Strategy is a Forest

What’s your strategy for tying your shoe?  None, you just do it.  You don’t need a strategy for little things.  Strategy is for big things.

How about for growing a tree?  Do you need a strategy for that?  Perhaps.

What if you need to grow an entire forest – to a specific size in a specific shape and direction… in a specific timeframe?  Definitely.  We need a strategy for that.

Your business, your sponsorship, your division, your team… they all have big plans.  And big plans need strategies.  Of course they do.  You already know that.

And to help you develop your strategy, there are many tools available.  You can start with a SWOT or PEST analysis or a BCG/Growth-Share Matrix to assess the current situation.  You can run a Value Chain Analysis or a VRIO framework to improve margins or identify competitive advantage.  You can use an Ansoff Matrix to identify a growth strategy.  They all help you decide on your plan so you can get to work.

And once you get started, most strategies produce output in the form of data… so you start measuring.  The data begins to pour in and before you know it you have a pile of numbers that tell you… something.

Just as there are many useful tools for developing strategies, there are plenty of tools that help you organise and visualise strategic performance data. 

PowerBI, Tableau and others are great at data analysis and visualisation. Monday.com, Trello, Smartsheet and the like will help you with project management and workflow.  In sponsorship you have KORE, Luscid, Trak, SponsorWorks, Trajektory and a host of others to tell you in great detail what is happening. In any strategic setting, if you need data crunching or task analysis, you’ll not be short of some very solid tech options.

But what about the forest?

These fancy tools are very good at doing what they do.  They help you see what has and hasn’t been done – right down to the last shoelace tied.  They tell you when every sale was made, by who, and how every product is performing.  They tell you who used every ticket and where your logo did and didn’t appear… and how much media exposure and what audience segment was delivered by every asset on every digital platform.

But what about the strategy?  Is it working?

In our forest analogy, most of today’s tools and analysis can tell you the height, girth, growth rate and sap content of each and every tree.  They can tell you how much sun and rain each has received, and how that translates to limb length and leaf density.  All very interesting stuff.

But what they’re not so good at telling you is if the forest is taking the size and shape you want. Is the strategy working?

When looking at each tree in detail, can you see the forest?

Most of today's tools are good at analysing or providing lots of data, but it often doesn’t clearly connect back to the objectives of the strategy.  We believe that your strategy is a forest, and you can’t assess it by simply looking at the trees. To make good strategic decisions, you must have a clear view of the entire forest. 

The hard work is not in measuring and analysing every inch of every tree, but in figuring out which handful of measurements – your KEY performance indicators – can give you a quick and clear view of your strategic performance, so you can intelligently make the decisions and adjustments necessary to keep you on track toward your definition of strategic success.

That’s why we created StrategyLab – to give you an instant and constant view of the forest.

Strategic performance analysis works best if you first define precisely where you want to go with a finite set of crystal-clear objectives.

Rather than then measuring each and every tree leaf, each objective must then have a finite set of KPIs that define ‘what success looks like’.  A few key trees can tell you a lot about the forest.

And don’t then just throw all of your KPIs into a pretty (or very complicated) dashboard.  The key at measurement time is to translate that finite set of performance metrics into a single overall picture (or score) of strategic performance.  Yes, the individual components are worth analysing, but the KPIs must then link together to provide a clear singular assessment.

Too often we spend so much time gazing at the trees that we can’t see the forest.  Your strategy is a forest.  Be sure you take a good look at the whole of it.

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Bruce Cook is a consultant in Strategy & Sponsorship and Insight and is the founder of both StrategyLab and SponsorLab - simple yet powerful online performance frameworks developed to help drive better results from sponsorships and business strategy.  Get started for free.