Author: Markus Westerlund

Strategy is my passion! I love to simplify complex work and finally squeeze the strategy on one single page, the Strategy 1Pager.

Customer Strategy

5.02 Digital Sales for Dummies

Post author By Markus Westerlund
Post date March 22, 2021

Digital Sales for Dummies | 5.02

Markus Westerlund

Strategy is my passion! I love to simplify complex work and finally squeeze the strategy on one single page, the Strategy 1Pager.

Share this blog

For ten years I have put an enormous amount of energy and time into understand digital sales, and what digitalization actually means in communication, marketing and sales. Also, I have invested a great amount of money. Luckily, some of the investments have borne fruit. I have frequently visited the United States and London and found the best people who are at the top of their league in digitalization.

It has been my great ambition to produce this text. Now I will tell you what the point of digital sales is. In my opinion it’s as big as the invention of the telephone. Phones have existed for years, but very few understood their power in the beginning. Let’s look at what digital sales is.

Hot leads

Point number one is that this thing called digital sales exists. Everyone wants hot leads in B2B marketing. Where do the leads come from?

From marketing, of course. The purpose of marketing is to bring hot leads to sales, and then it’s the sales’ job to close the deal.

In the old world the lead could come from trade fairs in the form of a business card. What if the lead isn’t hot, but lukewarm? Or cold? I have the business card, so who cares?

Nurturing

The question is: Can I nurture the customer with scalability? Think, if I could nurture a big group of customers… I’m talking about a massive group, even thousands of people! That would be intense!

This is what it’s all about in digital sales: We can nurture thousands of people on a weekly basis! It’s impossible to personally meet thousands of people, or even phone them all.

Nurture the customer

The above image, in my opinion, is the main point of this whole blog text: Is marketing giving leads? Nowadays the marketing unit has begun to market digitally a lot, but marketing very often measures its success in clicks. LinkedIn, for example, measures in clicks. But is it enough? No, it isn’t. We need a name!

Sales call their customers in order to get a sales meeting. The salesperson gives a spectacular presentation with all the PowerPoint-slides needed, and in the end the customer says:

“Really interesting, but not now. We have so much going on at the moment”.

Sounding familiar? What happens next? A long wait. 3-6 months later the salesperson meets the customer again. What does the customer say?

“Really interesting, but we have other things going on at the moment”.

This pattern goes on, and on, and on. What do we do in between the meetings? Most people wait aggressively by the phone, expecting a phone call or an email from the customer.

Give personal professional knowledge

What if WE sent messages to them? We have their business card; we have the right to send them messages and emails. Messages can be written by the salespeople or by a professional who was present at the meeting. Messages should contain personal professional knowledge, meaning we give the customer our best practices for free -experiences and cases, for example.

Text Messages can also be sent, marketing review reports, for example. The content has to contain substance, this means something that the customer wouldn’t come to think of on their own. A business has a lot of experience from its own field, and that’s the kind of information and know-how that the customer probably isn’t aware of, which makes it both insightful and valuable.

The customer needs to be nurtured with information and understanding, and we shouldn’t be guarding it jealously! This is called digital sales.

The second option is receiving an email address from the marketing department, without even meeting the person. We can, however, begin to nurture this customer personally through digital sales, just like I’m now telling you about all this. Yes, our idea behind these blogs is to give you sneak peeks and valuable insights. We not only want you to get something practical, that you can implement on your own, but to also get a clear idea if you would like to have us help you more in-depth. (Please don’t hesitate to get in touch.)

As I’m writing this blog, I’m at our vacation home in the Porvoo archipelago. We just arrived here with my wife. I have an office here as well, from which I work remotely quite often.

The thing about email addresses is so interesting. If I were a CEO of a big company or working in a company with tens of people, I would give the market one central measure:

“How many email addresses have you collected during this month?”

Clicks are only a waypoint. The culmination of the click is the email address. Did you get the address or not? Immediately when we have the address, we can launch a marketing automation sequence of multiple emails that contain substantial value for the lead. Not spam, valuable substance.

Digital sales is the same thing as the coming of the telephone. Before cell phones we, of course, knew how to sell. We went straight to the customer and knocked on their door and met them. Of course, letters were sent, and advertisements were posted in magazines. But then, cell phones came. Was the salesperson with a phone more efficient than the guy who ran around meeting everyone in person? OF COURSE, because they had the time to call many more people.

Now we can do digital sales! A massive amount of people can be reached with digital sales. Thousand times more than before with just a phone.

A personal professional relationship starts to build up. They start to know you.

First of all, I can create a personal, professional relationship with the customer. When I write this text for you to read, I need to speak to you as an individual. I’m not speaking in a large auditorium; I’m speaking to you as an individual and sharing my best tricks with you. This is how a bond is created between us. On the video it’s even more lively.

You begin to know me, and that is, of course, valuable. That’s when a customer might think:

¨Hey, that guy seems to know a lot and he’s telling me lots of useful things for free. In fact, I might start following this guy, because he seems so nice.”

I have many whom I like and follow quite intensely. Of course, all the time I don’t have the energy to read the messages I’ve received, but very often I look at them.

In 2007 I met Chris Cardell in London, and I have followed him ever since. He sends five messages a week, which I always don’t have the energy to read. I know, however, that in the beginning he gave me so much for free, that I was amazed and didn’t understand how that could’ve been profitable for the business. This is the catch. A person can sense this person genuinely wants to help, and not only sell.

There is always someone who needs help and will buy. But it’s wonderful if one can help businesses to succeed, even if they carried out a plan their own way without asking me for help. That’s the great mission. Of course, money needs to flow in. Someone always needs help in practice, but if someone can improve their business using the info I share, or some other presentation, it’s just wonderful!

There is no need of being scared of the competition. They can copy, but they also have their own beliefs and framework and their own way of doing things. It isn’t so easy to copy, and if someone copies me, I’ll be just around the corner the very next week developing something new, so at least in my business, the competition doesn’t matter because I move faster than the competitors can copy and implement my stuff. By they time they successfully develop and deploy my things, I have already made that same thing obsolete through new innovations.

Automate!

This way I can nurture thousands of people weekly. At the moment I have five thousand CEOs and management leaders on my mailing list, to whom I send a minute-long video every week. This type of short video is hard to do, because it can’t contain any extra word, because one minute is a very short time. I can easily speak 20 minutes or even 2-3 minutes, but compressing everything to a one minute speech is challenging. Every word needs to be examined, in order to make sure there is substance in the video.

I can share my message to thousands of people all at once. My customer’s salesman Jani had found 3500 contacts on LinkedIn, that could potentially be interested in the company’s services. He has met several customers face to face, altogether about 200. What does he do with the remaining 3300? Does he aggressively wait for someone to call? That’s when he realized he can approach them digitally and personally. There’s no way he would have the time to call all three thousand and meet them. Instead, he can nurture them. When the time is right and the customer realizes they need help, that’s when Jani might get a call or an email from a customer – without ever meeting them. Jani is already familiar to the customer.

Document experiences

I recently learned a new thing from my guru: Don’t create new content, document what you did”.

