Strategy Sessions

 How does your team come together to create their strategy?

It's a loaded term, prone to misinterpretation, but there's no time like today to start strategically planning. Far too often though, these sessions are poorly planned and the results leave us wanting.

Join us for this week's episode, “Strategy Sessions,” where Dave and Peter explore the secrets of making strategy sessions successful. We'll discuss tips that will help you get more out of your strategic planning.

 This week takeaway: 
·        Make decisions in the room.
·        Target a short time horizon.
·        Start with outcomes.
·        Prepare ahead of time 

 We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com 

Transcript

Peter: 0:05

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello and welcome to another fantastic episode of Definitely Maybe Agile with your hosts Peter Madison and Dave Sharrock. So hi, dave.

Dave: 0:22

Hey, peter, you're full of energy today, aren't you so great to be with you yet again? So obviously you've come from an invigorating, energizing strategy session.

Peter: 0:33

Of course, that's what I do all the time. Right, there's always energizing and invigorating when you have strategy sessions and we were just talking about this earlier and stuff. So what do you need for a strategy session to go right?

Dave: 1:05

strategic conversations and get decisions made and identify things moving forward, because there's a lot of change around, there's a lot of pressure on organizations to handle what's out there, what's coming at them, and the way people have been working perhaps doesn't seem to be working as well as it could do. So there are problems in delivery, or they're worried that maybe what they planned to do this quarter, this half year, this financial year, isn't going to be what is needed, isn't necessarily going to be delivered, maybe something along those lines. What do you see?

Peter: 1:34

I see that there's all of these pieces where I relate it back to there being just too much work in progress.

Peter: 1:41

It's that people don't have a good idea of what they're going to focus on. They haven't put the immediate set of requirements in place, and so this means that when they come to try and make those decisions, they've just got way, way too many things to try and sort through and it's got this huge list and it's like well, we want to do everything. Well, yeah, but we know that it's this classic supply and demand problem. We don't have capacity to be able to do everything. We have to pick the things that we can do, and I've had multiple conversations even today with senior executives talking about well, we know that we've got to do this and we know we've got to do these pieces, but how do we go about narrowing this down and coming up with some strategy around this sort of narrowing this down and coming up with some strategy around this? And this is where I see the importance of running these strategy sessions and ensuring you capture the right things, absolutely.

Dave: 2:30

I was just thinking as well, is the I mean a few years ago, your strategy session? There was one for the year, right, it was a get together and you'd plan the year out and then maybe some way partway through that you'd assess performance and see how things were going. Company retreat, company retreat, and maybe some way partway through that you'd assess performance and see how things were going. Company retreat, company retreat, exactly, and I think the reality is now A. We've got loads and loads of things to do. So we're trying to juggle many, many balls in the air.

Dave: 2:54

But also now more and more opportunities, must-haves are coming in through the year which weren't known about at the beginning of the year or were just not front and center at the beginning of the year. So there's a little bit of that shuffling of the decks and how to figure out how to do those. So these events are happening more frequently. Which, to start with, I think is one of the key things, is this idea of a company retreat, financial, strategic look at the entire year. There is a need to do that more frequent every three or four months, something like that. There's an assessment, maybe twice a year, on a depends again on the scale of the organization, but that the frequency of reassessing objectives, reassessing priorities, validating your strategy is something that you cannot leave as an annual event.

Peter: 3:43

I completely agree and I think having those more frequent sessions where you're getting together understanding. Are these the outcomes we still want? Are we still aiming for the same things? Are the objectives we have going to get us to those outcomes? Are we actually working towards the same set of goals? Has anything changed, both internally, externally, in the context of what we're looking at? Are our customers asking for the same things? All of these need to be brought to the table and considered as we look at all the rapid change that's going on both in and out of the company.

Dave: 4:17

We've had a number of our clients where we've been working with them, helping them put OKRs objectives and key in place. And what I really like about those conversations is the whole point of the Objectives and Key Results is, first of all, that they're done as a dialogue. They're not done as some sort of cascading, mandated objectives for the year. That's part of obviously any sort of discussion is. It's a discussion, not information coming at you. But the other piece is the continual review.

Dave: 4:49

The idea that something stays, those key results become your priority for an entire year, is sort of thrown away. And the idea is that you'll have the outcomes. We need to focus on those outcomes. We have we come up with an idea of the key results that would drive those outcomes. We need to focus on those outcomes. We have we come up with an idea of the key results that would drive those outcomes. But then to your point about that kind of review cycle, a more frequent review cycle. Those outcomes become something that are reviewed, revisited, more frequently than this idea of a sort of an annual objective.

Peter: 5:18

Yes, because if you leave them for too long, then they're going to be out of date.

Peter: 5:23

You're going in the wrong direction.

Peter: 5:24

You need to make sure that you're constantly looking at where it is that you need to be getting to next, so that short time horizon is critical.

