From Chaos to Clarity: How to Run Effective Strategy Meetings

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's webinar on how to run effective strategy review meetings led by Ted Jackson and Joseph Luko. Ted Jackson is the co founder of Clearpoint Strategy, bringing over 25 years of experience in strategic management and worked closely with doctors Robert Kaplan and David Norton, the creators of the Balanced Scorecard. His expertise in performance methodologies and reporting has helped countless organizations drive results. Joining him is Joseph Luko, Vice president of Customer success at Clearpoint Strategy. With over 13 years of experience in customer success and 11 years at Clearpoint, Joseph leads a dynamic team dedicated to helping hundreds of clients achieve their strategic objectives. Together, Ted and Joseph will share practical tips and best practices to help you run strategy review meetings. Let's dive in. Go ahead and take it away, Ted.

Welcome everybody. Thanks for joining us today for the webinar on making strategy review meetings more effective. As Jenna said, I'm Ted Jackson. I'm here with my colleague Joseph Luko.

Yeah, hello everybody. I'm really excited to be here with you all today. And at clearpoint, I work closely with our customers, helping them just streamline their strategy execution and reporting. And today we're going to be tackling a really common problem that we see, which are strategy review meetings that don't actually drive action or strategy execution. And people come to us with their strategic plans and they know they need to update them and be reporting on them and gather information. But there's this whole process around actually reporting and managing that plan effectively that people don't often think about. We often internally think about this. It's like the example of like a floating iceberg in the ocean where 10% of the iceberg is above water. And that's what you see, that's what you know about in terms of, hey, we need to be able to get this information from all of our folks that are involved in the strategy so we can report. But that 90% of the iceberg that's under the water that you don't always see is the processes and approaches that Ted and I are going to be talking about today. So we're really excited to dive into this and reveal that lower 90% of the iceberg.

Yeah, excellent. So, you know, if you only look at your strategy every three to five years, then, you know, really what's the point of having one? So strategy execution requires regular meetings. Too often these meetings become frustrating and ineffective. So what we're going to do is walk you through some best practices, some real world examples and how clearpoint can help. And I think Jenna mentioned this in the beginning, but the Q and A is open in this zoom meeting. So feel free to put in your questions and Joseph and I will weave them in throughout this, this discussion. But with that being said, let's just jump up. Let's jump right in. You know, we need to start by diagnosing the problem. You know, strategy meetings should drive decisions and actions, but often they fall apart because of, you know, several core challenges. You know, preparation is inconsistent. This leads to totally wasted meetings. We'll talk about more, more about this in just a minute. You know, but then during the meetings, you know, if the meetings lack structure, you have a lot of discussion, but you end up not making any decisions. And then following up from the meetings is critical as well. You know, these meetings only end up happening once a month or once a quarter, and they're usually just a couple hours long. So the real action in execut your strategy happens outside of the meetings. We want to make sure what happens during the meetings gets captured and followed through on the outside.

Yeah, absolutely. I know there was a customer that we were working with that struggled a lot because for their per capita metrics, this was a local government. Each department would use a different population number. So by the time they brought leadership all together, a lot of the questions that were coming up, the meeting was, well, which population number are you using? So, so by the time they got to a point where everybody felt comfortable with the metrics and the data and the results, the meeting was basically over. So there was really no actual decisions being made, no things happening during the meeting, except just doing a deep dive into a couple super specific measures. So if your meetings are getting derailed, maybe this sounds a little bit familiar, but Ted and I will talk about how to fix those issues and many more.

Yeah, so really, you know, the best run meetings start before the meeting itself. You can't really expect to. To walk in and solve strategic problems without good preparation, you know, and, and really, when we think about it, that requires, you know, standardized data collection. The ability to pull that data in from across a variety of sources.

Yeah, exactly. And we worked with another customer that was a large utility, actually, and this data collection process was actually owned by a team of four MBAs, probably costing close to a million dollars a year. And all this group did was gather Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoints and data via email from all the different lines of business or departments at the utility. And then they would spend a whole month preparing the final documents for the board meeting. And then when that, when that meeting was over, they would just do it again the whole next month. So took a tremendous amount of time, cost a lot of money and you know, wasn't quite giving them the results that they needed.

