Dear Reader,

Welcome to the first issue of perspectives in 2009!

I find it interesting at this time of year to look back and see how the rhythm of the different organisations I have worked with has been affected by the Christmas and New Year period. In some cases the momentum is clearly disrupted - things take longer to organise, and the organisation finds it hard to get going again and pick up speed, in some cases not really finding its pace again until towards the end of January. In other cases the deadlines for financial year end or January conferences drive somewhat frantic activity! And there are several where the change of rhythm provides an opportunity for people – and the organisations – to catch their breath and refresh their energies and enthusiasm for the new year.

It's also apparent that the many challenges and complexities faced by organisations can take their toll on the ability of people and organisations to tackle these – the burden of too much to do, too many difficult problems, weighing heavily and crowding out the mental space to be able to deal with these effectively. One of the important skills of strategic leadership is to recognise the energy flows within an organisation, and to help people focus their efforts on what will make a difference – hence the topic of this issue's article!

David Booth

I was talking to a colleague recently who works for a leading retailer, and he talked enthusiastically about the razor-sharp focus throughout the organisation on the vital measures reviewed every morning to ensure the management team keep on top of the business – questions along the lines of “were the shelves fully stocked yesterday?”, “did any of our customers have to wait more than 3 minutes at the tills?”, and “were our prices on defined priority items as low or lower than competitor X?”. The whole organisation was geared up to be able to answer these questions – and to take action as a result.

What is so powerful about this is its very simplicity. The questions are precise – yet uncomplicated: everybody understands them. They are operational standards that implement strategy effectively. And they are practical, requiring action - everybody in the organisation has a part to play in achieving them.

Although the questions might be simple, a lot of work is likely to have been involved in distilling and communicating them – and to establish them at the heart of the organisation. They meet the acid tests of any strategy – for everyone in the organisation to be able to answer:

· can I understand it?

· does it make sense?

· do I know how to act on it?

Keeping it simple is an art – especially with strategic planning. Here are some of the common pitfalls that can afflict even the best-intentioned strategic planning processes:

- it is easy to get carried away by the techniques and terminology of strategic analysis and end up with sophisticated language that – however logically derived – fails to convey meaning. This is why diagrams – and the classic 2 x 2 matrices! – can be so useful in helping achieve understanding

- the danger of overload – so many strategies or initiatives that people soon lose the overall sense of direction and priority in the detail. Using strategic themes can help here, grouping together similar actions under ‘banners' each reflecting a single aim or direction

- grand designs, poised for implementation – but by the time the organisation gets around to considering just how it is going to progress these some of the momentum has been lost – and having gone through various organisational filters the resulting projects are more narrowly scoped and less transformational. Boxes are ticked because there is some action, but the difference achieved is less significant than it could –or should – have been

There are risks too with setting targets – they can become an end in themselves, rather than just the means to achieving desired improvement. A couple of examples:

- a few years ago the senior management of a FTSE100 PLC decided to adopt the directions for greater corporate social responsibility and stakeholder accountability as expounded by the influential “Tomorrow's Company” report. A laudable aim, but rather than concentrate on helping the company's Divisions and Business Units to understand the principles and work out how they apply these in their organisations, the top management issued some very specific detailed targets. This prescriptive top-down approach resulted in the Divisions devoting resources to making sure they looked good at HQ but resenting the imposition of a high profile initiative they didn't really understand and which they felt added nothing to their business - the opposite of what had been intended!

- staff in the NHS have been swamped by the plethora of initiatives and targets that have accompanied the reforms of the past few years, at the expense of people both within and outside the NHS having a clear understanding of the principles and rationale of the reforms. In the attempt to ‘translate' the reforms into simple operational actions and ‘force' the desired results each organisational layer has added its own additional requirements, so that front-line staff are focused on achieving ‘ticks in the boxes' rather than more fundamental sustainable change.

So, just how to help an organisation focus on strategic priorities is a leadership challenge that should not be underestimated. Attempts that over-specify can backfire; making things too complicated can fail to achieve understanding. Finding a way of expressing strategies so that they make sense and help people decide what actions to take is quite a skill – there's an art to keeping it simple!

For further exploration...

· The benefits of simplicity feature strongly in Peters & Waterman's classic ‘In Search of Excellence' (Harper & Row, 1982) – for example, they champion the Proctor & Gamble ‘maximum one page' discipline (and highlight the amount of work that goes into crafting recommendations within this limit). They quote Richard Deupree, the past President who instigated this policy: “Part of my job is to train people to break down an involved question into a series of simple matters. Then we can all act intelligently.”

· For a practical approach to using strategic themes, see ‘Living Strategy: putting people at the heart of corporate purpose' (Professor Lynda Gratton, Pearson Education, 2000) – a book I've referred to several times in previous issues of perspectives: “The challenge.. is to create broad themes of meaning..[which] show the direction in which the company should be travelling, and bring simplicity and coherence. By concentrating on broad themes, action is focused and the path shaped from current reality to future vision.”

· Tomorrow's Company was an initiative by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), which in 1993 brought together 25 of the UK's top businesses under the leadership of Sir Anthony Cleaver, then Chairman of IBM UK, to re-examine the sources of sustainable business success and develop a shared vision of Tomorrow's Company. This work has been taken forward by the Centre for Tomorrow's Company.

What do you think?

One of the most effective strategic marketing plans I've come across was just 6 pages long! And in developing strategy there's often a simple diagram that emerges that seems to capture a key message in a way that everyone understands.

I'd be interested to hear of any examples from your own experience where keeping it simple has produced significant benefits!