You don’t have to make up content! Just explain what you learned. That’s why I’m trying to become sensitive towards the moment I experience a Heureka-moment. Every week I get a feeling that “this was pretty interesting, I’ve learned something new”. I make a video about what I’ve learned, and send it off every Thursday.

I have been doing this for so long, that I suddenly have an archive of 300 videos! Producing a one-minute video no longer takes that long, because I’ve standardized the process for myself. Before, I was thinking a lot about how to get them done in my everyday life and what kind of technology and lighting I need. Here’s a tip for you: Talk with someone, who has figured things out and can help you get started. That way things go easy. Also, the best thing is that recording a video doesn’t have to cost you any money.

Goal of digital sales: The Meeting

The goal of B2B sales is the meeting. Not the fact that the deal would be done on the internet. These deals are usually very big. Nobody orders anything online with big sums of money, they invite you to a meeting. Then the traditional and physical offer negotiations begin. The goal in B2C is to secure the purchase. Same principles as in B2B apply, but closing is different online.

Traffic

Everyone wants traffic on their webpage. They want the email address. Traffic is wanted and it can either happen fast or slowly. Buying traffic is faster. In other words we advertise our pages to a large group on Facebook or LinkedIn. We get people to click and to download our “magnet”. The price is the email address. The feature of bought traffic is that it fades, people stop following after a while even though they had clicked on the link.

However, the traffic that comes from people who find our webpage on their own or through Google, is the traffic we own, because we have their email addresses. Even though Facebook, LinkedIn and everything would end, we have email. Facebook and LinkedIn can identify the people who have visited their pages. That’s when we can buy advertisements that are published directly to these people on those platforms, not outside of the platforms. However, we don’t get their email addresses if we just rely on advertising on the massive digital platform and ecosystems. We don’t own the traffic, which means we are in trouble if we are banned from using the advertising systems on these platforms.

The blue line in the image above is more valuable in the long run, but it is advisable to use both ways of traffic in the beginning.

Relevant content

Many think email is a disappearing medium and that nobody has time or bothers to read them. Yes, nobody reads a message that isn’t relevant to them! I say, however, that the receiver will most definitely read the message if it’s truly relevant to them.

A magnet has to exist, something that they want for themselves. It could be an e-book or a video series. A CTA (Call to Action) button is placed on the web page stating “Order this”, or “Download here”, for example. The email address is the what the user gives in exchange for the thing that they want.

It’s interesting when I asked a company management how many email addresses they have. They didn’t know! This in my opinion states that nobody has acknowledged that a new telephone has been invented. Otherwise they would’ve known the exact amount. This morning I had 7416 addresses, 5000 of which are in Finland and the remaining ones abroad. I can see these numbers directly in my information dashboard, and I keep track of them often — daily or weekly.

The List

This is an important point: Email addresses form my list. I have many many addresses on my list and together they are a huge asset, capital to our business. The list is important because it consists of current customers as well as prospective customers. If we have a quality list, it raises the valuation of our company.

The list is absolutely essential: You should collect email addresses, and in a way that the person is willing to give it. Then you grow the list systematically. This is the reason I would set the amount of new email addresses as a central KPI (Key Performance Indicator).

Of course people will leave the list when they no longer want to follow – and that’s ok. The more people leave, the better. That’s when the quality of the list grows because you don’t want to spam people who are not interested in the information that you are sending out. I, as well, clean out my list. I intend to send everyone that hasn’t followed or looked at my mails, a message. I will inform them that I will stop sending mails to them, but they can continue the subscription by clicking the button in the email.

Automatic nurturing

Once the message has been written, you don’t need to do it again. The computer takes care of the rest. Some people can think that automation makes the message impersonal. It isn’t impersonal, it’s me writing it! It’s just that the message comes with a delay. That’s how it was during the war when a letter came from the trenches. The letter had been written by a person, it just took time to arrive at its destination. The message has to be written in real time with a personal touch, but the delivery comes with a delay.

Digital sales allows us to take care of personal customer relationship development in a scalable fashion, in practice this means thousands of people. You are giving valuable information for free. The content has to be so solid, something you find difficult to decide if it is a smart choice to hand it out, because it something so valuable. You however are an expert, and you know how hard it is to actually implement your expertise. So even if the other party gets super high-value information, then they may not even have it in them to successfully implement that information. Those who truly value your expertise and value their own time, will realize that the most valuable choice for them is to contract you to help them out personally. Those who don’t value your input, come to the conclusion that they much rather do things by themselves. That is fine, because you will have more time to dedicate to the customers who actually value your input. Everybody wins.

“Wow, I’m getting so much for free, I wonder what I would get if I paid?”

Learn to collect email addresses and how to systematically build the list.

The goal of B2B sales is to get the meeting.

Ignite your strategy! Read more.🔥

Finding Us On Social Media

Stradigo

Stradigo is a brand owned by Rdigo Oy (Business-ID: 2120844-1).

Learn more from our Imprint.

Rdigo Oy is registered in Finland as a Limited company. We are a strategy consultancy located in the Helsinki capital region.

We’ve been in business since 2007. The company name comes from the latin word Redigo, meaning both ‘I shape’ & ‘I renew’.

Stradigo combines the word strategy with Rdigo.

Strategy Implementation

3.02 The Game Book of Actions

Post author By Markus Westerlund
Post date March 22, 2021
2 Comments on 3.02 The Game Book of Actions

The Game Book of Actions — 3.02

Markus Westerlund

Strategy is my passion! I love to simplify complex work and finally squeeze the strategy on one single page, the Strategy 1Pager.

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Many leaders have the problem that makes it difficult for them to renew their way of working, even though the goal is clear. How could one make everyone feel excited about creating new things while improving competitiveness? Creating an exciting game book of actions is the answer.

Let’s begin with our strategy model, in which three loops rotate while linked to one another. The first loop is where the strategy is directed: Everyone is involved and ideas are chosen, challenged and crystallized. When the strategic goals have been defined, the second loop’s mission is to break them down into subgoals. Prioritizing, resourcing and steering take place. The final loop is the everyday work, which is the theme of today’s blog.

Three loops

How do we get people to serve their customers with excitement throughout the entire customer lifecycle? The customer lifecycle is a journey as well.

What are the crucial matters, the new ways of working, that must be implemented? These matters can be made into Game Book. This metaphor has excited many. How can technology be used to make the ‘We Act’-loop rotate faster?

In actions, there are two pedals, the gas pedal and the brake pedal. If the brake pedal is pressed down, the car won’t budge. We must figure out a way to lift the pedal. I always pose a question:

What’s not working?

Of course, in every place there are a million things that don’t work. But what are the big things that aren’t working? If we merely try to step on the gas without letting go of the brake, it’s wasting energy.

The point is to understand what the WOW factor be for us, for me, my friends, and for our clients? This is the key to a fine process. Let’s engage everyone to think about the WOW factor. That’s when the brake pedal lifts, and the car is free to move. Not a very difficult idea, in theory.

What is the WOW factor for us?

The movement must be going from left to right. At Stradigo, we have facilitated tens of processes just like this, and as a concept it seems to be amazing.

The answer is to create a Playbook together! Invite people to join the process, even on a voluntary basis. Don’t create a thick Playbook, instead include only the crucial new procedures.

