The path toward organizational health starts with a solid foundation and direction. It starts with adapting your current strategic priorities and roadmap to be more agile, flexible, and directional.
Agile strategic planning requires clear, bold direction from your leadership team. You may have set a destination previously, but given the state of the world, it will need to shift. Creating an agile plan requires shifting to processes that measure the health of your organization in real-time.
Video Transcription
Today’s Whiteboard Video is on agile roadmapping. This is part of our series on agile strategy or agile strategic planning. We have a four-part framework: roadmaps, agile roadmaps, strategy sprints, health metrics and weekly health check-ins or Metric Mondays.
Hi, everyone. Thanks for tuning into the Virtual Strategist. My name is Erica Olsen. I’m the CEO and co-founder of OnStrategy. Today’s whiteboard session is about agile strategy or agile strategic planning, with an overview of what that is and why it matters. And before we jump in, I just want to say I’m so excited about this topic because it’s about time that traditional strategic planning meets the principles of agile. And by agile principles, we do indeed mean those principles from software and product development. And the reason that matters is because today’s business climate requires us to be adaptive. It requires us to adapt and thrive in ways that we’ve never before because the volatility and the pace of change is unprecedented. So, the slow way that we’ve been making decisions in organizations up until now is not going to work into the future.
Old Way Versus the New Way
So, let’s talk about the old way, and the new way, and why it matters. So, the old way of strategic planning and the new way is really about shifting our mindset and maybe doing things a little bit differently, like shifting from timelines to trigger events…from performance targets to thresholds…from a big lofty vision to a clear future state. It is critical as leaders that we have a North Star. It is our job to have a place that we’re driving our organizations to– that we’re trying to have an impact that’s bigger than what you’re doing today. That’s the job. So, to do that, you need a lofty vision, but for agile strategy, it needs to be clear, and that future state needs to be concrete, from annual planning to quarterly priority setting.
Responsive Decision-Making
Again, we need to have a roadmap in place, but we want to see what our priorities are quarterly. And we want to shift from quarterly business reviews to MetricMondays (our trademark name for weekly health check-ins)…from KPIs to health metrics…from a profit focus to a sustainability focus, which is a little controversial. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be profitable. You have to be profitable, but it’s not as much about margins today, as it is about sustainability for your employees, for your customers, and ultimately for your community. And what do you get out of all of that? You move from glacial decision-making to responsive decision-making. And responsive decision-making that’s in the context of where you’re leading your organization.
Four-Part Framework
So, to make this come to life, we have a four-part framework on making it practical and realistic for you. Those four parts are roadmaps, strategy sprints, health metrics, and weekly health check-ins or MetricMondays.
For more information on this topic, check out those four videos. And just to mention it, here at OnStrategy, we’ve helped thousands of teams make these principles and practices come to life. If you need more help, we have an app and we have experts that would love to help you. Drop us a line, subscribe to our newsletter, or subscribe to our YouTube channel if you haven’t already. Happy strategizing!
