From Plans to Progress: Strategy Frameworks that Drive Results

Hello everybody. Thank you for joining us. The topic for today's webinar is from Plans to Progress Strategy Frameworks that Drab. And Champ Randall is president and co founder of LBL Strategies and author of strategy in the 21st a practical strategic Management Process. Robin served as Vice president of Strategic Foresight and was awarded Strategic Advisor of the Year just this week. So congratulations Robin, and welcome both of you.

The audience will system of strategic management and within that any number of frameworks fit within. And I can say something about that as we go. But these are the six phases. My guess is those of us on the call can agree that anytime you find yourself leading the strategy project of some sort, you have to initiate it. And always or generally always or certainly should be begin by looking at the environment around us, what's coming at us. And this is where the growing discipline of strategic foresight scenario planning comes in. The third phase has to do with formulation of strategy. This is where we set the direction we're going and put together that high level strategy followed by actually the strategic planning. What is our strategic plan? What is our strategic operating plan? And having done this, I've worked on about 3,000 projects over the years. This is pretty much all my life has been kind of where I've come to is this is the easy part, the first four phases, this is strategic planning. But by far and away, the harder part of strategic management begins as strategy execution, particularly related to aligning the organization with its operating model. And then ultimately once implementation begins, we have to manage strategy and as an ongoing project, an ongoing process, and throughout engagement of stakeholders and governance of strategy are absolutely at the core. The other thing I want to say about this is that while it's presented in more of a circle linear format, strategy is dynamic. So things don't always unfold as this graphic implies. But our perspective is in the work that we do in preparing people for certification, it makes sense to be able to kind of learn the tools and the techniques in this sequence. But we all know once we get into executing strategy, the world around us continues to change and we have to be able to adapt dynamically. So Ted, that's a little bit about who we are and the framework that guides our work.

No, that's great, Randall. I really appreciate it because, you know, it's, it's interesting when you say this is kind of, it's agnostic to the, the strategy approach that you take. I'm really, I'm really interested in learning more about how you align with other strategy frameworks because over at clearpoint, we, we also say like our software is pretty agnostic as to whether you're using the Balance Scorecard or, or okrs or another approach like that. So looking at this in more detail, be great to learn more about how you think about this compared to a particular framework.

Well, let's maybe start with, maybe we start with just like looking at phase three, establishing strategy. There's Plane to Win, there's Porter's, there's other frameworks out there, ansoc's Grid that fit within establishing strategies. So whichever framework an organization chooses to use, that's fine, but it's something after we know where we're going, we have to establish a strategy. When we talk about okrs and Balance Scorecard, you know, those are options for within the Strategic operating plan that in terms of how we look at all this so frameworks can fit wherever they may. What we've done and what I'm most proud of after almost 40 years now going down this path is that we have looked at this generic approach to strategy management. We have written, just finished writing the second edition of our textbook which mirrors this framework. But we went a step or two further. We've also aligned it with the Baldrige Performance Excellence Framework. They're really two sides of the same coin. Baldrige is the nation's quality standard. It's non prescriptive whereas strategy management is more semi prescriptive. And I'll talk a little bit more about these linkages as we go. But we've also aligned our course, our textbook, our consulting practice with the IESP competency model. This is, if you think of certification, there are really two parts to it. You know, what is it they're able to do? Those are the competencies that we need to have as strategy professionals. And then what is it that we need to know as a strategy professional? And that's the IASP body of knowledge. I've been involved. I was kind of the co author of BOK 2.0 and we were major contributors to BOK 3.0. So we've aligned all of this, our course, our book, with all three of these other frameworks.

It's actually pretty interesting because I also heard you kind of catch yourself a little bit when talking about some of the other frameworks because it's like if you think about balanced Scorecard, it's applying to the execution piece of it and how you might organize it. But like Porter's five Forces might go more into the assessment piece of it. And some people have even come to Us saying that, you know, a SWOT analysis is a type of framework and it's like it is a framework, but it's not the framework you would use to manage your strategy. Might be the framework you would use to, to develop or assess your strategy. Not sure how often you all run into that at lbl. People trying to pigeonhole different frameworks into maybe even the wrong place.

Well, absolutely. You know, when we look at the external environment, certainly we can use Porter's five forces. The Strategy Canvas is a great diagnostic tool. Not only a strategy setting tool that would fit into more into phase three, but yes, depending on the context you're operating in, depending on the priorities of the organization, there are many pieces that can be used in various parts and there's just a wealth of frameworks out there. And again, you know, you use the framework that fits the context.