The Game Book of actions reforms procedures

The idea is to crystallize the new procedures. It’s advisable to do that according to the role. In an organization, people have multiple roles. What if people in certain roles were invited to identify the procedure that would become the WOW factor? WOW stands for Way-Of-Working.

The point is that the identification is done together. It’s not done in a conference room. Preferably, it’s done with volunteers. When people are given the freedom to think about the WOW, it’s easily identified!

In many places, I have been told that rules are not wanted. I often use soccer as a metaphor, because certain rules are needed. One must be familiar with the area in which the game is played. The goalkeeper can use their hands when catching the ball. A player can’t kick others in their legs.

If we do things together, the Game Book of actions inspires people to turn their operation towards a common direction by themselves. This direction is our Purpose, how we help our customers.

What motivates a role?

Let’s look at the roles. The customer is, of course, an obvious role. As is a salesperson, an expert, and a manager. A bunch of roles are picked, and then people are asked to volunteer in the process of choosing WOW factors for the roles. This makes everybody see the WOW factors in the roles.

The WOW catch

The work begins by looking at what’s slowing us down. The catch is to go around the obstacle. We task a group to find a way around the obstacle. The amount of creative ideas it’s possible to get is amazing!

Typical Game Book themes

The management’s job is to create focus, and they want to influence the process at this stage as well. The image above has typical approaches. The core can be the agile customer work. How could interacting and collaborating work better, and what about decision-making? How could we understand the customer more deeply? We ask people to innovate WOW factors within these themes.

The themes in the above image are typical, however, the management group can identify specific themes that they want to work for them.

Case: Roles have common joker cards

I invented the above card metaphor during a process inside of a big organization. The WOW factors were contemplated with chosen pioneering individuals. The management had given themes in which new things were innovated. These procedures were developed in a series of workshops. That’s when the idea of making the WOW factor into a playing card was born. It creates a card game!

Four cards were created in one workshop, when people were divided into four groups. Together, all the cards created a deck of cards. The name of the WOW factor was written on a card. We also gave the card a short description. The card contained ideas the individual carrying the card could implement without needing to ask a superior for permission. We also created special Joker cards, that could suit all the roles inside of the organization. Here is an example of such a Joker card:

“I cut meetings in half, both in time and number, without sacrificing our goals. I save people’s time by freeing them from long meetings. I only invite people relevant to the meetings. Using Teams, I collect everyone’s comments beforehand or after the meeting. We converse in Teams, not with email.”

Many cards were created, 52 to be exact! That’s the same amount of cards as in a regular deck of cards. The management was very excited about this. Take a moment to guess if the organization’s creative team was excited about the card deck? Yes. They ended up going out into the hallways, and the company neighborhood and they told everyone in the organization what had taken place.

The whole process went organically. In this situation the management didn’t start pushing it. Pioneer individuals were chosen, and they got to spread the excitement to others. It’s a very efficient and natural way! In other instances, we have done things more traditionally if the customers have wanted to set goals and to follow up. It depends on how this all feels as a process.

Create a Game Book of actions and ignite your strategy! Read more.🔥

Finding Us On Social Media

Stradigo

Stradigo is a brand owned by Rdigo Oy (Business-ID: 2120844-1).

Learn more from our Imprint.

Rdigo Oy is registered in Finland as a Limited company. We are a strategy consultancy located in the Helsinki capital region.

We’ve been in business since 2007. The company name comes from the latin word Redigo, meaning both ‘I shape’ & ‘I renew’.

Stradigo combines the word strategy with Rdigo.

Strategic Leadership

2.04 Strategy implementation in sprints

Post author By Markus Westerlund
Post date March 22, 2021
7 Comments on 2.04 Strategy implementation in sprints

Strategy Implementation In Sprints – A Living Digital Board | 2.04

Markus Westerlund

Strategy is my passion! I love to simplify complex work and finally squeeze the strategy on one single page, the Strategy 1Pager.

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A strategy is useless if implementation never occurs. In this blog, I discuss how the company can kickstart the implementation process and its practice while using sprints and a living digital strategy board.

The eternal fight

A never-ending battle between important matters and urgent matters exists. Guess which one wins? Urgent things always win. How can this be managed? Crystallized focus areas and breakthrough goals are super important. They must be present in the strategic work. Implementation is required, not necessarily by tomorrow, but soon.

People are always in a hurry. Leaders are bad leaders if they don’t fill their coworkers’ days with desirable activity, like productive work that forwards their goals. The more people that the leader needs to streamline, the bigger the hurry is inside the organization. It’s crucial to understand which task is the essential one and how important it is to implement.

Strategic and operative work in the same work pile

Let’s put everything in the same work pile! If we keep the strategy separate and hidden, it’s not going to work. We need to have urgent and important things in front of our eyes all the time.

Let’s make only a single work pile! Let’s collect the goals together and list the necessary tasks under them, just like how old binders have interleaves. That’s how they are constantly in front of everyone’s eyes while browsing through the workload.

Workpile onto a digital strategy board

What if we moved the work pile onto a digital board? Let’s put the big goals and choices in columns and the necessary tasks in cards underneath them. The tasks get distributed between people, and decisions get made about who does what. The traffic lights enable us to see, for instance, if the task is progressing, if it is behind in schedule, or if it is experiencing problems.

When the goals and tasks get listed on the digital board, have a guess, will the board become alive? When the board gets looked at every week, it becomes very much alive. In a physical meeting, the digital board gets projected onto a wall so that everybody can see it. If the meeting takes place as an online session, one person shares their screen, but everyone can also look at the screen through their browser window, which means everybody can write simultaneously on it.

An online meeting works better than a physical meeting, which is pretty exciting. Many think it’s nice to meet in person. Still, if we take a realistic and blunt perspective and look at this from a productivity and efficiency angle, well-facilitated online meetings are better. Especially if the meeting structure is in order. More gets accomplished when people work online with proper methods.

Online meetings are face-to-face meetings

Ever since 2016, I have facilitated almost all of my workshops online. In the beginning, it’s good to meet in person at least once, to get to know each other. Everyone, however, has their laptops and the joint writing board open during the meeting. People see the board and post input as digital cards. The following sessions take place online because they are so much more efficient. Besides, video conferences are, in fact, face-to-face meetings, if you start to think about it!

Whether working online or on location, what boosts the group’s productivity is a shared board to write on. If the only way of communicating is through speech, comments easily get forgotten, as high detailed documentation rarely takes place.

In online meetings, I sometimes ask for pulse comments about how the session is going. Documentation exists the whole time, but we also read the written input out loud. With a joint writing board, separate transcriptions are not a necessity. Workshop preparation also takes much less time.

Agile strategy implementation

A corporation can follow up its goals from the strategy board. Different business units can have their boards as well. In the above figure, a card gets broken into subgoals. The tasks, of course, also have a person in charge. In the figure, there are four departments, and they all have their boards. Also, there are three functions: Finance, HR, and communication.

The point is that the boards are visible to everyone. If someone wants to know what other people are up to, they can have a look. An agile strategy can be completely transparent! One great thing comes from the fact that free software exists that already comes with basic needed functionality. One practical example of such software is Trello, which I use extensively.

