The strategic working board will help you and the team organise strategic inputs, relevant internal and external data, and insights gained as you do the work to build your strategy.
The strategic working board is configured using a 4 zone framework to ensure you take a holistic and balanced approach when building and implementing your strategy. All too often we see customers who are overly focused on the financials and do not consider what the whole system needs to look like to reach those financial goals.
The 4 zones:
- Financial security
- Economic engine – the focus is on the external customer.
- Organisation design - the focus is on structure, operational systems and processes.
- Leadership and culture – focus on people, culture, learning and leadership.
As you work through the pathways to build your winning strategy, you will use the strategic working board to record inputs into a logical order under the 4 zones. This grouping of data will allow for focused and considered discussions and hopefully insights that will lead to a solid winning strategy.
If you don’t use a framework to organise the data, the whole process becomes messy and discussions can be confusing and unfocused. It’s impossible to hold all the relevant data in your head.
You will start by organising the vision into strategic themes across the 4 zones. You should have at least 1 theme in each zone, and you will probably find you will have 3 or 4 in the economic engine.
As you work through the pathways any relevant data or insights will be associated with the relevant theme. After discussion, debate and renewed insight you will use the information on the strategic working board to create your strategic goals.
TIP: You will have gathered a lot of inputs from your business and not all (or even most!) are strategically relevant and should not be added to the strategic working board. Inputs that are operational or business as usual (BAU) should NOT be added to the board.
It's important to reiterate that the strategic working board SHOULD ONLY contain inputs that you think are relevant to your business meeting its vision or strategic goals.
Examples
An example strategic working board can be seen below:
Examples of good inputs to add
- Competitor X has preferred supplier status
- Ensuring we build play spaces that incorporate nature
Both examples here are specific, and target the bullseye of the organisation, or are critical for the organisation's strategy to become financially successful.
Examples of bad inputs to add
- Competitor X has been established longer than us
- Consistency
Both examples here lack detail, and possibly aren't really strategically relevant. An input that says something like 'We don't deliver projects to our customer in a way that is consistent, repeatable and with high quality' might be a better phrasing of the input.
Notes
The four zone framework is similar to a balanced scorecard approach introduced by Robert Kaplan in the 1990’s. Today it is the most widely used approach.
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