Ep 18 When a Written Strategy Document Lacks a Strategy w Alexis Savkin / Excerpt

It's the Jump Leap Long-Term Strategy Podcast, Episode 18. Your company has a long history of putting together strategic plans, and you have diligently read them all in a search to understand the intentions of prior leaders and prior managers. But as you do your review and as you look them over, you're concerned. There are lots of to-do lists, action items, and budgets, but the underlying plan seems to lack something important: a strategy. You can't quite explain why this is the case, but you can tell when that some intangible quality is missing. Perhaps there should be a better way to tell that than just using your instincts. But, but how can you know for sure? And obviously, how can you make sure that in your next strategic planning activity or project, you don't commit the same error? Tune into this episode to hear from me and my special guest Alexis Sapkin as we solve this wicked problem together. I'm Francis Wade, and welcome to the Jump Leap Long-Term Strategy Podcast. And welcome back. As you can see, I've brought on the stage our special guest for today, Alexis Sapkin. But before I introduce Alexis, I want to welcome you if you're a guest to the podcast. Why? Well, this is a different kind of format than the usual sort of invite a guest on and then do, uh, you know, uh, kind of an interview asking the guests, you know, for their wisdom and what books they've written and what their favorite color might be. Instead, what we're going to be doing is tackling a problem, problem I actually mentioned in the introduction. And it's as if you're in the next room listening while we're in an office and we're at a whiteboard trying to figure out how do you get to, you know, the bottom of it. How do you know when there is a strategy in the strategic planning document? And how do you make sure there's always a strategy in every strategic planning document? So our hope is that as we diagnose and tear apart the problem together, that you'll be exposed to some underlying thinking that you can use for yourself going forward. Better than just us just giving you the answers, we're trying to sort of show you the messy thinking that goes into our answers. And in particular, this one is particularly tricky because, like most of the problems that we choose here on the podcast, they don't have an easy solution. So we're going to spend the first part diagnosing and then going into solutions. And we're kind of following what Einstein said— bright guy— he said if he had an hour to solve a problem, he spent 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions. So we're looking for some serendipitous kind of special moments where we hopefully move the needle in the right direction. And as we do so, we'll be also ringing a bell. We have an insight bell that we use here on the podcast, and if we have some insights that are especially poignant or new to either one of us, then we'll ring the bell. If we get to the end and you don't hear anything new, then we're gonna play a buzzer. So that's how we— that's how we roll here at the podcast. And, um, let me start off again, just before I introduce Alexis, telling you about George. So George has been tasked with putting together a PowerPoint presentation intended to communicate the new strategic plan to the board. He wasn't at the offsite where all the decisions were supposed to be made, but now he must capture the essence of the new plan for others to consume. Lucky him. He's staring at his screen with the official output document kind of staring back at him. He's been stuck on the same page for about 2 hours trying to get past the list of tasks it describes. But try as he might, he can't make head or tail of what he's reading. Sure, there are 157 action items grouped under some interesting pillars, like 4 pillars maybe, but that seems to be all there is. He can't see the connection between them or the overall outcome the plan is supposed to achieve. He asked for a copy of the agenda, so he sits down with the agenda, you know, with a colleague of his to understand the process that was followed. And as she explains the process, it confirms his hunch. The strategy was just a brainstorm activity which resulted in a bunch of wish lists. Each department looked at its past results and shared it with an admin assistant. The final version simply put them together on the same page. George, poor George, is confused by all this. It appears that some important steps are missing or were skipped. But what? Alexis Savkin, Savkin, our guest for today is the CEO of BSc Design and the author of the Strategy Implementation System. With over 20 years of experience in strategic planning, he assists organizations in articulating and executing their strategies. Alexis, welcome, and what do you think of George?