Leading strategy implementation in sprints is a 30-year-old idea. The IT industry has demonstrated that it’s not worth planning a project in detail because the world and the customer need changes over time. Big projects get delayed constantly, and the outcomes aren’t, in the end, even good. What if we merely decided on the big goal and worked in shorter sprints? The customer can track our progress thanks to this sprint structure.

The customer can get unsatisfied if they experience a long project without getting any intermediate results.

When we made long waterfall projects and didn’t show the customer’s intermediate results, they ended up unsatisfied with the final delivery. The customer’s needs had changed along the way. It is vital to understand the customer deeply! That’s when spring leadership came into the picture: Working in small sprints and keeping the customer up-to-date as the sprints progress.

Agile prioritization

I think every business would benefit significantly from using sprint management. In sprint management, the company works from a backlog. The backlog should be looked at only when deciding on actions for the next sprint. Thinking doesn’t go beyond the sprint at hand. Staff limit thinking to the most critical things, which prevents information overload. Sprint duration is scheduled, which means the sprint is never late. In the old days, when the team didn’t reach a goal on time, the goal stayed the same, but the issue stretched the schedule.

The philosophy is different with sprints, because the sprint is never late. The schedule never changes. Instead, the group must only finish the core of the project. Projects become lighter because not everything needs to get done in a perfectionistic fashion. Otherwise, everyone tries constantly to produce extra, too refined, value. Minor improvements might not necessarily be so necessary. But, when tasks need to get finished, the focus is automatically on the core. Then the job for the next sprint is decided.

Time-boxed goals

Here you can see a one-week sprint from Monday to the following Monday. I would say a two-week sprint is the maximum time allocated to a single sprint. A Monday meeting gets held, which begins by looking at how the previous week’s sprint went. Are the tasks ready?

People get to decide for themselves what they want to work on during the next sprint. Unfinished tasks move into the backlog, from where they may be chosen for the next sprint once again, if still relevant. Sprints are necessarily not tied together regarding tasks.

Herein lies a psychological factor. When people know that they get asked if they managed to finish their work at the end of every week, they tend to get the job done. If they don’t, they still manage to do a final crunch and think about something they get to finish on time. They know how to focus on the core issues. Set goals ought not to bend to short-term whims, but the goals’ content can and should adapt to needs. It was the other way around back in the day.

Strategy implementation in sprints is a win-win for all!

Put strategic tasks in the same work pile together with the operative tasks. Strategy implementation in sprints enables you to implement the strategy much more efficiently, and the schedules hold. That’s it.

Use this approach to ignite your strategy! Read more.🔥

Finding Us On Social Media

Stradigo

Stradigo is a brand owned by Rdigo Oy (Business-ID: 2120844-1).

Learn more from our Imprint.

Rdigo Oy is registered in Finland as a Limited company. We are a strategy consultancy located in the Helsinki capital region.

We’ve been in business since 2007. The company name comes from the latin word Redigo, meaning both ‘I shape’ & ‘I renew’.

Stradigo combines the word strategy with Rdigo.

Strategic Planning

1.04 Case: Strategy together

Post author By Markus Westerlund
Post date March 22, 2021
1 Comment on 1.04 Case: Strategy together

Strategy Case: Creating A Strategy Together — 1.04

Markus Westerlund

Strategy is my passion! I love to simplify complex work and finally squeeze the strategy on one single page, the Strategy 1Pager.

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Today I will talk about a case that had a few fantastic features. The strategy was done together! I simply must share it with you. The most amazing thing was that a big corporation had the guts to jump into a completely new way of making strategies by involving the whole staff. It most certainly wasn’t in their culture, but they sensed that now was the right time for it. The strategy was done together, and it went very well.

We do the strategy together!

The strategy was made authentically together! Even blue-collar workers joined. Over 100 people always attended the meetings, although I must admit that many more were expected to participate. I’ll tell you more about the kickoff and about the feedback we received.

We held three workshops with two divisions. We worked with both in tandem, alternating between both divisions over the workshops. The workshops involved about 30 people, and everything was done digitally online. The trick is to have a common digital board, which magnifies meeting efficiency, and on which everyone can write simultaneously. Every meeting had its own digital board, and that is something that changes the whole process. Steering meetings were held in between the workshops, in which we presented the unfinished strategy to the staff for feedback.

Think how “horrible”! We showed everyone something that is not ready!

In the end the tough choices were brought together, and the staff had a moment to browse through the Strategy 1Pager and leave their fingerprint on it. I call these comments steering signals, and boy were there many!

The dreaming workshop

After the first kickoff the next step was the dreaming workshop. We jumped into a time machine and travelled five years into the future and landed at home. The participants were asked to visualize everything that they would see, hear, smell, feel and taste five years in the future. The visualizations were written into 12 stories, and they were all so exciting! Every time, people were as astonished as I am about how much information our subconscious contains.

I asked people to give a one-word comment about the kickoff. Those comments were then used to form a word cloud. It’s easy to see what people have thought about it. The bigger the word, the more times it has been commented. Most of the comments are super positive, but you will always find some constructive criticism. The word interesting is, well, interesting because it’s the subtlest way to object. It means you are looking at the situation from a distance and that you haven’t hopped on board quite yet. Those that give exciting feedback are the ones that have already stepped on the boat and are ready to row.

Challenging the way we think

How do we challenge our way of thinking? As we travel into the future during the dreaming phase, an interesting phenomenon happens. It is a bit like playing and people come up with ideas easily, without being weighed about the implementation difficulties.

Every theme is a workshop by itself. During this case, we went through all four workshops. In brutal reality, we wondered why we are constantly in a rat race and a step behind, even though we have a ton of great ideas and a lot of work is being done.

Development debt will always exist, and one must learn to live with it. It can be hard to dream at times. But, when the workshops are done online, one is already finished after an hour. In our case, every workshop was three hours long, and the staff worked for four hours altogether. The whole thing was done in two and a half days’ time.

Would you invest two days to think about your strategy?

Our workgroup had a few people that found it weird to think about high-quality thoughts. That’s exactly what they are, high-quality. I firmly believe that one must have one’s head in the clouds, while also having very long legs that reach all the way to the ground. If you only think about practical down-to-earth things, you don’t see the big picture, now do you? The helicopter view is an important aspect.

The interesting thing was that fear also reached the management level. People at that level were scared the people below wouldn’t have the capability to think about the future. That tells a lot about the management if they feel they are the only ones capable of thinking about the future. I say if you guide people into the future and ask them to fly, they will think and use their brains to understand the work required.

In the final phase, some had the opinion that certain matters were left undiscussed. They were right in a sense. Before this process began the management group and members of the board sat in two workshops and defined the focus areas, that were important for them. A vast staff survey was used as a base for that discussion.

This survey helped to produce and crystallize the three focus areas, which were then discussed inside the divisions and then written (transformed) into a more practical form. We started to think and prioritize our thoughts during every meeting. This is how we found the grains of gold, which ultimately became the tough choices.

Summarizing everything on a single page

What you see below are a process and a funnel. We asked questions, wrote, and commented on our digital board. One division gave us 4090 comments, out of which 177 comments made the cut. Those were then grouped into breakthrough goals.