Peter: 5:33

I think the other piece that we were talking about there as well is around that like starting with outcomes, because the criticality there is that if we then walk into that strategy session, there's the criticality there is that if we then walk into that strategy session and we start from the point of view of, well, we have all of these solutions and we know what it is that we're going to do, the solution will drive your strategy rather than your strategy driving the solution, and so we've got to make sure that we get these in right order, and I find that starting with outcomes is a great way to do that, and techniques like outcome mapping and things like that are really really great ways I found to get people to start to think about what the future might hold versus and start to take a step back from the trees and look at the forest, which I found, especially working with technical groups, is one of the biggest problems that we run into.

Dave: 6:19

Well, it's that you almost have to have a bit of space at the beginning of a strategy session for people to say what they think they're going to be doing and get that sort of off their chest on a bit of paper, on some digital workspace somewhere, so that you can then push that to one side and start talking about what the desired outcomes are and we can maybe revisit and validate that as you go forward.

Peter: 6:45

I made exactly that recommendation, more than an hour ago.

Dave: 6:48

Okay, yes, yeah. Now here's the other thing that always strikes me as a bit of an oddity is those strategic sessions with little to no preparatory work, and I mean, I know everybody's calendar is chock-a-block and in a virtual world, there is only one Zoom virtual meeting after the other, team or teams or whatever it might be, looking at your market and what you're trying to achieve. I do feel that taking the time to understand your current state, understand maybe some of what the market is doing and what the direction is, whether it's through competitor analysis or just looking at some of the data that, to be fair, most organizations are swimming in data and information how do you turn that into something that you can use? I do feel is important in any strategic session that sort of pre-saturation, of understanding the current state, so that we're primed and ready to talk a predefined list of things which are going to need to be considered.

Peter: 8:08

So, once we've defined our outcomes, you know what direction we'll go in. But we know that we have ongoing work that we need to look at and start to consider in that context. And I've been in this situation where I said, okay, well, here's the list that we pulled out of the system of all the different things that we're working on, and so what's this one mean? And you just get blank stares and it's like nobody knows. It's like.

Dave: 8:32

So we've got to have this understanding and have done the research to look at this so that when we get to that point, we can at least start to have the conversation around it, because we've got enough information to have that conversation Well and have real data, not that recency bias where you're walking in saying this is a huge problem because the last three days I've been dealing with some customer service issue or challenge Well, that might not be the biggest challenges that we have in the organization so kind of getting a way of cleaning through some of those things and aligning on what are the pressures the organization is under, what are the problems, the outcomes as you said, they have to kind of work towards and sort of getting that comfort level with knowing what that is, so that we're able to as a group really address them with the right solutions or the right ideas and focus yes, and and there's the uh along with that there's if we have that, we can now have a much deeper conversation about these things and talk about, well, what's actually causing the underlying problems that we're trying to solve here as well, because this is the other reason.

Peter: 9:43

We start with the outcomes and then, when we understand more about the problem, we need to be able to understand enough about it to say, hey, what is the reason that we're doing this? And if we can't properly articulate the problem, then we're not gonna be able to easily get that across and make the right decisions. And which brings us, I think, to another point that you were talking about as well chatting right before this around ensuring that you make the right decisions in the room. That it's not that you come up with all of this discussion. You document it, you put on a virtual whiteboard and then walk away and nobody ever looks at it again.

Dave: 10:19

You need to have decisions being made then and there about what's going to happen, so you can take that away and apply it to you and I I'm a huge fan of that, I mean, and if the wrong people are in the room or if we need to go bring somebody to the room, then make sure that's that's something that's possible.

Dave: 10:35

I I also liked what you said about capturing those ideas and artifacts and and the this the the most valuable strategic workshops that I've certainly been involved with have built on the previous one and and again there's sometimes there's this punch of activity around a strategy session and then some period of application, if you like, and then another punch of strategic activity, another period of application, but the connection between those strategic workshops is maybe lost. And that whole visualizing what the outcomes were in the last strategic session have they changed the activities that were agreed in the last session? How are they being implemented? What progress is being made? That connection between one strategy discussion and the next allows, you know, deeper dives into what's going on and it does feel obvious. However, I think there's it's difficult to avoid the you know, that board kind of goes dormant for several months, three, four, five months, and then we dust it off and everybody has to reconnect because they've expired their connection to whatever it was and there's an opportunity missed when that happens.

Peter: 11:46

yeah, footprints in the digital dust. There's a this. It's quite um, it's quite incredible how much that happens. It's like you. You come away from the session really energized. You, you can see what these outcomes are. We know what we're going to work towards. We've made those decisions. We, we've all agreed and you've had all of the nodding heads around the room that we've all agreed to this. And then you come back and to a follow-up planning session and nothing happened. In fact, everybody just went back and did exactly what they were doing before.

Dave: 12:20

Well, you say that's a surprise, but I think the reality is of course that's happening because you know we're all inundated with calls on our time and we leave that session maybe energized, but it doesn't take very many emails opening up for us to kind of lose that energy and focus and get drawn into what's around us for us to kind of lose that energy and focus and get drawn into what's around us.