Well, thank you for introduction. Uh, George, uh, well, he's in a very difficult position actually, and I think One of the reasons is because this task, this challenge that he had from his senior management, it's actually, uh, it's, it's really vague. It's not clearly defined. So, well, I, I, I, I, I think he understands these two words like strategic plan, but it's a business cliché. Yeah, it's, it's, it's something that we call whatever. Yeah, and I think he's in a kind of challenging situation. On one hand On the one hand, he understands that his colleagues are expecting from him some bold decisions, some interesting, engaging document that will capture all the nature of what is happening. On the other hand, it's not obvious how to make this up from what he has. So the list of things, the list of ideas, probably 4 pillars, they help, but anyway, it's like basically, he see, uh, what he see is a mess, and his task to, to make something good out of this mess. And it's, it's challenging task, and I, I, I don't want to be in his place, frankly saying, because you don't, you don't envy him? No, it's, it's, well, it's typical. Yeah, so I think if you, if you deal with, uh, like we do, we do with businesses every day, and you hear, you, you're kind of trying to read between lines. So probably that's what George needs to start with instead of, you know, like following the task literally. He needs to start, you know, scratching the problem, understanding what's actually people expect from him. So probably that's, that's a starting point in this case. But anyway, we agreed to talk first about the, the problem, like And the Einstein quote you mentioned, actually use it often also in my articles.

Well, this is the, this is the problem he's, he's facing, because even when, even when someone like George is given the job of, you know, sharing the strategy in a PowerPoint, it's never made clear because he's not told what the strategy is beforehand, right? He's just told to figure it out. And that's often what we end up doing as people who work in strategy, right? You know, on my part, I walk into a company and they hand me a strategy. And I don't know the company very well, usually. I'm new. They hand me a strategic document. And as I read it, I'm like, I am George. I struggle to gain even a beginning understanding. But in your role, I believe you also have this experience. Can you share a little bit about your own experience of being sent strategies that you have to kind of look at, well, figure out?

Yeah, so, well, basically my experience is mostly based on helping companies to automate their strategy because we do software. And every week or something like this, we get some insights, we get some requests from companies. It's worldwide, not just, you know, English-speaking companies, but also Middle East, Latin America. And we get requests like, okay, we need to automate our strategy. And they sometimes, they send us their strategy, and typically it's a document in Microsoft Excel, or probably in the worst case, PowerPoint slides. Typically, what they mean by strategy, they mean by strategy a long list of KPIs. Then we have a kind of internal maturity system for strategies. Immature strategies, like strategies at low level of development for us, are those with just a list of KPIs, indicators they want to track. This supposed to, uh, explain what the intention is, what they want to achieve. Okay, we can deduce it, but it's not like the best option. Uh, in the middle we have strategies where we see strategies and they align with the goals. We see some initiatives, so basically we can imagine more or less how things are expected to move, what will be moving, what will be the drivers, and probably what will be the outcomes. And in the best case, I think it's about like 5% of our cases, uh, we see the reasoning behind the goals. We can see a clear cause and effect, like where you want to start, where you want to end. And, uh, well, basically, uh, that's the levels. And, uh, but again, most of the cases is just a list of indicators people track.

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Basically, with George's situation, when they asked him to make up a strategy probably they expect, uh, like I can imagine, 20 slides, uh, introduction, general things like we, we want to achieve all good things and we want to avoid all bad things. And then they expect like the rest of the slides to be indicators they're going to focus on. That's unfortunately, that's what the strategy is in most of the organizations.

And do you, do you end up like, like I do sometimes, having to talk to somebody? Like, he tried to get a colleague to help him to understand what the strategy is or was. And do you sometimes have to talk to someone? And, and I'll tell you, I talked to people who were in the prior session and it's as if they weren't there, you know. I mean, they, they witnessed talking and they talked, but they can't explain what the heart of the strategy is. They, they're at a loss. Do you have that experience also?

Well, actually, uh, when you start talking to people, surprisingly, in most of the cases, they, they give you some, uh, some good answers. Probably I'm not deep in their business, obviously, but, uh, the answers that they give, they're quite logical. So I think, well, our profile of customers obviously biased by those who are looking for automation, but I think on the level of, you know, understanding, most of the people understand what their intent is, what they are going to go. The problem is that they cannot articulate it. It's a problem that they cannot articulate. And we typically talk to senior management like CEOs or key strategists. So On this level, they more or less have an idea about where they're heading to, and the problem starts when they need to put it on paper, when they need to articulate it. Yeah, so probably that's talking about the diagnosis of the George situation. Probably that's, that's the thing. So the strategy exists in the heads of, uh, top managers. Probably the strategy exists in the hands and heads of some key managers, but they were not able to, you know, to articulate it well enough. And basically we see the result. We see that when someone tried to share old version of strategy to George, he doesn't, he don't, he doesn't understand it because it's not in a shareable format.