Breakthrough goals are bigger than normal goals because you go through (break through) the wall with them. They are all included in the Strategy 1Pager. Once you have thought about these a lot, everything has been evaluated from every relevant angle. The Strategy 1Pager is presented to the management and the board to give their comments on the output.

A cultural change

I was just at a board meeting telling them about this work process. I said:

“Before you look at the result and give comments, you should know these people have put their hearts into this work.”

A couple of wrong words can kill the atmosphere. The board listened. I also said if they have any ideas, let’s bring them to the table as well. They gave us three focus areas as a send-off, and that’s what we did.

When the company leadership reported their own strategy, one of them said:

“This is a cultural change in our company. We have never done it like this.”

All this leads to the result that people get on board. Everything changed only because they were given the possibility to think. And why did they have the possibility to think? Because technology exists. With little effort, we got everyone to participate. We didn’t need to travel across the country.

During the first workshop, someone said that if they had traveled to another city and tried to do all of this on their own with sticky notes, it would have been a disaster. It would have taken a week to get the same amount of work done as we did with online workshops. The result, however, would not have been the same because challenging happens through questions.

The talent lies in asking the right questions. It is the job of a professional to pull the information out of people’s heads. Technology enables this.

Result

This was the result. I asked the group for comments about the whole process, what was it like? Again, the answers were collected into a word cloud.

As you can see, there is the word tiresome. That’s exactly what it is if one is not used to doing processes at a fast pace. The pace is fast because the process is so expensive to do. Expenses double if the pace is slower (more time = more expenses).

The word confusing has sometimes come up. People form their perception of the world based on a certain image. Then when something comes up, that doesn’t fit their current perception of the world, things become confusing. This confusion is a good thing because that way new pathways in the brain form. It is, in fact, a very creative state, that allows people to update their perceptions.

Returning to our subject, there was a staff member who said that nothing changes if no one gets angry. That’s true, in the sense that this process had even more potential, because the feedback was so positive (we could have pushed further)!

This morning I held a dreaming workshop in a new organization, where the factory floor staff took part in the workshop through their phones. These people were also amazed at how their imagination was allowed to run freely. Together we thought it was miraculous. I told them:

“Look at everything your subconscious can store!”

When you get the whole group to implement them, it’s fantastic!

I wanted to share this case because this is such an important topic. It’s not enough to just have a good strategy that’s made and agreed upon inside a conference room high up in the ivory tower. The strategy has no value before it is implemented. The implementation requires that everyone is involved in the process and the strategy is ignited together! Strategy together, that’s the 🔑!

Ignite your strategy by doing it together with your staff! Read more.🔥

Finding Us On Social Media

Stradigo

Stradigo is a brand owned by Rdigo Oy (Business-ID: 2120844-1).

Learn more from our Imprint.

Rdigo Oy is registered in Finland as a Limited company. We are a strategy consultancy located in the Helsinki capital region.

We’ve been in business since 2007. The company name comes from the latin word Redigo, meaning both ‘I shape’ & ‘I renew’.

Stradigo combines the word strategy with Rdigo.

Strategic Planning

1.11 How to crystallize a strategy?

Post author By Markus Westerlund
Post date March 22, 2021
11 Comments on 1.11 How to crystallize a strategy?

How to crystallize a strategy? – The Strategy 1Pager | 1.11

Markus Westerlund

Strategy is my passion! I love to simplify complex work and finally squeeze the strategy on one single page, the Strategy 1Pager.

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Today I’m talking about crystallizing a strategy. I will explain how a strategy is simplified and goals are clarified. I will also introduce my pride, the Strategy 1Pager, which allows the whole strategy to be crystallized onto a single page.

Let’s look at our loops once again.

A strategy journey has three phases, which I call loops. The first loop consists of renewing and directing the strategy. The second loop leads the implementation of the strategy, and it is linked to the first loop. If the implementation doesn’t happen, the whole strategy is pointless. The third loop is daily operative work.

The first loop rotates quarterly. A bigger strategy round is done every now and then, however, the goals need to be updated more frequently. Have our goals been set? Do they need to be changed? How are we doing?

The second loop is about steering the strategy implementation, and it rotates weekly. What are the sub-goals and their functions? We prioritize and assign resources.

The third loop is all about implementation, and it rotates daily.

The three loops are linked together, and they rotate at different speeds. This is the whole strategy journey. It is very easy to think that the strategy process means strategic planning, the moment when the strategy is decided, and it is written down. However, in the above model this is only represented by the first loop. There are two other loops! This means that it’s better to understand the strategy journey as three full loops, not one.

Let’s focus on creating the strategy, which is the first loop. Often the end result of the strategy process is a thick pile of PowerPoint slides, and usually the contents on the slides are of very fine quality. But how well do people remember what is written on the slides? Can the strategy be crystallized and compressed into a tighter package?

Incredibly great strategy

Our company was born out of this idea. We at Stradigo concluded that strategies are incredibly finely made documents, so finely made that nobody can, in fact, implement them successfully. We felt that we need to help humankind by simplifying this.

When working with new customers I often get to have a look at their previous strategies. One time I was handed a 157-page presentation that was done the year before. It was so incredibly fine that as I browsed through it I thought to myself:

“OH MY GOD. What do these people even need me for?”

After I was over my shock, I realized that something has to be wrong if the presentation loses the train of thought constantly. According to the organization they had used old slide layouts, imported from previous companies. The quantity of the pages was blinding at first, but they ended up having clear problems in their strategy. This organization had predicted massive growth, however, nothing happened in the next four years, except that their profitability plummeted.

The strategy was wrong or too fine to be implemented. The layout was splendid, but when people tried to get the hang of it, it only made them sweat. The organization was left wondering if they would ever manage to implement it.

Strategy sales for the team

When a fine strategy is made in a conference room, the next step is to sell the idea to the staff. It begins with a large meeting where the CEO presents the strategy over an hour or two. People are extremely interested in listening, because they want to know how to continue into the future.

After the presentation comes the Q&A session, where someone raises their hand and, interestingly enough, always asks the same question:

“What does this mean in practice?”

The CEO has to give an example, but the thing is that these people should themselves figure out what it is in practice. I’ve talked about this before.

The reality

The reality, however, is often this. The board and management group have sat down for many workshops. They have crystallized a hard thing and found the catch, and they are very excited. Then this is explained to the others, but none of them really knows what to do in practice.

This is a HUGE problem. If the strategy isn’t implemented, what’s the use of it? All the work, money and energy has gone to waste. It’s devastating!

Alternatively, one can ignite the strategy. Business owners get to decide the cornerstones and the direction they want to go in. They want to risk their money in some business and then say: “Please don’t go overboard.” Then they hire professionals that are interested in the company’s sun, the purpose for their customers.

The job is to find the best way to the sun. How do we help our customers? They have to be sailing every day, so to speak. They need to know the strategy so that they can sail towards the sun. We need a crystallized strategy, with simple enough frames. That is why we need the following.

We need to simplify and demystify by crystallizing the strategy. I’ve been terrified while reading what some American professors write about strategy. The text is so difficult to understand, my goodness!

The other keyword is “together”. Simplify Together.

It’s all possible now thanks to technology, that multiplies efficiency, so it’s not time-consuming.

