Manoeuvres – your key to having an ACTUAL strategy

If you don’t feel like reading, you can watch my video below or by clicking here,

Three things all clients want from strategy days, which I know because they tell me when we meet.

1. Practical actions
2. Avoid waffling
3. Keeping ‘interesting’ participants in check

There is a simple word I use which gives us all three of these, and that’s

manoeuvres.

I first heard this word in the context of strategy from Lucy Loh and Patrick Hoverstadt, authors of the brilliant book Patterns of Strategy, and for me it was a game-changer.

Let me elaborate.

The 4 S’s That Will Move Your Culture

Prefer to watch on video rather than read?  Click here, 5 minutes with captions.

Getting your culture moving in the direction you need doesn’t have to be a mystery.  There are tangible actions you can take right now that will make a difference. 

I’ve named them the 4 S’s, and if you know the work of Frances Frei and Anne Morriss in Unleashed, and the body of work known as Systems Leadership developed by Ian Macdonald, Catherine Burke and Karl Stewart…you’ll already be familiar with some of these ideas.

First – my definition – culture is the shared understanding about the way you need act to fit in around here.  Don’t get too caught up in it…this works fine.

Business Partnering – It’s So Hot Right Now!

Click here to watch this in a 5-minute video!

On the agenda of every corporate services area, be it IT, HR, Finance or the more modern incarnations of business improvement and innovation….is business partnering.

But there’s a lot more to this than good intentions and writing it down in a plan.  Here’s what’s required to get to this to work.

‘Business Partnering’

First – what are we on about?  I like to use the ideas we can find in Patrick Hoverstadt and Lucy Loh’s book Patterns of Strategy, where they describe in detail the strategy of ‘Strategic Partner’.  One of the supplier family of strategies, this is where we look to cause change in the other partner for the benefit of both of us.

The Only Thing Missing From Your Strategy….is a Strategy!

If you prefer watching to reading, you can watch the video about this by clicking here.

You’ve got a strategic plan.  What you might not have in it, however…is a strategy!  I’ll explain.

The Standard Strategy

Imagine I’m interviewing to be coach of the sporting team, and I’m asked to go through my strategy.

I’d start with an intent: a successful club that wins premierships. And a key aspect of that intent is to: win games.

Then I might be asked “Great…but what’s your strategy?”

So I confidently step up to the whiteboard, draw this up…

…and sit back down knowing the job is mine.