Rachel Madan

Happy Thanksgiving! While you’re waiting for the turkey, here’s some brain food for thought.

The economic news seems to go from bad to worse these days. Budgets are being cut, government funding and grants are disappearing, and organizations and businesses are feeling that cuts are the only way to go. Organizations are cutting staff, programs, operating hours, travel, and more. In the non-profit world, some organizations are re-doubling their fundraising efforts, working ever harder to bring in a smaller pool of funds.

But there is an untapped resource that many are ignoring.

It’s the money being spent to keep the building functioning. And many times, that cost is a lot higher than it needs to be.

Have you ever sat down with your electricity bill? Let’s say it’s $5,000,000 a year. This is not an outlandish number. Most of my clients have electricity bills that are 5x this figure. Anyway, let’s say you have the choice to either cut this bill by 10% to generate $500,000 of new income, or do a fundraising effort to raise $500,000. It’s likely that most people would choose to raise the $500,000 because it’s what they are used to doing. But to save the $500,000 could be far easier. Most of my clients have done that with very little effort or investment– just through due diligence and paying attention.

So think about it. You are already spending the money. It’s already in your budget. Couldn’t it be put to better use?

Much like building a house, you can’t develop strong growth strategies on a shaky foundation. An example from my client work is the implementation of sustainability strategies.  In order for sustainability to really become embedded in everyday practice, not only environmental sustainability, but also financial and social sustainability, businesses must spend time putting in place the structures which allow for what I call “sustainable sustainability.” Although the example here is sustainability, this is true of almost any type of strategy you could think of.

Without a proper foundation, strategies won’t take hold and they won’t be successful.

Potentially transforming strategies often fail. The reasons are not unique (though the way they fail may appear to be unique to a particular business or organization). Many organizations embark on change programs with the hopes that all problems can be solved through technological innovation. Others charge ahead without proper strategies, leadership or staff buy-in. Grim statistics on the success rates of organizational change can be found ranging from a failure rate of 64% up to 80%. Success stories are infrequent.

What can you do to make your transformation a success?

The most important things to do early on are to ensure proper leadership and staff buy-in to put in place a rigorous strategy. Taking these steps means opening up the door to further opportunities down the line, or taking advantage of opportunities right now which your organization might otherwise miss. My clients report back to me that it’s not just awareness, but the ability to act and implement internally that has made their implementation of sustainability strategies successful.

I encourage you to really think about the foundation you are giving to your  journey. Is it strong, or is it shaky?

Putting it into place

Well, here we are. It’s the last post of the series! Of course, as you’ve probably realised by now, this is really only the beginning. You are now at the point where you need to think about how you will put everything into place. But first, let’s have a quick re-cap of the other four posts in the Implementing Strategy series.

Session 1: Examining the big picture: In this post I introduced the idea of a theme strategy and the importance of understanding the risks and opportunities surrounding your theme.

Session 2: Where are we now? In this lesson we considered how to get started with simple benchmarking. We looked at visible and invisible impacts. 

Session 3: Where do we want to be? In this lesson we considered your future vision for your business. We examined how to be strategic rather than tactical in order understand in what direction we should move our organization. 

Session 4: Getting others on board. In this session we looked at stakeholder engagement. A transformation to a sustainable future is not a solo job. We came up with a list of stakeholders who could help or hinder us, and we considered the positions and interests of those stakeholders. 

Having gone through all of the previous steps, you are ready to begin exploring how your organisation can implement the visualised changes. This should not be an incremental list of your current activities. If it is, your plan for change will do little other than maintain the status quo (a bit like treading water). This is why we have gone through the visioning process.  

Using SMART Goals
Begin by bringing your identified stakeholders together in strategic brainstorming sessions. Together, you and your key stakeholders will identify a shared vision for your organisation. Once this is identified, your group of stakeholders should determine and agree the key steps that will take you towards your vision. SMART goals are worth using to help screen your ideas for achievability. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Relevant, and Trackable. You should run any steps identified through the SMART test. Objectives that are SMART are much more likely to be achieved.