I just finished a strategy process for a billion-dollar company. We held three meetings with the entire staff. Have a guess how long the whole process took. The whole staff worked four hours and the workshop participants 15 hours altogether. That’s two and a half days to create a strategy.

Would you sacrifice four hours of work to be able to create a massive amount of energy that spurs people forward? Somehow it seems stupid not to do things this way.

We do it together!

Let’s do things authentically together from the start! The first one-hour kickoff is held online with the whole group. After that there are workshops, which anyone can volunteer to attend. The volunteers sign up on a Trello board, and a group is formed! It’s also so wonderful to see young people take part in a strategy for the first time.

The staff meetings and workshops alternate in turns. Every meeting has its own digital board that enables everyone to write on cards. They’re like sticky notes, but digital and better. We use Trello for this.

People have their video cameras on during meetings, so they can all talk and write simultaneously on the board. With one click everyone can be sorted into break-out rooms, where they can converse in small groups. Finally, they write their conclusions on the digital cards.

Crystallizing a strategy onto a single page

We often have three workshops and two staff meetings. No more two-day or even one-day sessions. No more travelling and polluting, no traffic jams, no wasting time! Let’s work from our current location.

Don’t sit in the conference room together! If some are sitting in a conference room and the rest are taking part online, the people in the room will converse with each other and the other half online won’t be able to catch what they’re saying.

No no no. INVOLVE EVERYONE! One can participate through phone nowadays. Earphones in and let’s go!

The strategy funnel

As you can see from the image above, the number of comments, represented by thin lines, is great. All of them are crystallized and compressed. They are prioritized, meeting by meeting, and only the top candidates make the cut. By working digitally, comments are always written down, which means everything gets documented at the same time.

No more colorful walls stacked full of sticky notes, which are transcribed into a file after a few days. Digital cards, on the other hand, can be zoomed in and the best ones can be voted with likes. The staff is then shown all that has happened in between the workshops.

The billion-dollar company strategy meeting collected 4080 written comments! The deciding factor is how they are crystallized. These 4080 comments were crystallized into 177 topics that were prioritized and they made the cut. Out of 177 cards the main themes and their focus areas were found. The whole process is absolutely solid! It, of course, requires some know-how have the energy to prioritize these comments, because nothing can be forgotten!

The company board gave a comment:

“But those people don’t know how to think about the future, they can only think operatively.”

It depends of course what kind of task one gives them! We dream in workshops and travel to the future with a time machine and choose trends.

We also think about paranoia and about what our competitors are doing. What enemy lives in us? How can we screw up this whole process? How do we turn the screw-up into a victory? What NOT to do?

These are the things that produced the 4080 comments, which were prioritized into 177 topics. Those were then compressed onto a Strategy 1Pager. It had a lot of things for the future. It’s somehow funny that in bigger companies the board and management group think they have some kind of a monopoly to understand the future.

The future doesn’t exist

I’ve mentioned the Swedish futurologist Kjell A. Nordström before. He once began a presentation with these words: “The future cannot be studied because it doesn’t exist.”

This reminds me of the words ‘intuition’ and ‘gut feeling’, and how it has become an annoying label today. You know what? The finest computer in the entire world is between one’s ears. If an expert gives their vision as to where the world is going, it is better to hear it from an expert than an amateur. It’s the expert’s point of view, but then here comes the criticism like this expert view is such a bad thing.

It’s based on a mathematical scientific paradigm, where the truth is only measured outside one’s head. But that’s measuring the past. Then one is not measuring the future, but only what is now.

All statistics can be utilized to see if the curve is going straight, up or down. The trends are visible, but no-one knows the future. A good vision, assumption or belief is worth gold.

All numbers are only guesses, because the future doesn’t exist. That’s why we need a vision where the business will succeed. Then we have key beliefs and assumptions about what’s going to happen. The strategy is built on top of those key beliefs.

If the beliefs are high-quality, the strategy will be high-quality. If the beliefs are not high-quality, meaning false, the strategy will be bad.

Beliefs and key assumptions aren’t usually even written down. They exist in the speeches of board meetings. The CEO holds a briefing about this meeting and the management group begins to work on the next strategy.

A one-page strategy

Finally, when the strategy process is completed, crystallize it into a single page. It’s boiled down like a sauce. That’s when the big tough choices emerge. They have to be so tough that someone becomes anxious. If no-one becomes anxious, nothing changes! Because we want to steer the operation towards a better future, of course some things need to be terminated if they are outdated.

Think, a big company strategy can be done in just over two days! It’s absolutely amazing.

The whole point of this text is to crystallize a strategy onto a Strategy 1Pager. Once you have that, you know what to do. A strategy is of course based on beliefs: Bad belief → Bad strategy. Good belief → Good strategy.

The talent is to take all visions inside the organization and compress them onto one page. The page needs to have those big tough choices written down, and there must not be too many!

The catch is to have the talent to do a Strategy 1Pager. The strategy becomes simple and bloody exciting.

Ignite your strategy by crystallizing your strategy! Read more.🔥

Finding Us On Social Media

Stradigo

Stradigo is a brand owned by Rdigo Oy (Business-ID: 2120844-1).

Learn more from our Imprint.

Rdigo Oy is registered in Finland as a Limited company. We are a strategy consultancy located in the Helsinki capital region.

We’ve been in business since 2007. The company name comes from the latin word Redigo, meaning both ‘I shape’ & ‘I renew’.

Stradigo combines the word strategy with Rdigo.

Strategic Planning

1.03 What kind of strategy process?

Post author By Markus Westerlund
Post date March 22, 2021
3 Comments on 1.03 What kind of strategy process?

What kind of strategy model? — 1.03

Markus Westerlund

Strategy is my passion! I love to simplify complex work and finally squeeze the strategy on one single page, the Strategy 1Pager.

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We can use a variety of strategy models. Today I’ll explain a process that is strongly involving. It all starts with a preparation phase, which is often over in 30 seconds. The leader decides who all are involved and how many meetings are held. After that the preparation phase is over.

Things can be done much better during this phase, which is why I’m introducing you to my very own pride, the hamburger model.

How does one go top-down and bottom-up at the same time?

The Hamburger Model

Go top-down and bottom-up side by side. This forms a hamburger, where the outcome becomes the patty in the middle.

A management can start from the top, while creating the catch. I often use a sector model for this. The management defines the sector in which we want to operate. The cornerstones can be at the end of the lines. In this sector we decide what we want to do to get more growth, profitability, excitement and energy eruptions.

At the same time the ball is thrown to the organization by asking it for insights. Involving others can easily trigger anxiety in a traditional management and board. They think that others aren’t capable of understanding anything else but operative everyday situations and that it’s the leader that must think about the future.

This, however, isn’t true because there are many that understand the future very well.

Once the group has gone through the strategy, the ball comes back up. Then the big choices, and focus areas, and their breakthrough goals, are decided.

The hamburger strategy model is approached from two directions. One doesn’t need to do just the other, because the result is much better when using both.

Top-Bottom vs Real Participation

In my opinion, the picture on the left is horrible in a sense. This is the traditional top-bottom strategy model, which basically means that wisdom sits at the top of the ivory tower:

The top-floor people sit down for many workshops. Then, the board gives the opening speech and the management group is put to work. In the end, when the white smoke has appeared out of the chimney a briefing is held.

