Strategy to Action describes the practices and behaviours required to develop and deploy business strategy, turn your ideas into focused actions, and turn actions into the results you want.
Developing and implementing strategy more effectively in a fast-changing world
Companies that can turn strategy into purposeful action and adapt quickly to a fast-changing world build-in a competitive advantage.
Our solutions incorporate Leadership through Intent™, a mission-based approach building meaningful connection between people, strategy and operations.
We work in several connected areas:
- Helping you to develop intent to indicate a clear direction of travel and priorities
- Communicating intent and promoting alignment of operational activity
- Developing adaptive leadership capability at all appropriate levels
- Integrating other people and performance processes
Developing clear intent
Over many years we’ve developed tools and practices to help clients describe their strategic intentions in a concise form we call ‘intent’. Often this requires a review of the overall situation to ensure goals, capabilities and opportunities and in balance and make significant strategic choices about what is both important and achievable.
This is an example of how we’ve built strategic intent for a client using 10 Critical Planning Questions:
Communicating intent and promoting alignment
We codified the basic practices associated with Leadership through Intent™ so they can be learned and deployed consistently.
It takes a little practice to become comfortable with the idea of leading through intent rather than instructions. You need to think in a structured and distinctive way. It’s about HOW you think not WHAT you think.
So that everyone can think in a structured way we designed a simple thinking process called 5MAP™. It’s based on five questions and provides a consistent process to establish objectives, accountabilities, priorities, boundaries and requirements to support other teams. 5MAP™ creates a common and aligned start point from which teams and individuals can plan and execute strategy. 5MAP™ reliably ensures leaders can interpret strategic intent and cascade it throughout an organisation:
Developing adaptive leadership
Our development programmes help leaders understand and apply the principles of Leading through Intent™. We’ve adopted a Leader Playbook of six distinctive new behavioural ‘plays’ associated with Leading through Intent™. These plays, supported by experiential learning, make it easier for leaders to assimilate and embed positive changes to their behaviour.
Read a case study about how we bring strategy to life
Benefits of strategy to action
- Teams engage with the strategic context for their actions and are clear what really matters
- People are better able to conceive what success looks like
- Leaders do the right things at the right level
- Mission-based teams readily form and align across functions and geographies in with clear boundaries for decision-making
- People are allowed greater freedom to act and adapt faster as the situation changes