Dave: 12:45

I'm always reminded of things like lessons learned or, you know projects, retrospectives that can happen where a long list of huge, you know significant changes can be agreed. And then, of course, you know they're parked and it's in a filing cabinet somewhere and eight months later or 18 months later, the same conversation, the same observations come up. It's not a fault of the people, I think as much as anything, it's a characteristic or an attribute of the system. Right, and remembering that one of the things that we spend a lot of time in strategic workshops is committing to one or two changes, not 28,. Right that you started it when we started this conversation, talking about limiting work in progress, and I think this is one of those areas where where we can really lead from the front if we're able to get that agreement in those conversations and I think there are as well, when you're doing this, especially towards the end of the session, saying okay, and how are we going to hold ourselves accountable to this?

Peter: 13:49

taking some notes, how to coaching? What new awareness do we now have like? How is this a value? So you're cementing the, the things that have been discussed, you're building that action plan, you're making sure that people understand how it's going to be tracked, how it's going to be. People are going to be held accountable to those things and and I agree completely, keep it a very small list of things, but make sure we've also understood how we're going to hold ourselves accountable to making sure that those things happen, because that's how we build trust and we build momentum and we build value out of that time spent together.

Dave: 14:24

Now, lemmy, so as you're describing that, I'm just wondering if any of our listeners are thinking well, what about those stretch goals, the reach for the stars type of objectives or actions? How do they sit aspirational pieces right, how do they sit with what you're just describing?

Peter: 14:42

So when I do this and I find this is really good from an outcome mapping perspective is we're looking at exactly that.

Peter: 14:49

What can we do in the next three to six months You're saying, you're putting a time perspective on it so we understand what outcomes, what actions we're going to take that we're going to be able to measure against within a period of time that we'd be able to at least see and assess the outcomes from that.

Peter: 15:06

We take our longer term aspirational dependent ones and then we have those longer term aspirational ones which we want to capture because we know that those are things. That we take our longer term aspirational dependent ones and then we have those longer term aspirational ones which we want to capture because we know that those are things that we want to eventually get to, and we document them and we look at them and we make sure that those are there for us to say are we still moving towards? Are these aspirational goals still serving us? Are we, are these the things that we still want to be like? If you want to be like the number one virtual bank in the world and that's this is your aspirational goal you want to rule the payments market or or something that is up there as a long term aspirational goal that you you know that you're not going to get to, but it's an outcome you want, and so you capture it and you come back to it and say are we working towards that with the other outcomes that we're targeting?

Dave: 15:48

working towards that with the other outcomes that we're targeting. Yeah, I'm reminded, just as you're describing that, peter, is that whole bit about nested objectives, okrs, nested like you're going to have that long horizon aspirational piece but that whole conversation of breaking those down and understanding, in order to hit that, what do we need to hit in a slightly shorter horizon? And in order to hit that, what do we need to hit in a slightly shorter horizon? And in order to hit that, what do we need to hit in a slightly shorter horizon? And then validating that the whole way. I think there is the time taken to articulate that clearly but then also revisit and discuss them is time well spent. Sometimes we need to have those conversations rather than dive into the actions and the execution and what's the next solution that we need to work towards. For sure I think that's part of those discussions.

Peter: 16:36

So at this point should we sum this up for our listeners. Sure, what do?

Dave: 16:39

you see, as the top two or three things coming out of our conversation.

Peter: 16:43

So I think starting with outcomes is always one of my favorites. I think I would always put that as the number one. Starting from there, so many buyers add so much value. Just beginning from that perspective, I think that's probably number one on my list Making sure that those outcomes have a short time horizon, at least initially, that you're working towards action items that have a short time horizon so that they're things you can commit to and hold yourself accountable to, and so that they're achievable in that sense. So if we look at the concepts of smart goals and things like this and like, what are we working towards so and so? I mean those are a couple. What other things would you add to that?

Dave: 17:25

um, yeah, what stands out for one of the things that are highlights of the most powerful strategic sessions I've been a part of is the preparation, the work that you do before entering the room, and I think what's super critical there is that that work is well thought out and is respectful of time. It doesn't mean here's eight pages, 18 pages of stuff to read through. It's condensed, there's something clear, but coming in with a shared level of understanding around what the challenges are, what the data is telling us, what's out there as opportunities, really seeds great conversation.

Peter: 18:07

I think that's fantastic, and so with that, I think we're at time now for this session today. So it's been a pleasure, as always, dave. I always enjoy these conversations and, as always, if anybody wants to reach out and send us any feedback, you can do so at feedback at definitelymaybeagilecom and we will see you next time.

Dave: 18:26

Great to talk again. Looking forward to our next chat.

Peter: 18:29

You've been listening to, definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts Peter, see you next time. Great to talk again. Looking forward to our next chat.