Yeah. One of the challenges there also is, you know, you go into that board meeting or that executive meeting or the council meeting, and if you haven't looked at the information in advance or engaged in it, it's hard to really start that discussion or start trying to have those decisions, you know, if you're seeing the information for the first time. So you really want to engage people prior to the meeting about what's happening or what's going to happen in the meeting. And this is really closely tied to this third item of distributing pre read materials. This would be getting information to people in advance. Right. So it's really frustrating to see an executive team, I call it one of the most expensive meetings you'll have by salary captured during that meeting, when they're just reviewing information for the first time. Really makes for a low quality discussion.

Yeah. And we've worked with a number of customers that have really struggled come before they came to clearpoint with getting their various updates in on time. But with leveraging some reporting workflows, our tool called the Data Loader, a few things that TED will share, they've really been able to ensure that the data is updated consistently before the meeting even started. And then you can even use your workflows to pester any of your stragglers because we know that they exist in every organization.

Yeah. So let's look at how we've thought about trying to help you prepare best for these meetings. With that, I'm going to jump into clearpoint if I can transition my screen appropriately. You know, one of the initial challenges that I talked about was getting that data in advance. So here we can see we have all of our measures, we have our actual target. You know, this organization's reporting on a quarterly basis in Clearpoint, you can just download this information directly to Excel, make any changes, upload them back in there. It's also a great way to get all of your historic data. And then the other thing that we have is we have a tool called the Data Loader that can map information to CSV files, Excel files, and run SQL queries directly on your data sources. So this is a great way to get your information directly into clearpoint and then once it's in, then you want people to go ahead and make their updates. Well, you don't want people to get confused about where they are. So we created this concept called Workspaces. And Workspaces allows an individual like if this were my workspace, I could see the five or six items that I need to update and I could jump right in to one of the places I can make my updates, see where I am. If I need to make recommendations. I could use our AI to, to drive a recommendation here, put that information directly into clearpoint here. And then what I need to do next is really check with people on the team. This is where we want to start engaging people, right? And saying, you know, like, like hey, I can mention somebody, right? Like hey Joseph, you know, please make sure my analysis is written well. And Joseph's going to get a note both in his teams and in his email. If he's in clearpoint, he'll get an alarm in clearpoint to say, hey, you've been mentioned about something. So it's a great way to start engaging people in what they're doing overall. So it's just a really nice way to be able to, to, to get prepared before that meeting. And then the other thing you would want to do for that pre read, what clearpoint can do is we can analyze everything that's happening across the scorecard so we can do just a full analysis. Again with AI, I'm just going to spread this, this out. It might not have liked me moving the screen at the same time. Let me restart that so we can do a full analysis of what's been happening across your account with your goals, your measures, your projects for that reporting period. We can take that analysis and, and send it out in a pre read. So it's just a really nice way to, to make sure your team is prepared for this upcoming meeting, you know, because then let me jump ahead. You know, once you have that reliable data, you've done that analysis, we've sent it out, the next thing is to start having those focused meetings. And those meetings need to be driven on a review calendar.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that review calendar is something that's super critical to this process. Tying back to what I mentioned earlier about the ICEBERG and the 90% below the water, you may not see or think about creating that standardized process and approach, getting everybody aligned to how you're going to run this process of collecting information, distributing a pre read and then reporting on that information. And following up, we've created, using some best practices that we've borrowed from our customers and some of the ideas that we've come up with on our own, a management reporting guide, which is like a Governance document that you can really leverage to really make sure that these processes are fully functioning for you. And it's super predictable and easy for everybody involved in the process to understand where you're at in terms of the reporting journey that you're on.