Action Steps: Putting it into place

1. Review lessons 1-4 for completion.
2. Set up a meeting with key stakeholders to discuss a shared vision for success at your organisation.
3. Run key steps through the SMART test.
4. Congratulate yourself! You’re well on your way to helping your business achieve your theme strategy.

Getting others on board
In the previous post, we took a look at creating a future vision for your business. I hope you were able to create an exciting vision of a sustainable and successful future for your organization. But could you achieve that vision on your own? Unlikely. A whole array of different people will need to be involved and behind your strategy in order to get it moving.

These people are commonly called “stakeholders.” Of course, this is just a bit of jargon to describe the people who will either affect, or be affected by, the outcome of a situation, decision, or project. They “have a stake” in the outcome.

Why should I get other people behind my project?
The list of people who might be affected by your project, or who might affect it, could be endless. Why bother talking to them? Well, your strategy is likely to be complex, and might overlap and affect other areas of your organisation, community, suppliers, etc. These interactions might not be obvious to you as a project champion. Involving others in your discussion can help resolve conflict or a problem, bring about change, build partnerships, lead to better decision making, improve communication and dialogue with everyone interested or involved in the project.

Understanding positions and interests
Someone’s position on an issue is what they want.  Their interest is why they want it. And their need, is, well, what they need! But when most people approach discussions they often are only aware of positions, and not interests or needs.

Let’s look at an example: 

A parable that demonstrates this concept is that two children found an orange. Both of them wanted it, the boy to eat it and the girl to take the peel and make a craft from it. They couldn’t agree on who should get the orange so they asked their teacher to resolve the dispute.

The teacher simply cut the orange and gave half to each.

By looking at their interests, the best decision would be to peel the orange and give the fruit to the boy and the skin (peel) to the girl.But their position to have the whole orange blocked the view of their interests and therefore neither could meet their need.

Through dialogue you are able to better understand the needs of your potential project advocates, not just their position and interests. By understanding their needs you will be able to tailor your project objectives and deliverables in accordance to them.

Building a list of people who can help you (or hinder you)
You should think about identifying a group of “key stakeholders” at the initiation and planning stage of your sustainability strategy. Getting them on board from the start will be critical your success. Understanding what they need, what they want, what their priorities are will help you define your project output and critical success factors.

• To help you identify and build your list of stakeholders you should consider asking yourself the following questions:
• Who is most affected by your project?
• Who will benefit from the project?
• Who will lose something because of the project?
• Who wants you to succeed?
• Who might want you to fail?
• Who will visibly support your project?
• Who will visibly hinder or oppose your project?
• Who will invisibly support your project?
• Who will invisibly hinder or oppose your project?
• Whose success is enhanced by the project?

Now, can you identify their positions, interests and needs when it comes to your strategy?

Action Steps: Stakeholders

1. Write a list of your strategy stakeholders
2. Write down the positions, interests and needs of each stakeholder regarding their view of a your strategy for your organisation

Where are we now?

In the previous post in this series, I discussed the importances of identifying the big picture, and understanding the impacts your theme strategy could present to your business. It’s important for you to understand the risks and opportunities of your theme.

The next step is to understand where you currently are with regard to your theme, be it sustainability employee engagement, diversity, growth, or something else. How can you know where to go if you don’t know where you’ve been?

Many organisations take a traditional strategic planning approach at this point, using a SWOT analysis, where you examine the organisation’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. While this approach can be useful, it will be limiting at this point. Right now it may be unclear what the strengths, opportunities, weakness, and threats are – especially if your theme is a new area for your business. A better approach is to begin by taking stock of where we are.

Simple Auditing

The easiest way to begin this process is just to start listing all of the visible steps your organisation is taking to manage its impact in the theme you are tackling. For example, if you were developing a sustainability strategy, you might do a simple environmental impact audit. For instance, this might be the existence of an energy policy, recycling bins, low energy lighting, or a green travel policy.

