Getting from vision to results

The journey from vision to action - and ultimately results - is the hardest any venture has to take because it’s not just about action, but the right action. Action that takes you towards your goals, step by step, day after day. 

Before leaping into action there is some thinking to do. In the wise words of American author and entrepreneur James Clear “hard work is not always something you can see. It is not always physical effort. In fact, the most powerful form of hard work is thinking clearly. Designing a winning strategy may not look very active, but make no mistake: it is very hard work. Strategy often beats sweat.”  

There are three critical steps to get from vision to results - clarity, focus and alignment. 

Clarity

The hardest part of solving a problem is accurately defining it.

James Clear

The first step sounds simple - become clear on what you are trying to achieve, and the key challenges you must overcome to make it happen. 

Set your intent

In his book “Essentialism” author Greg McKeown introduces the concept of essential intent as an important evolution from the common  - and usually meaningless - vision or mission statement. An essential intent is aspirational and inspiring, but also measurable and specific. This difference is key, as anyone can see whether you’re succeeding. Good examples include Race Online 2012’s “getting everyone in the UK online by the end of 2012”, or Welsh jean-maker Hiut Denim’s original essential intent to ensure “our town is making jeans again, creating 400 local jobs”.

Another approach is to use an essential question that the organisation seeks to answer. A great example is Team GB’s men’s rowing eight who used  “will it make the boat go faster?” to guide their decisions and actions after leaving the official training programme. This question drove them to win gold at the Sydney 2000 Olympics. You can also find inspiration in Hiut’s new essential question as they seek to become an exemplar of sustainable denim manufacture - “how can we be lower impact today than we were yesterday?”.

If your company could only achieve one thing, or seek the answer to one question…what would it be?

Explore and diagnose

Now you know what you want to achieve, look next at what stands in your way.

This starts with context. What are the obstacles and opportunities that you can see? What are the emerging trends and models that could affect your business? How are your customers needs changing? Tools like context maps and PESTLE are great prompts for ideas and ways to structure and synthesise your thoughts. 

Once you’ve looked outside your organisation, it’s time for ruthless honesty about what your business is good - and not so good - at. The humble SWOT works well for this. 

These activities will provide a wealth of observations and insights, ideas and concerns. The last step is to prioritise the challenges and opportunities that you believe are the most important. 

Focus

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe

Abraham Lincoln

Design

At its heart strategy is a design process, where we craft our response to the challenges between us and our vision. 

A great framework to use to develop and explore options is the five-question strategy cascade developed by Martin and Lafley and explained in their book “Playing to win”. 

Use this activity as a safe place to explore options for your future without risk. Even if you don’t pursue the more ‘extreme’ options, there may be insights and elements that you can extract and use to differentiate yourself. Remember, the most exciting things are usually happening at the edges, so push the boundaries and challenge yourself to look beyond the obvious. 

See what you can learn from the companies, people and brands that inspire you and your team. This can both spark new ideas, but also help develop a clearer idea of the type of organisation you want to be. 

Once you’ve developed a range of strategic options, you can assess which you’re interested in pursuing. Some may be complementary, some may be discrete alternatives, some may be risky, some safe. Choosing which options to pursue is a balance of judging which excite you the most, which you have the capacity and capability for, and which are consistent with your work in the first phase. This is a balance of objective assessment and a subjective view of the possibilities. 

No matter how many exciting options you’ve found, you must choose which to pursue. This is hard, as choosing which customers to focus on, or what products to develop, also involves the opposite. Which opportunities to decline, which customers to reprioritise, which services to stop. Choice is essential.

Look at the options you want to pursue and unpick the assumptions inherent within. Which of these are most important, and which are you least confident in? Testing the critical assumptions before you commit is key. 

It’s important to note that these two steps - clarity and focus - do not need to take long. Depending on the size and complexity of the organisation - and the urgency of the process - this could take from a few hours to a few months. The aim is to build coherence in the action that follows, not over-analyse. “Good enough for now, safe enough to try” should be the mantra. 

Alignment

The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.

Phil Jackson, 12x NBA winning coach

We now have to turn our clarity and focus into action. This means aligning your business and operating model to deliver your chosen strategy, ensuring that you are prioritising actions that take you towards your essential intent. 

Deliver

The key to delivering is to break down the challenge you face into small steps and use the right tools to set priorities for your teams and track progress. Success stories are rarely due to a single big step forward, but the result of consistent, coherent action over time.  

A useful first step to setting your priorities is to look at your flywheel, a concept first presented by Jim Collins in his seminal book “Good to great”. Your flywheel is a coherent series of actions and activities that build upon each other to create repeatable, compounding success and momentum. Understanding how your flywheel works helps you assess how well you currently perform each element and prioritise action, and build a roadmap for change and improvement.

Measure

Once you’re driving action, it’s essential that you can both measure progress - to make sure that your action is having the desired effect - and monitor the health of your business to ensure that you are building a robust and sustainable organisation. 

The combination of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and balanced scorecards is a powerful way to do this. 

OKRs are a simple yet impactful tool to track the achievement of your strategic priorities. A quarterly cycle of setting priorities, and converting them into qualitative objectives and quantitative key results builds alignment, accountability and transparency across your business, breaking down silos and encouraging collaboration.  

Scorecards provide an overview of the health of the key areas and processes of your business. Aligning these measures with your flywheel will act as an early warning system for any areas where performance isn’t acceptable. The actions to fix any problems or drive improvements could become OKRs, connecting the two tools in a coherent, aligned performance measurement system. 

These two tools also provide the basis for communication across your teams, as they naturally create an ongoing narrative for your priorities, activities and achievements over time.

Refresh

This is a time of constant change. Even the best strategy will need to be refined as conditions change and new challenges and opportunities emerge. 

Build a learning loop within your business that engages your team in helping to solve the most critical challenges you face. At least quarterly ask the question “has anything changed, or have we seen any trends, that mean we should reconsider our approach to achieving our essential intent?” Curiosity, open-mindedness, humility and the willingness to try things outside of your comfort zone are key behaviours to encourage as you learn from your actions. 

Conclusion

It is action that differentiates successful organisations from the rest. Not just action, however, but action that takes to you towards your essential intent, that is consistent with your understanding of context, that is focused on your priorities, and that is measurably relevant. 

Don’t rely on chance to take you where you want to go, instead build a platform for repeatable, measurable and sustainable success.

Focus on the process, and the outcome will take care of itself.