Only we have a better insight into our organization as a system. Let's see if we can take some of the clues that we found there and bring them forward into this next step of leading change. Here, our work is to simplify and gauge the strategy. There's not enough work here to develop a strategic plan. Your organization already has a strategic plan somewhere. The question is, is it simple enough?

And does everybody get it? So when we think about strategy, let's think about some basic questions in your organization right now based on its habits and approaches to strategy from the past number of years. who's involved with strategic leadership? Is it the senior team? Is it a collection of everybody? Is it a cross section?

Who is it? And when you come up with a strategic plan, how is it documented and how is it shared? Many organizations have strategic plans they post online they may take some of the key salient bits out of that strategy and make posters out of them. Sometimes the strategic plans are long, complicated 97 pages of charts and graphs and all kinds of acronyms, whatever it might be. If you want to learn more about your strategy and either couldn't find or didn't want to take time to read the strategic plan, who would you talk to? And what would they say?

And if you talk to more than one person, would you get a similar and consistent story? across the whole organization? How well understood is that current strategic message? So push, pause and answer these questions. Now, based on your habits, there may well be some obvious places where we can improve. I'd like to share with you five key requirements for effective strategic leadership and we're going to have an opportunity to grade these on a high, medium or low scale.

I'd like you to find worksheet number Five and on that you will find five dimensions for effective strategic leadership. One of them has to do with systems approach organization uses. That ensures we've got a continual connection to the internal and external pressures and opportunities that drive us forward. We have a purpose or mission and values or principles that are well understood and supported by everyone. The outcome or the vision is clear and it's compelling and it provides a pole for everyone in the right direction. Your organization has a small number of strategic priorities.

And it's a small number two to four that provide that critical discipline for decisions on what changes will be made. And lastly, have all functions departments, teams and individuals align their own strategies that supports and helps fulfill the organization's strategy. So you have high, medium and low written there. push pause, take a moment and circle the responses. that are appropriate for you. Now, you will have circles around some of these, they may be all high, I don't know.

And if so well done. Hopefully they're not all low, maybe you'll have some things that need to be improved. Well, let's see what we can do to help. At the very bare bones basics, if you wanted to make a statement about the most important strategic foundation for any organizational change, there's two dimensions. One is a realistic sense of urgency, and the other is a compelling sense of hope. Without those two important strategic forces, fully understood and embraced by everyone, your organization is not going to change and it's certainly not going to change successfully.

So those two are important and they're easy to remember. But we can take strategy and expand it just a little bit more. And we can come up with a very compelling, very rich and full, strategic message. When I think about simplifying a strategic message with an organization, I think about the art of taking a 95 page strategic plan, and putting an outline together on one sheet of paper. This outline will cover the five dimensions of strategy. What's the purpose or the mission?

Not answer some basic questions. What do we do? Who are we? What business are we in? Who do we serve? How do we add value?

Second one would be principles or values. These would be our shared beliefs that guide our actions. These are guidelines for decision making, especially important in times of major change. These provide the let's call them boundaries or the rules to keep everyone on the same page in the same way. game number three, and this is where the rubber starts to hit the road here. Why is change necessary?

What are the pushes? What is that realistic sense of urgency? What are those forces? What are the critical ones? And what are the consequences if we don't respond appropriately or don't succeed in our response? Number four, what's the goal or the vision?

Where are we going? What are we trying to create? How would we recognize it? And lastly, what are your strategic priorities? What are the very, very small handful of areas that you are focusing on now? What will you put time, effort, energy, money, resources toward to move your organization in the direction it wants to go?

So there's your essential strategic message. And what I'm asking you to think about is how do we answer these questions and how do we provide an outline form, not paragraphs and sentences and all the rest of it I'm simply looking for talking notes that would simplify your strategic message. Most important are the last three, the pushers of the sense of urgency, the poll or that realistic sense of hope and the strategic priorities or the goals. This was actually a document that was developed by an organization that I worked with several years ago. Now, they couldn't believe both the executive team and the planning department couldn't believe that we can take a 97 or 95 page strategic plan and boil it down to a one page outline, but they had faith and with a lot of patience on their end, and lots and lots and lots of discussions and debate, as well as some help from a communication professional that was able to take complicated information and make it simple.

They ended up with this. Now this has been made generic because they wanted to share the results of the work but they didn't want anybody to know who it was. So the words have been changed, but the format the layout was automated. After the same as it was, if you look at this the mission and the values are on the top, the middle section comes with why change and what happens if we don't with some images to spark some imagination. We also had a Where are we going? The vision for the organization it had four descriptors, job security, breakthrough product development, green manufacturing, customer satisfaction, those are the dimensions.

And they had three corporate strategic priorities, transformed manufacturing processes, apply leading edge technology to product development and achieve world class excellence in customer service. Those were their priorities. So here, we've got a one page outline that describes the essential message in a 95 page strategic plan, which would you rather look at, I know which one I'd rather look at. So here's your turn, find worksheet number six, and again, it's a blank page almost, and it's got these dimensions purpose or mission principles values. Push her as sort of this sense of urgency, pull in the vision, and the priorities and the strategic goals. So I'd like you to push pause and go through and fill this out.

Now that you have that essential strategic message outlined, it's probably not in publishable form yet, it may need a little bit more work, but you've got a good start at it. What are you going to do to ensure that this essential strategic message is fully engaged across your whole organization? What I'd like you to do is to answer that question, by making some notes on your action plan specifically focused on simplifying and engaging the strategy. Who else needs to be involved? And then what are you going to do and what do you think we are going to do? And here you can certainly make some notes in any of the three timeframes.