On effective development of strategies

To make strategies effective for all the stakeholders the strategy needs to be able to: evolve dynamically, ensure participations, have clear transparent underlying framework (way of organizing information and making decisions), reflect best practice (learning across the spectrum of sport), allow consensus and divergence of views to be understood, and relate directly to actionable tactics and initiatives.

We can see the failure of strategy when something like the recent economic “melt down” occurs i.e. rather than us being to quickly analysis what the impact of these different externalities logically is on what we need to do – and therefore which programmes and initiatives (i.e. spending) should be adapted and how – business are forced to blind cutting or some extended re-analysis. This is because the knowledge about the exact impact and import of the assumptions the strategies are based and lost in the mists of time.

Working strategies needs to:

Produce Sustained value – This means that we need ensure that information that is captured can related and reused. That it can be refined and changed (the impact of the change or refinement is understood).

Be dynamic and current - The framework (how we do things) needs to be able to evolve dynamically i.e. so that changes we make to how we do things are immediately available. In practice this will mean a systems based solution – as it clear that with even a very small number of documents you can’t effectively (considering time and cost) propagate changes to templates and inter-relationships between the documents.

Ensure participation and engagement - The mechanism for sharing our understanding (i.e. of cause and effect) needs to be accessible – because we need to encourage as broad an engagement / participation as possible. In practice this will mean Web based delivery is important as it removes an inhibitor to engagement. It is at best imprudent to rely on people being able attend face to face meetings.

Be clear, explicit and transparent – We must explicitly define the semantics e.g. we may have goals, facts (including law and regulations, market and environment factors, demographics, etc.), germane beliefs (which should be based on facts and relate to goals i.e. in order to be germane), recommendations (which are based on goals and beliefs). We would also usually want concepts (common terms and concepts), risks (which we may choose to distinguish from risk and issues), extant assets and capabilities identified discretely. If we don’t do this when we disagree on recommendation we can’t even work out what it is we are disagreeing about e.g. the goals, the facts, the beliefs. A weakness with prose based approach both oral and documentary is that frequently the persuasive power lies in eloquence, erudition, wit or charm. These are not really sound ways to make policy. An explicit approach to semantics helps depersonalise things (often disputes arise because of issues of personality and all efforts should be made to avoid this).

The ability to analyse the basis of recommendations (based on agreed beliefs and relate to defined goals) is quite important. To allow effective analysis we need to be to understand the semantics and allowing for weighting i.e. we need to recognize that not all goals are of equal importance and recommendations don’t equally support goals, or follow from beliefs.

Reflect best practice and common - Reference models assist us in organising our thinking. They may be simple classification systems, but ideally they relate high level concepts that allow us to do inferential checks on completeness e.g. to take a trivial example if we have a reference model of services (e.g. “delivery”) and systems (e.g. “delivery tracking system”) and know in this model that “deliveries” must “be tracked” in a “delivery tracking system”. Then when we have a specific thing of service instantiated that is defined as “delivery” - we can infer that their should be a “delivery tracking system” and if nothing of this is instantiated we can infer we have an issue.

Communicate effectively with many stakeholders – we need to show people ONLY what they are interested in seeing. This is why most people won’t read long reports (unless the report is written for them). So what we really need to be able to do is produce a report for audience, from point of view. Traditional documentary approaches to this either result in a plethora of documents oriented at different audiences, on different topics and different levels of detail. Or we end up with a large tome that no wants to read (and very few will).

When we look the above we can see that documents will fail us in this exercise (as will document based Web portals) i.e.
- Sustained value – we can get information related and reused
- Dynamic and current - we can't support a dynamic framework that evolves as we learn and change
- Ensure participation and engagement - we can't ensure engagement. In fact documents will ensure most people don't engage and we can’t build consensus.
- Clear and transparent - we can't be get people to agree what the real issues are (i.e. agreements and disagreements explicit and precise)
- Reflect best practice and common - we can implement a common set of reference models i.e. it is to hard with documents (too much paper).
- We can analyse things - documents need to be read in toto.