Right, Excellent. Well, you know, I think I mentioned to you kind of leading up to this webinar, is that a lot of the local governments we work with have received the Baldrige Award and a lot of other ones are very curious about, you know, how they would get involved or how it works related to kind of managing or executing strategies. So, so tell me, let's, let's dig a little deeper into that and talk about, you know, where Baldrige and your, your, your performance management system, your, your SMPs kind of interact.

Okay, great. I, I guess I would position my comments this way. Strategy management is one side of the coin. Performance excellence is the other side of the coin. However, the two, in order for there to be synergy between the two, there has to be a place where. And what you're looking at here is kind of a traditional hierarchy of strategy management. The longer term direction, kind of that mid level where is, what are the major goals and key drivers and then subsequently what would go into a strategic operating plan. The intersection, the work that we've done and I had the opportunity to work with Tamara Fields Parsons, she used to be the head of the Tennessee Baldrige program and had a chance to speak down there a few years ago and we began to see that these really are complementary. And then we've spent several, actually, you know, about a year and a half plotting the intersection between the two. So I wanted, before, before we go to that slide, I want to just go back for one second, Robin, to the previous slide and talk about this first intersection point, the overarching goal. Any strategic planning process, any strategy management system, an organization needs to have those longer term overarching goal, goal or Goals. It's at that point that the intersection begins. Here's where we From a performance excellence point of view, once you know what the goal is from a performance excellence perspective, the question becomes, well, what's the major change that has to take place in order for that goal to take place? Who are the key stakeholders to that change? What are their value propositions for those key drivers of success? What does each key stakeholder need to do accomplish in order to move us towards that goal? So this is where we have built out a separate program called the Baldrige Performance Excellence Champion Program. And it builds from these two points. If we could go to the next slide now, Robin, here is. If you see along the left hand side, you'll see the six phases of the strategy management framework that we use in our work. And along the top are the seven core areas of the performance excellence system, Leadership strategy, customer measurement, workforce operations and results. So what we've done in our textbook, what we've done in our coursework is we've plotted where those intersections are. So those little small tiny numbers and letters that you see there really is kind of a cross reference, a crosswalk from the SMPS to the Baldrige framework.

So if we went back or even just go backwards, even to the, the pyramid, I wanted to ask about it. So what you're saying is on the right side or on the blue side with the red, this is where you would take your performance management framework. And then on the left side is where the Baldrige Performance excellence piece fits in. Is that how we should think about it?

No, I'm sorry, I wasn't clear there. Let's imagine it's all blue on the right hand side, forget the red on the black on the left is a little bit of a description. So a vision is the destination, the mission is our purpose. However, when you start thinking about performance. Excellent. Where does it tie in? Where specifically? And we're making the argument once the organization knows its overarching goal and goals, once it knows what the key drivers of success are, that's where Baldrige really can help us by starting to understand the change. You know, who are the key stakeholders to that change and what are their value propositions and what do they need to do? And then they work kind of a parallel. You know, I make the argument that a strategy management professional can also be the Baldrige champion inside their organization. These are very closely related roles.

Gotcha. And if we still stay here, sometimes I see people try to put, because I like your strategic altitude on the left hand side, some people try to say, well, the strategy piece or my enterprise level strategy, whether I'm a local gov, my city or my county strategy lives at that 25 to 40,000 foot level. I'm a business, that's my, my enterprise or my, my overall, my corporate strategy kind of lives at that 40 to 25,000, maybe even if I was looking at it 15 to 20,000 foot level. And then when I get down to my departments, I'm seeing annual plans, you know, or, or business plans or department level plans. That's where most of my ground level work is happening kind of out in the field where I can see all of my initiatives taking place there, initiatives that are very clearly driving to the targets that I'm looking for. And then I zoom out a little bit. I can see at whether it's a city, county or a, a corporate strategy that see where it fits into my objectives overall, my bigger picture, goals, the mission and value, et cetera. Do you see it in a similar way?

In general? Yes. I mean even at, the, oftentimes we refer to these as tier 1, tier 2, tier 3, tier 1, enterprise level, even at the enterprise level, there may very well be a set of objectives at that level and cross functional initiatives at the enterprise level. But as you begin cascading those corporate level objectives, enterprise level objectives, down into the program units, the departments and so forth. Yeah, that's where that annual business planning comes in, the more specific measures of success, the projects at the department level. So yeah, I see it very similarly.

