Three weeks does not produce a full transformation roadmap. It produces a defensible and agreed starting point. It has put into place the conditions necessary for the strategy to succeed.

The leader's job is not to predict the future and distil that view into a document. The leader's job is to create the right conditions for the organisation to move well together.

What happens next depends on execution discipline. The strategy is only as strong as the agreement and alignment behind it.

The next phase is where the real work begins.

If you need structured support in this situation, my services are here.

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