Right, right, right. So I've seen that too. I've also seen cases where it's a little bit like the blind man and the elephant, where one guy understands one part of it, another lady understands another part of it, and when you talk to them, they're not talking the same. It's, it's like they were in, in a different meeting altogether, because somehow what— and, and well, it's, it's what he understands, what she understands, and then what is what's got written, what got written, and there are 3 versions of something. And then you're forced to almost like triangulate because none of them is particularly comprehensive. Each of them has an angle. So I've seen that. Have you witnessed that also? Or is that just me?

Absolutely. When we see it, it's actually— well, I agree to talk about diagnosis, but let's talk a little bit about the solution. So when you see a goal like this, when you have 3 opinions and all is different, The question is how to make one opinion, and that's where we recommend to use performance indicators. So basically, well, not performance indicators, but to quantify things. Because I just give you an example, when I say we want to have high quality, what do we mean by this? What do you mean by this? We have different opinions, that's naturally. But when I say, okay, high quality of the, for example, online meeting platform is, uh, time that I need to log in, including all, you know, accepting all, uh, permission to use a camera, avoiding all the dialogues, uh, introducing my email. So we quantify quality by time, and when we agree on this, there is no other, uh, interpretation of quality in this context. Okay, later we can change it, but for a period, for a year, for quarter, we can agree, okay, for this period we'll look at the quality from this perspective. And in this case, the indicators, it brings certain clarity. And that's— I think that's the best approach to indicators, not just to use them to calculate rewards or some incentives. No, it doesn't work. It will break the system. But if you use indicators to clarify the goals, to clarify the strategies, then it's, it's a good approach.

You see that, that working for clarifying the goals. But let's keep, let's keep digging into the problem to see if it clarifies the strategy. Because I like, for example, the, the SDGs, the, this— not to use jargon, but the Sustainable Development Goals that the UN has committed to us, 17 you know, very detailed goals, don't have any strategies per country. And as a result, they're not being implemented very well. But it's a, it's a problem that I've seen in companies that know how to do the first step. So they can define and they can measure and they can— they're all, they're all about the SMART goals. But they don't know how to position their SMART goals in a way that creates a strategy. Is that making sense?

Yes, it makes sense, but it's about Sustainable Development Goals. Many people critique them because they are not really specific, and that's true, but they are not designed to be specific actually. They are designed as aspirational goals. Yeah, and actually the previous version of— I don't remember how it was, it was something like Millennium Goals for year 2000.

MDGs.

Yeah, it was even more aspirational. So Sustainable Development Goals are a little bit more specific now, but they're not supposed to be, you know, specific enough so that you can pick a goal and start implementing. They're not simply not designed for this. And what the countries, what the regions and specific countries should do specific companies, they should do what we call decomposition. So they should select a problem that they like or that they resonates with their business and should start digging into it, should start breaking it down into smaller pieces until it starts making sense. When it starts making sense, when it starts resonating with the value you create for customers.

That's really a decent example of the problem, right, that we're talking about, because you're handed the goals but you're not told anything other than the goals, um, in the case of the SDGs, um, and you really do need a strategy. So you actually have a similar— it's a similar problem to the one that we're talking about because you need the glue to make the thing happen, and you need to either create the glue or understand the glue. So we could talk about both during the course of our conversation because they're a little bit similar And people don't quite grasp why the thing isn't being implemented, but they don't understand that something did not happen in the conceptualization of it.

Yeah, I think the decomposition is one of the glues in this case because it's actually— it's not from the business world, it's from the world of mathematicians. Yeah, I'm by training, formal training, I'm applied mathematician, so I look at this problem from this perspective as well. Actually, like many, like many business experts, I was writing about Ansoff, you know, Ansoff matrix. He's also applied mathematician. Yeah, a lot of shared ideas. Yeah, so anyway, decomposition—

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And, um, you have usually quite big personalities with quite different views, and those views are going to come out in these crucial moments, and how you handle them is absolutely critical. If you drive just for efficiency of decision-making only, there's a risk that you just go down the same old tracks you've always gone down. And so you have to allow some of that, you know, the real value is to be found in that messiness, if you can handle it well, but it's not easy.

And if you've ever been in an executive or a boardroom discussion where there's really strong difference of opinion come out, it's really hard And if you like the work we're doing, feel free to follow us at our website strategyconf.fwconsulting.com or like or leave a comment on one of the popular podcast apps such as Stitcher or iTunes. This is Francis Wade, and I'm signing out from The Jump Leap. Long-Term Strategic Planning podcast. See you later.