Be as specific as you can while conducting your audit. This is a critical skill to build early on in your process. Sticking with our sustainability example, let’s say that you identify paper use as an area of impact to audit. When recording this, you could just say, “we use a lot of paper.” But how useful is that, really? A little extra effort right now will make a big difference later on. How much paper do you buy? How many reams? From what suppliers? How much does it cost? What proportion of the paper is made from recycled paper? What proportion is made from FSC-certified sources? A few questions answered now will save headaches later.

Invisible Impacts 

There will of course be many more impacts than what one individual can see. Once we go beyond visible impacts, where do we go? To take a different example, employee engagement strategies often consist of employee surveys and an intranet. But beyond counting how many people complete surveys or log in to the internet, what are you really measuring? Often, this is where the biggest issues (and opportunities) can lie. Your supply chain, your customers or clients, your marketing, can all have big impacts beyond your operations. To begin to audit these areas is a massive undertaking. So the next step is to understand how you are managing all of your impacts. See if you can answer the following questions:

• What kind of process exists in my organisation to manage our impact?

• Does our organisational culture support a change toward success in our chosen theme?

• How are we communicating our approach to our theme, internally and externally?

• What kind of partnerships do we have to help us tackle these issues?

• How do we encourage new ideas?

Action Steps: Simple Audit

1. Do a simple audit for your chosen theme. Enlist the help of other staff members if you can. Be sure to consider detail at this point if you can.
2. Start talking to other staff members about the questions raised in the Invisible Impacts section of this post. Take one step at a time. For example, can you find out if you have a communication policy on sustainability, diversity, etc? Who would you ask?
3. Start thinking about the “bigger” issues like supply chain. Who will you need to get on board to start tackling these areas?

Does your business have a “theme” strategy? What I mean by theme strategy is a strategy that is intended to make a big change, but is typically not well-defined, open to confusion and poorly measured. Some examples of potential theme strategies include

• Sustainability
• Diversity
• Employee Engagement
• Emerging Markets

The sign of a theme strategy in action are clear to outsiders, but typically unseen or unspoken internally. You might be facing some implementation problems if you hear the following comments around the office:

• No one knows what anyone else is doing.
• I can’t measure how well we are performing.
• I don’t know what we are trying to achieve.
• I know there is something else we could be doing, but what?

You might even be in the situation where you have a goal around a theme (for instance, “engage with all of our stakeholders”) but you don’t actually have a strategy around how to achieve this.

So the first step is to actually develop a strategy to help you meet your goals. In this series of posts I will show you how to take the first step towards this critical goal.

So let’s get started right away…

Part 1: Examining the Big Picture

Most theme strategies cover multiple issues. This is one of the things that makes them so difficult to implement. Take sustainability for example. In encompasses people, planet and profit. It can often feel difficult to access sustainability as a concept because of the variety of issues covered.

It is useful to focus on a thread that runs through all of the issues. For example, many organizations tackling sustainability issues focus on climate change in particular, because it touches many of the issues in sustainability but is more concrete and easily measured. When working with my clients on an issue like this, it’s important that we examine the unique impacts of the issue (in this case, climate change) on that particular business. So the strategies of an art gallery vs. a law firm vs. a retailer all look very different. That’s fine and to be expected. In fact, it’s necessary in order for any of them to make a real difference to their respective businesses.

Once the thread is identified, a business must examine the impacts from many different angles. What are the risks to operations, to costs, to supply chains? What future opportunities and risks might this issue present to the business? You cannot shy away from the challenge of identifying impacts. While this can be difficult, it offers the ability to focus and develop new opportunities for your business (or organization).

Action Steps: Consider the Big Picture

1.    Consider the possibilities – what possible impact might your theme strategy have on your business?
2.    Write down WHY it is important for your business to understand these possible risks and impacts.