TED okay. Sorry to interrupt. I know, I just wanted to take us back because I wanted to make sure as we run through this, we're capturing the pieces of it. I think we, yeah. This is where I left you.

Yes. So this is kind of to round this out in terms of the intersection of strategy management, which you'll see on the left, that's our framework. That's where certification comes from, GW those, those phases and tasks, you can see how they match up with the competencies, the skills that strategy professionals need to be able to bring forward to their client. And then the far column, the ISP bok, how it matches up with the knowledge section. So we've taken careful, very careful effort to make sure that there's a crosswalk between all of these. As best as I know, nothing like this has ever been done. So we're, we're very proud of this. TED.

No, it's really nice and, and it should let anyone who's in the strategy management space also Realize almost by the transitive property, I guess that ISP and Baldrige are also kind of tightly linked and your framework can, can, can match them together. So if you're thinking, okay, I'm doing Baldrige, the, the ISP is really important because it'll give you skills, you know, like that body of knowledge will also map over to that Baldrige body of knowledge.

Well, in the end, Baldrige is, are the, are the, the criteria that we want to meet? If we want to be excellent, it's non prescriptive. Whereas strategy management is more process driven, it's more semi prescriptive. So one is what do we want to accomplish? And the other one is more about what's the process we go through to be excellent.

No, great, great. So, so over here at clearpoint, we're a software company. You've been talking about bodies of knowledge and your, your framework. Where do you see software in general interacting in the strategy world overall and how's it evolved over your, over your career?

Well, early on in my career in the 90s, I was in the software business and developed a couple tools, lost a whole lot of money, I have to admit that. But historically I think the way it has been is strategy software plays primarily in phases five and six. More related to the, the, the execution of the strategy, the measurement of the strategy. But now that we're in the discipline and the, not the discipline, but the era of generative AI, you know, I see many intersection points for how software that incorporates AI into it and. Robin, is that you?

Yes, I'm sorry, go ahead, Randy.

I was just going to point out, particularly related to the environmental analysis piece, building out the operating plan and then phases five and six. So Robin, let me turn it to you. You know all about this.

I am a big fan of strategy software. When I was still a customer in the US Government, I made sure that I budgeted to have strategy software in my suite of tools while I manage strategy both at the Defense Department and at Secret Service. I had one employee before we had the software. We were using PowerPoint and Excel and I had one employee count. He had to manually insert 2,000 hyperlinks into our PowerPoint deck to brief our senior leaders. And that was part of our justification for obtaining strategy software. So definitely an indispensable tool. We ran all of our senior leader meetings using strategy software. So I am absolutely a big fan and cannot stress how important it is to be able to manage your strategy effectively is to have strategy management software.

Yeah. And Robin, we even Built our business off of that pain of PowerPoint and Excel. And Randall, just like what you were saying is we're actually seeing our software become more obviously clearpoint fits directly into phases five and six, but we're seeing, you know, at one level, going deeper into phases three and four, being able to leverage models to be able to build your strategy, whether it's using, you know, an OKR framework or a balanced scorecard framework or any of more than a dozen frameworks that we support just with prompts and still being able to put in your bhags and your other goals to just help you think through that process and then even more backing into phase two, or sometimes I would even say going around your, your wheel back into phase two as you think about getting, you know, external foresight or insight or doing a SWOT analysis, we have started taking, you know, strategy, a strategy report at the end of the quarter that you might conduct in an in person meeting, but with software supporting that, taking the output of that and letting software help you do SWOT analysis or a pest or pestle analysis or other ways just to leverage it to help you also think through your ability to meet your goals next year based on your previous results. Sometimes the humans in charge of making those decisions can be too optimistic or too pessimistic and you know, a larger model can look at your data and say, you know, if you continue in this route, maybe your targets should be in this area and just give you some more objective, objective ways to think about it.

You know, we're all on a big learning curve here. The world has changed, has changed forever with AI. So I guess kind of where we are and our, our guidance to the folks we work with is we've all got to get on optimistic or too.

Pessimistic and you know, a larger model can look at your data and say, you know, if you continue in this route, maybe your targets should be in this area and just give you some more objective, objective ways to think about it.

You know, we're all on a big learning curve here. The world has changed, has changed forever with AI. So I guess kind of where we are and our, our guidance to the folks we work with is we've all got to get on this learning curve, figure out how to use these tools to do good, because God knows the world needs it right now.