A “town hall meeting” is an hour or two long, where people are invited as auditors. The CEO gives a presentation, and the management is very excited to have finally finished the strategy. The CEO shows everyone their exciting ideas and the people are puzzled at what this all means to them.

Next comes the Q&A moment, where someone always raises their hand and asks:

“What does this mean in practice?”

Of course, the CEO tries to give an example, but silently in their mind they are thinking:

“Do I need to do your job for you? I’m paying you a lot of money so that you can figure out what this means in practice. I can’t do everyone’s job for them”.

… But of course, they can’t say that. Instead, they figure out an example.

Case Example

I once bumped into a board member that ran a strategy process in a big organization. He used the word ‘keskusteluttaminen’ in Finnish, which freely translates to “forcing people to converse.” This word is the worst thing I’ve heard after headquarters, subordinate, the head, and other ancient terms.

Think, if someone today would re-launch the word ‘foreman.’ Whoever thought of the word would be lynched for its misogynistic and discriminating nature. The word for “forcing people to converse” is worse because it’s the same as saying, “Converse you idiots so that you understand the point of this.”

During this specific case, when extremely qualified people conversed, and they took their feedback upstairs, the message fell on deaf ears and wasn’t paid attention to. They gave heavy feedback. They said they wouldn’t see a difference if they kept doing things the same way. They seem just the same as any business. The people upstairs didn’t pay any heed to this.

Listen, people. The traditional way is not only terrible, but it’s also a bad system that won’t lead to good implementation. The implementation becomes bad, and people won’t join in the journey. The management has to sell an idea and use a lot of time, money, and effort to get the organization on board.

NO, NO, NO! This is why one should move to authentic participation.

Authentic Participation

How do we get the feeling we’re authentically taking part in the strategic process? That’s when we realize there’s no need for a separate implementation process!

Immediately when you understand something, you start implementing it right away. I think it’s impossible for a person not to start implementing the greatest idea in their mind. It begins immediately.

In a world where we go from top to bottom and bottom-up, there is no separate implementation process. It has happened already. You start to do things with excitement! We have to get into a world like this. The reason is strictly economic because the authentic participation strategy model creates much more results and value for the business owner than the top-down model. It’s in a different league. Everyone wins: the customers, staff, business owners, the government…

I like to say that nothing is as strong of a force as a hundred people going in the same direction. It produces a magnificent power instead of all of them going in different directions and doing their own things.

One must build the hamburger model top-down and bottom-up and get the operation in the middle as a patty.

Let’s see how it’s done. I have visualized a hamburger model, where progress takes place over iterative rounds.

Round 1.

Leaders define the frames, the sector. The board looks at strategic key questions, to which they want an answer from the organization. Then the ball is thrown into the second round. The staff is asked for their opinion, and they are presented with central questions and the frames in which the business wishes to operate.

Round 2.

A business owner has a right to decide where they invest their money. This is how the frames are formed. Then, people begin to think, and this produces a great amount of comments. One challenge at this stage is how these comments are collected and refined. The hamburger patty needs to be found.

Thankfully, technology has brought many efficient methods to help. With digital technology, it’s possible to collect everyone’s opinions efficiently and to refine them further. It takes a week or two in a big organization, and after that, we move to round 3, which is the “patty level.”

Round 3.

Let’s combine our thoughts. What is our focus? Many goals are defined and are combined into focus areas. It can be that the big focus areas have already been defined at the beginning of the collective strategy journey. Alternatively, it can be that those decisions haven’t been made yet. Throw the ball to the staff and ask what they think should be focused on. It’s amazing how high-quality the answers are.

Round 4.

Now the ball returns upstairs. There the suggested ‘patty’ is examined if it’s good or not. My opinion is that if many big breakthrough ideas have been crystallized at the beginning of the strategic journey, they tend to change towards the end. People have gotten wiser as their ideas have iterated during the journey.

Strategies cast in stone are dead, in my opinion. No more three to five-year strategies. One must proceed with an agile way of thinking.

Strategic Season

Actually, the term strategic season is an old-world thing because no one can plan or predict the future. There is only intuition and guesses. With the help of the past, one can measure statistics and ask oneself if the numbers are going up or down.

However, surprises arise. That’s why it’s better to think about the strategy model and to update the strategy more or less constantly, maybe every 3-6 months. It doesn’t mean that the big things change all the time, but some projects are completed as others need to be updated. That’s why the strategy should be looked at quarterly.

Iteration

The whole point is this being an iterative process. The strategy ripens version by version, and just as in a micro-enterprise or a billion-dollar company the strategy is crystallized and compressed onto a Strategy 1Pager.

Even for a micro-enterprise consisting of a few people, it’s useful to think about the choices that take them further. It happens intuitively between the ears, when in bigger companies it happens through these iterative rounds.

The common factor is in producing a one-page map. Once you accomplish that you have also made your choices. I call this the Strategy 1Pager. If you refine it, miracles will happen. Especially when the whole staff has been involved in building it from the start. It’s in a completely different league compared to doing things the old way. The old way is slower: You make less money, people are less happy, energy erupts less, you don’t become successful.

This is how a strategy is ignited! Define your strategy model. I highly recommend you take the hamburger model into practice. Do top-down and bottom-up at the same time. That’s how you find a juicy patty to go between the buns.

Ignite your strategy! Read more.🔥

Finding Us On Social Media

Stradigo

Stradigo is a brand owned by Rdigo Oy (Business-ID: 2120844-1).

Learn more from our Imprint.

Rdigo Oy is registered in Finland as a Limited company. We are a strategy consultancy located in the Helsinki capital region.

We’ve been in business since 2007. The company name comes from the latin word Redigo, meaning both ‘I shape’ & ‘I renew’.

Stradigo combines the word strategy with Rdigo.

Strategic Planning

1.09 Big Strategic Choices & Goals

Post author By Markus Westerlund
Post date March 22, 2021
8 Comments on 1.09 Big Strategic Choices & Goals

Big Strategic Choices and Goals — 1.09

Markus Westerlund

Strategy is my passion! I love to simplify complex work and finally squeeze the strategy on one single page, the Strategy 1Pager.

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The topic of the day is the big and tough choices of the business world. Strategic choices are the big choices in business. I like to use our strategy journey model as the base for every strategy.

How does one ignite a strategy? – By making three loops rotate simultaneously.

Let’s look at ‘We choose’ and ‘We crystallize’ phases of the first loop, in which we make the big decisions. How are these big decisions made?

Challenging current thinking

The whole concept of involving everyone and challenging the old models is covered in other blogs.

Analyzing the dangers and opportunities of trends helps to understand how one should react to them. Brutal reality means thinking about what the brutal reality is that we live in.

One must dare to dream. A great amount of thoughts form in the ‘Dreaming’ phase, but one also must dare to be paranoid. How could one ruin everything and save oneself from it? There comes a time when one must make tough decisions.

Summarizing everything on a single page

When we hold meetings with the whole staff, we get loads of comments. These comments are all documented using a digital board, for example, Trello. This is how we get everyone, including introverts, to write.

