I once worked with a client to create a one page summary of their transformation strategy. We had a name for the strategy, a defined mission and a vision, some associated values, a customer promise, key goals, time gates and measures. The risk with this approach of-course is that it becomes overly reductive and misses any nuance or detail around execution or delivery. But I do think that it’s a very useful exercise to go through for a few key reasons:
It forces a leadership to align around a specific articulation of what their high-level strategy is. Too often different senior leaders within an organisation may have slightly different perceptions or perspectives on what the strategy is, or where the precise prioritisation of effort and value should lie. This brings clarity, and is something that can be referred back to again and again
It helps with communication. Rather than the CEO doing a powerpoint presentation and expecting everything to change, the one-page strategy becomes a living articulation of what the organisation is trying to acheive. It’s very tangible. It can become a thing. It can be visualised, put up on the walls, put in shared areas as a constant reminder of what the company is trying to achieve.
It can help teams to own the strategy. A clear articulation of the high-level strategy helps teams to develop their own executional plans for how they will help achieve the outcomes the company is going after. The strategy-on-a-plan acts as a guide for what they should be doing and the time horizons that the company is working to.
As long as the one-pager is supported by a clearly articulated (preferrably written) strategy which gives the necessary supporting detail, it is a brilliantly simple way of ensuring a common understanding of the strategy and communicating it to everyone in the business (in a relatively non-commercially sensitive way).
I was reminded about this as I read about Salesforce’s V2MOM. V2MOM (which stands for vision, values, methods, obstacles, and measures) is a way that they have of ensuring strategic clarity and alignment. The idea is that a corporate V2MOM is created, updated and cascaded annually, and then each team (and even individuals) creates one which is aligned to the corporate strategy but articulates it in a way to make it more executional and specific:
- Vision: What do you want to achieve?
- Values: What’s important to you?
- Methods: How do you get it?
- Obstacles: What’s preventing you from being successful?
- Measures: How will you know you’ve been successful?
Since the V2MOMs are created within Salesforce (of course), they are visible to everyone else in the company. Here’s an example of some of the questions that teams might ask under each of these headings (re-purposed from here):
This kind of cascade and transparency reminds me of the principles behind OKRs but importantly it enables informed conversations to be had about individual team agendas and priorities.
Fundamentally this is about articulating a strategy in a clear way, but then linking it to execution in a pragmatic way, whilst also ensuring alignment through the organisation. Whether it’s a V2MOM or some other format, all this makes complete sense and yet so few companies actually do it.
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Photo by Ashley West Edwards on Unsplash
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