Well, Robin, I'm going to jump over to you because you, you lead the IASP community of Practice for government and wanted to. We have a lot of local government clients, a lot of cities, counties, and state agencies and wanted to give you the opportunity to talk a little bit more about that and how it works and how people can build their body of knowledge through yalls expertise.

Absolutely. So I is the International association for Strategy Professionals. I have a small screenshot here. There are several chapters and communities and one of those chapters is the Government Community of Practice. So we meet once a month. We have guest speakers and webinars and we share our best practices practices. And this is across government, state, local, federal. Many guest speakers, you generally have to be a member to attend or you can pay a small fee. However, if you have a.gov email address meaning you are a government employee, we have approval to offer up to two webinars for free if you would like to attend and folks can contact me. Our upcoming speakers January 9th is Dr. Aaron Bazin. He was part of Special Operations Command Strategic Planning and he's going to talk about visioning and his new book the Vision Advantage in February. The co chair of the government Community of Practice, Nikki Gomez Whaley, she works in the Arizona Governor's Office. She's going to talk about their strategic planning specifically as it relates to people centered government and how they're engaging with communities and developing their strategy. And of course Ted, we're happy to have you coming up on March 6th. So if anyone has questions, they want the code. If you're a.gov to get into any of these for free, please reach out to me. I'll have my email address at the end. And I'm happy to talk to you about the government community of practice or IASP in general.

Okay, excellent. I'm looking forward to participating in it. I know it's a group that is, that's very committed and, and there are always some good deep questions, you know, in the, in the little bit that I've been able to participate so far. So let's, let's talk a little bit about, I know we only have like a couple of minutes left. Let's talk about certification and how it works and why would someone you know who's doing strategy in their organization want to or even need to get certified?

Yes. So IASB has two levels of certification, a strategy planning professional SPP or a strategy management professional, smp. There are many reasons up on the slide about why to get certified you want to bring value to your organization. You want to distinguish yourself from other consultants, you want to elevate your level of expertise, definitely make your resume stand out as someone who is certified in strategy management. And the way it works is that there is a body of knowledge that Randall mentioned that you can study. And then we also have a prep course at LBL Strategies. Our prep course is the SMPS Mastering Strategy course. And it is a prep course to help you sit for the exam that you would take throughout ISP to get ISP certified. And I believe Randall, if I'm correct, we have a 94% pass rate. So our students that take the course have a first time pass rate. 94%. We've noticed that the ones that did not pass first time, generally English is not their first language. They're some of our foreign students that might have some language issues, but otherwise I think we do a pretty good job of preparing folks. And we also have a second course, as Randall mentioned in phase two, we have a deep dive into four Foresight. Both of our programs are affiliated with George Washington University, the Center for Excellence in Public Leadership. You can get a certificate from them as well as the Baldrige Foundation. And I know we're running short on time, but if anyone wants to reach out to me or Randall, we have our contact information on this slide and we're happy to get you information on this or ISP or Baldrige or any of the questions that we can't address today.

Okay, awesome. Robin, we did have a question come in about the community of practice is if you're outside of the United States, let's say Canada, could you still join the community of practice? Is something like that open and available?

Absolutely. IAS is global. So we have many, many countries involved in iasd. So yes.

Okay, awesome. One of my, I know just as we, as we wrap up here, one of my big takeaways, even from, from this webinar, as I've been kind of taking notes on the side, is, you know, when you think about certification, you, you might even be wondering, you know, well, my company or my organization does Balance Scorecard does. Does this apply? Right? Or if. But we do okrs or we've actually customized a strategy management process. Does any of this stuff apply? Because there's nothing kind of directly related to it. And what I, what I was thinking about as Randall was walking through the crosswalk slides that, you know, showed how the, the SMPS and Baldrige and IASP all kind of COVID the same materials. Might even make you more valuable to your employer to be certified because you can help differentiate between all the different approaches, knowing that one is like an approach and the other one is a process. Right. And if you can sort through those, then you can, you can, you can become more valuable. Especially what we see is, you know, usually every three to five years, company or a business either has a newly elected employee or newly a new manager who says, I'm not good this way, I'm going to do it that way. And this type, you know, whether it's using the phased approach or being certified, will give you the tool set and your in your own your own knowledge bank to be able to to help manage that.

I couldn't agree more. If every problem looks like a nail and all we have is a hammer, we're not going to go very far. You need to have a number of tools in your toolbox because every situation is different.

Great. Randall. Robin, greatly appreciate your time today. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks, Ted.

Thank you.

All right. Bye.