Right. I see. We did get a question from the audience about the previous information that we were talking about, which is how to incentivize individuals to provide updates. Like what if they're not engaging in the process. It's interesting because you can see in clearpoint, I'm going to just quickly jump back into clearpoint. You can see in clearpoint, in the workflow that we're in, you know, who's been engaging and who hasn't been engaging in updating their information. So, so it's a nice way to be able to nudge people and, and, and push them to make their updates. We also see it's, it's pretty common for organizations to have on any of the pages in the pre reads or on the detail pages the name of the person who's making the updates and then you can see their updates. So you do end up in a nice way being able to, to, to showcase people that are doing really, really well and showcase people that have left blanks in. I've seen an executive director of an association just pull up a page that she knew was going to be blank because the person hadn't put in their information and just said, well, I guess Julie hadn't made her updates. So we're not going to focus on that area. Let's go to the next area. And you can bet you Julie made the updates the next time. So it was really nice. So, so again, let me get back, let's get us back on track. We need that review calendar then we need that data with, with decision points to it and we need to have an action focused discussion. So you know, one of the things that, that I saw at the last ICMA conference in Pittsburgh was one of our city managers came up and said, you know, I think we're trying to present everything that we have in clearpoint at a meeting. Like what do you think we should be doing? I said, well, tell me more. And he's like, well, some areas are more important than others. I was like, okay, I think you just answered your own question. Why don't you highlight those more important areas and put those in the agenda for the meeting and focus on that. You can always send out all of the information as a read ahead. But, but tell people these are the areas that we're going to be discussing. Did you want to add anything, Joseph, before I show something in?

Yeah, I wanted to kind of touch on that point again about just focusing on the discussions and the action in the meeting. And I think, you know, sometimes people can get a little bit really focused on their objectives or goals and their measures or KPIs. But I think the nice thing about Clear Point in having a truly balanced overall approach to strategy is that those projects and those action items are really, really key because it's, hey, what are we actually going to be doing? And I think if you're only focusing on the objectives and the measures, the meeting becomes a bit of a, of just a readout and the status of those objectives and measures can be tackled in the pre read that you share. But the discussion really should be about kind of where the measures are at and then what, where how the projects and actions that you're taking are driving improvement to the metrics and to those trends. So, you know, I'm reminded of a customer that we worked with in the past that really spent close to 80% of their meeting time they mentioned just talking about data accuracy and doing a readout and then at the end running out of time to actually really dive in to talking about what we're going to do about the results and ultimately like that's what's most important in terms of actually executing the strategy.

Yeah. Excellent. I see we got a question from, from Rachel on, do we have suggestions on how to motivate meeting attendees to complete the pre readings? We've done a couple of things. One, typically the, the people writing the analysis for objectives are the ones that are in the meetings or for the goals. So one of the things we've seen is people leveraging our AI capability to summarize what's happening and then we send out the information in advance saying this was written by AI. Make sure that it represents what you've written appropriately. And that gets people pretty curious about what it could have written and how well it did, summarizing the information and that with the agenda, with a clear set of what you're trying to solve in the meeting. And then if people aren't prepared, they don't get to weigh in. Some of that is having a good decision making process, letting people understand how you make decisions during meetings. And usually that gives people a bit of an incentive to show up, especially if one of the decisions is going to impact their department pretty heavily.

Yeah. And Rachel, you're certainly not alone in all of this. I know one of the management techniques that Jeff Bezos used when he was running Amazon was he would reserve the first 15 minutes of a meeting to make the other executives read the pre read because he just knew that sometimes certain leaders will kind of show up and fake it and not be completely prepared. So he actually carved out time in the meeting for people to do the pre read.

