Now that we've explored your organization from three different systems, perspectives, and found some ways for you to simplify and engage the strategic message, it is time to turn our attention to change. There are two things that you can strengthen in your organization here. One is the alignment of all of the changes to the strategy. And the second is your ability to plan and implement the changes successfully. Let's start with the alignment challenge. I'd like you to find worksheet number seven.

And here I'm going to ask you to simply take stock of all of the changes that have been going on are going on and will soon be going on in your organization. recent past current and near future. If you're working with a group of people, you can use a flip chart sheet you can use sticky notes if you like. And just before you get started, let me give you an example. Large Insurance organization came up with this as the dozen or dozen and a half. I don't know how many changes are here, major changes that were impacting the whole organization across a timeframe that was about 36 to 40 months long.

And you can see that some of the changes are both in the recent past and also into the current and sometimes from current into near future and some of them are really big changes. Like the two on the bottom, focus on insurance and concentrate on North America, Europe and China. Really, they're significant enough in their scope and their scale that they span all three timeframes. Time for you to go to work, press pause, and take stock of what's changing in your organization. Now that you've got that done, it's time to organize it. What we're trying to do when we organize the changes is aligning them with each other.

More importantly, align them to the spirit Dziedzic priorities that we have going on, and the overall strategic direction. So this provides a very clear connection between our intention of strategy, and what we're doing to fulfill that intention with all of the changes. Now, this is a layout that you can use if you like. And I found over the years that this is both a easy to do, and can be extremely helpful and a very powerful communication tool. Let me give you an example before I turn you loose to create your own in that insurance business, they were refocusing the enterprise that was the vision. They were trying to get back to what made them great as an organization.

From an organizational lifecycle perspective. They really had come over to an institution starting to close in and they were fundamentally trying to renew the enterprise. So that was the vision they had for strategic priorities, operational efficiency, the balance sheet core products and key markets and manage the capital base more effectively. So that's the vision of the organization and the strategic priorities. you've developed yours in that one page outline of your strategic message. Now, here's where the changes come in.

What we want to do is align each of the different changes underneath the strategic priorities they support. You'll see that some of these strategic priorities for example, the operational Improvement Program, really just aligns underneath improve operational efficiency, but some of them are much larger in their scope. This next one spans three different priorities, the discipline redeployment of capital into profitable growth opportunities. That's a big change. Now, these are enterprise wide changes. So there are major initiatives and they all align.

If you look closely, you will see both some initials in brackets As well as some dates to make this particular communication tool, this way of aligning changes in the strategy, what becomes very compelling is when we have the actual initials of who owns the vision, who owns each of the strategic priorities. And who is the person that would be the one person that would be on top of that particular change could be the project leader for that particular change could be a senior level leader in your organization. Also, when it comes to the changes, you'll see some dates, months and years. And this then provides people not only with a sense of who would we need to talk to to get more information on any of these changes, but also, when are they being launched? Or when do we expect to see them finished? We just need to clarify which those dates are.

And we've got a really helpful common sense communication tool here, that helps everyone understand the alignment. Now, when we think about ownership, the vision must be owned by the most senior executive. So if this is a large organization, that would be the president or the CEO, or the executive director, whoever it was, the strategic priorities are owned by someone on that executive team, the owners of the priorities have to be very clear. And they have to be at a very senior level, because they're the ones who are watching and keeping their eye on and providing the resources and so on, for all of the changes that are underneath their particular strategic priority. Now, when you can get that kind of ownership clear in the organization, everybody has a much better sense that we're actually serious about this, and things are going to get done. Now it's your turn, like you defined worksheet number eight.

Start with your overall strategic direction. That would be A handful of words no more than that two or three that would essentially describe the vision. What are the two or the three or the four strategic priorities? Again, you've got those listed in your one page, strategic message, then all of the changes that you listed out under the recent past, current and your future, start to put those down underneath which strategic priorities they fit with they support if you can clarify who's responsible for what changes as well as the strategic priorities as well as the overall strategic direction, and any key dates that you know, you may find there'll be some changes that don't fit, list those separately and address them in terms of if they don't fit on our overall strategic direction and priorities. Why are we still doing them? And you might find that there's one or two strategic priorities that don't have many changes going on.

So the question then becomes, is this a strategic priority or not? And if it is, what changes do you need to make to ensure that that strategic priority gets fulfilled