Yeah. And then we just got another question from Deborah. I appreciate all the questions. That saves Joseph and I from just chatting with each other too much is, is how do you train people not to just read each line about what they've writt. One interesting way to do that, I think I'm going to just jump into Clearpoint as well. Just to, to show while I'm here is, you know, in Clearpoint, a lot of times you can start at, at this level for, you know, the, the summary and then be able to jump in. You can organize these pages to not have all of the information or even to, to shrink a section to say you only have two sentences or two lines to be able to put information on the page. So there are a few ways to do it. One of the things we've seen is I know I'm on a measure detail page, but some people just stay at the objective level. And so you might have written a lot of analysis at the measure level, but we don't cover that. So it's just a nice way to say we want to stay at a high level. But in thinking about using tools during the meetings, clearly you could go in to a tool like clearpoint, show the information, be able to drill down from one level to the next there. You know, depending on what you're talking about, you may end up wanting to use our Kanban feature. If you're talking about, okay, which initiatives are we approving right now? Are we able to go ahead with that employee satisfaction survey? Let's go ahead and move it over to the approved column. And sometimes just the visuals allow you to get to a spot where the meeting is a little bit more engaging. Right. And then another way to prevent from reviewing everything is you may end up, you know, creating some reports that maybe are structured in a way that are just the items that are off track and then only either the analysis or recommendations like, what do we do about it? I'm not going to give you so much information that you get lost, but just enough for the decision that we're trying to make. And I think a lot of these things will help drive that, that meeting effectiveness. Another big thing that I recommend is also when you pull that meeting agenda together. Remember it's not going to have everything in your scorecard. It's going to have the key decisions that you're making. Do put some times on there. And I like to put, you know, not only 30 minutes, but also, you know, this meeting started at 11, I would say at 11:15. We want to be here at 11:30. We want to be at the next spot so that everyone can kind of look at their watch and know like, okay, we need to stop discussing this and move to the next item. It's a great way to, to, to push you forward, keep the questions coming. I'm going to make sure that we have time to cover all the items here. You see, we don't have too much stuff, but when we think about after that meeting, you know, it's as I said in, in kind of my intro, you know, the meeting happens once a month or once a quarter for a few hours, but the execution happens after that. Right. So we want to be able to, to have clear action items. Assign those out to individuals with like some clear responsibility. Create a meeting summary for your leadership, you know, for transparency. Here's what we discussed, here's what we decided we're going to focus on and then try to keep that visibility throughout those times between the meetings. So you know, you're getting notifications and updates along the way. Yeah.

And I know one of our customers we work closely with felt like they've kind of improved their execution by around 40% they said just by being able to automate those follow ups. And I think another really key thing that helps people see the action that's being made and helps with buy in to touch base on, to kind of tie back to some of the questions that we've gotten in the chat as well is part of that follow up really needs to be sharing that information broadly, whether it's just internal of your organization. And clearpoint allows you to share some things internally for folks. Your whole organization can see who's responsible, who's accountable, how things are moving along and how they fit into the strategy. But also if you're a public organization, you're able to share information externally if you're a local government with your citizens. So that way you can keep all stakeholders really informed on that follow up and on that execution overall.

Yeah, and even in the this middle section on briefings, one of the things we do as an organization is we create kind of two sets of meeting minutes. One is the clear action items for the people that were responsible for making sure they're doing the follow up. We of course put those in clearpoint, I'll show you that in just a second. But then we create a second meeting summary for the entire organization and we do like a brown bag lunch where we discuss, you know, overall how we're doing as an organization. What are the key things happening in different areas. It's a great way. I think there's, you know, typically when you're saying we're doing a strategy meeting, bringing the executive or the management team, you know, into a conference room with a closed door, people are usually curious about what's being discussed. This is just another great way to, to provide transparency. I'm going to show you a little bit about how you might do some of this stuff inside of clearpoint again. So, you know, if we were in, you know, one of our goals or KPIs that we were discussing, you can link items like action items, you know, like, okay, we need to make sure that we're taking care of these particular items and we, you know, you can have comments, you can have due dates for these action action items. You can be able to mark them as complete. And then you could also have one place where you see all of your action items and you can, you know, just quickly in one place. If you want to mark it as something that you have completed, you know, it will default to today's date. But you know, realistically, if you completed it a few days ago, you can move it that way. And then this is the list that we would print up and send out to people. So it's just a really nice way to do it. If you have your notifications set in clearpoint, a really nice thing you can see, Let me see if I can share this is we have it integrated with teams so you could see your analysis for revenue, your recommendations, you can make your updates there. You can get your action items also in teams if you are one of the owners of your information. So it's just a really nice way to put, to put strategy front and center, not just have, you know, that single strategy review meeting.

Overall, yeah, I think, you know, hey, like it or not, people are really busy, right? And a lot of folks are spending their time in either their inbox or on teams. And a lot leveraging that, leveraging that functionality allows you to put the strategy kind of right in front of people where they are, right? So I know even when Ted had added me earlier as a discussion topic, you know, I got a teams alert and I got an email. So I can really kind of stay aligned with those different things.

Yeah, it's nice. So we did get another question from Jeff says are your current customers using Clearpoint Live during a meeting or pulling data from Clearpoint for a PowerPoint deck? We've seen it a couple of ways. I, I've seen people take our briefing book capability which allows you to export whatever you need from clearpoint into a briefing book that does have hyperlinks in it. So you can treat it like you're online, but people send that out as a pre read so then people can look at it and then they're very comfortable that it's the same set of information. The benefit of the briefing book is that you can limit what you want everyone to review and what you're going to discuss by what you put into the briefing book. It can also be one of the drawbacks. Right. So some people like to do their meetings online because if they do drive into a discussion that takes them into how a department is doing, they can leave where they are and go quickly look at some of the departmental analysis. Joseph, I don't know about some of your clients if you want to.

Yeah, definitely. I think we see a lot of the briefing book being leveraged. I also really do try to encourage folks to, you know, use, use clearpoint Drive in clearpoint as you navigate through it and you can build different reports and views that you want to be able to leverage in the meeting in real time. And then you can capture action items in real time inside of clearpoint and link them to the appropriate either goals, measures or projects that they tie to.

Yeah, and then another question was around the brown bag lunches that we discussed is, you know, is it something organized for the whole team kind of beyond senior leadership and insight on how to keep that conversation high level? So I've seen it a couple of ways. The, the brown bag lunch is typically for that next level of management, sometimes for the, the whole organization, but it's for the people that were not in the room right when that meeting happened. And then depending on how much time you give it, I've seen them anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes long is, is, you know, getting people who own the information to talk about it in advance and even sending out, you know, almost a script of what you want them to talk about or at minimum some guidelines. You have one minute to discuss and, and then people across the organization hear from different voices, different on what's going on and it's about the same amount of information. Again, it's not a deep dive into every single thing that you discussed or every single thing in your strategy. But it's like the five to seven takeaways from the meeting, you know what really happened. So I do think there's some ways to do that. Typically a bigger organization has an office of strategy management that's organizing that. A smaller organization just going to have someone who is typically guiding your organization through that strategy review meeting can also guide that brown bag. Just some, you know, everyone's got two or three bullet points to discuss in their section based on the amount of time you give. You know you're going to cover, you know, three to five sections. Okay, we're almost out of time. Let's just kind of, you know, quickly recap, you know, from these, from, from this webinar. You know, the best meetings start before they happen. That means you're doing your preparation the right way. We've tried to get there. There are a lot of features in clearpoint that will help you do that, including those mentions inside of the tool. And you can allow a lot of transparency to everything in the strategy. Then you want to structure your meeting for decision making, not data review. Ideally, that pre read is your data review with the idea of what decision are you trying to make based on these results? We're trying to figure out these next steps. We think they're one of two options. So then you know why you're reviewing that data. So you can make the decisions and then follow through is where strategy execution happens.

Yeah, and really I think, you know, the best meetings are an experience that you're bringing your participants through. And that experience starts before the meeting, continues during the meeting, and then after the meeting, really until you're doing the prep for the next meeting. Right. So it's this critical cycle and in executing your strategy. And you know, Ted and I could chat kind of all day about this, but appreciate the questions throughout. And if there are any other questions folks want to submit, we're glad to answer those as well.

Yes. And thanks everyone for joining us today. If you'd like to improve your reporting or even just received a personalized clearpoint demo, just reach out to us. We're happy to continue to share insights. Happy reporting.