During the process, we got nearly four thousand comments. These comments are reduced to a bunch, and the tough decisions are the ones that remain. That is the point of the whole thing. In the end, we compress them all onto a Strategy 1Pager.

In the picture above you see a funnel, and that’s something that has to be in order. When you have a working funnel,

A.) You think of better ideas because everyone is involved in decision making,
B.) There is no separate implementation process because it happens automatically.

One time we were sitting with the board of a certain company, and someone made a comment:

“Those people don’t know how to think about the future, they’re so stuck in the present!”

That’s where they are wrong: There are many who think, and many who know-how. Because their thoughts are anchored in the present, their thought processes are usually of good quality.

Finding the big strategic choices

The hard part is finding the big decisions from the pile of comments. That is, in fact, the board’s job to say what the expectations are for this process.

What are the big questions that need to be answered? A group begins to figure these questions out and they produce answers. Once the process progresses, we come closer to the moment where the big and tough decisions make it through the filter.

I had a workshop with an organization, and the moment was very enjoyable when light was ignited in the people and the big choices were found. We also found an alternative way of thinking. Usually, when people in that organization think of the big things, they do it from a production perspective. We turned it into a customer-focused perspective. The group chair thought that this is a huge thing, and my response was “I know, right?”

Tough choices

Touch decisions can also be looked at one by one. Tough decisions are found by asking questions, and often it’s about the quality of these questions. One could ask what your company’s big business decision is. Now we are at the upper level and at the core of the business.

Whether we’re talking about a billion-dollar company or a micro-enterprise, they all have different businesses that are going through different phases in their lifecycle. The question is, are all these businesses where they belong — in their rightful home? Can we imagine having to get rid of a business so that the development budget would not be used in vain? We need to invest the money in the optimum spot, where we get the most feedback.

Business decisions

These big business decisions are truly massive. It is good to visualize the businesses by sorting them into a table that consists of four squares. That way it’s easier to see the horizon over the operation, the big picture, and decide whether it’s smart to invest in improving every business or should we make decisions about that business. That’s a conversation that easily skyrockets people to a satellite perspective.

In an earlier blog, I told the story about the five-day war in Kuwait and General Schwarzkopf. The general said, from the grassroots level you can easily make good decisions when the enemy attacks. However, if you’re looking at the situation from a satellite perspective, then you REALLY know what to do. – You need this perspective to see where your business lies.

Marketing choices

Another way of making tough decisions is through marketing decisions. This can also be thought of as geography: Where do we operate? If people who only work in Finland are asked, it can be that they haven’t even thought about working in another country. But, if a big growing company in Finland is finding it hard to find new potential, it can be natural to think about expanding their business abroad. Is it time to make marketing decisions? Is it time to evolve and expand? These questions will bring out big decisions.

People get anxious over worrying about having to make big analyses. In practice, the analysis doesn’t have to be a massive thing. It can be much simpler. You can start by making an initial assumption and ask yourself if you have already made a sufficient amount of background analysis? If you are not satisfied with what you have, you may need to do some more analysis? If even that is not enough you may need to start a full-fledged research project in order to achieve a satisfying conclusion to your analysis needs. The last option of course means you will have to reserve much more time and money and it may not fit your current schedule. In either case, at this stage of the process, you need to conclude if you have enough data from your analysis to make a high-quality conclusion?

The future is only guesses

The world-famous Swedish futurologist Kjell A. Nordström held an excellent presentation in Finland some years ago. He began his presentation with these words:

“The future cannot be studied, because it doesn’t exist.”

Whatever numbers we predict in the future are just guesses. Statistics and numbers can be looked back on and an estimate made based on their ascending or descending nature. All conclusions, however, are only guesses and beliefs. The person that knows the future does not exist.

I always say that the crystal balls that predict the future have been sold out and are no longer manufactured. But, it’s funny when you put a number in an Excel chart, it immediately becomes a fact in many people’s minds. That’s a clever way of pranking people, I tell you!

Hypotheses can indeed be made, and extra research is done if needed.

Customer choosing

The third way of making tough decisions is through customer choosing: We choose those who need to be our customers. We look at how we segment our customers into groups. How can we focus better on those customers that are very important to us and who need us?

Product selection

The fourth way is through product selection: We think about what it is we offer for different segments. With this way of thinking it’s possible to make very big decisions. Which products do we invest ourselves in? Which are most interesting to us? Which product development do we focus on?

Big opportunities and dangers

The fifth way is through big opportunities and dangers. In addition to the previous ones, I ask questions so that everyone’s thoughts focus on growth and avoiding overly great risks. It can be about digitizing, artificial intelligence, ecology, etc. Very big decisions can come out from these issues.

Hope

The last group on this list is quite exciting. What are the decisions that would awaken great hope in an organization? These decisions can give birth to an immense energy eruption and a sense of importance. Many technically thinking people can think that this is just utter nonsense. But nothing is as big of a decision as one that makes a hundred people run in the same direction, with excitement! One can make decisions while sitting in an ivory tower, but if you can’t make people implement them with excitement, nothing happens.

In conclusion, I can say that making the right decisions is very, very important! That’s what making tough decisions is all about.

Ignite your strategy! Read more.🔥

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Stradigo

Stradigo is a brand owned by Rdigo Oy (Business-ID: 2120844-1).

Learn more from our Imprint.

Rdigo Oy is registered in Finland as a Limited company. We are a strategy consultancy located in the Helsinki capital region.

We’ve been in business since 2007. The company name comes from the latin word Redigo, meaning both ‘I shape’ & ‘I renew’.

Stradigo combines the word strategy with Rdigo.

Strategic Planning

1.08 Challenging the way we think

Post author By Markus Westerlund
Post date March 22, 2021
3 Comments on 1.08 Challenging the way we think

Challenging strategic thinking — 1.08

Markus Westerlund

Strategy is my passion! I love to simplify complex work and finally squeeze the strategy on one single page, the Strategy 1Pager.

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Whether you are the CEO of the company or a leader of a department, we all have a problem, which makes us get stuck in a certain way of thinking. How to challenge strategic thinking? Let’s look at our model to see how a strategy is ignited.

We need three loops linked together, that rotate simultaneously. The third loop, ‘We Act’, rotates every day and in it, we serve our customers and solve their problems. The weekly rotating loop is ‘We Steer’, in which we steer and lead our everyday work. The question is, how do we make this work? How do we prioritize, set sub-goals, resource, and lead?

The slowest rotating loop in this model is ‘We Direct’, – Strategy design in other words.

The word ‘we’ in each loop means that we’re doing this together. Many companies make a bigger strategy round every few years. After the round, this loop should rotate quarterly in order to check up on the progress and update the strategy as needed.

Direct

Let’s look at the first loop more closely and how we can challenge our strategic thinking. In the previous blog I talked about the “include everyone” -loop and its points.

People don’t need to be involved through a separate process, because strategy implementation starts immediately, as if it happens by itself. I’ll tell you how to get people out of their comfort zone and challenge their current way of thinking.

This is a model we have used a lot and is in my opinion solid. Every box is its own workshop.

Trends

We have circulating trends that can either be black clouds or new opportunities. These trends should be looked at and conclusions made. We work together on a digital board, which makes its easy to choose the right trends to take into account.

Dreaming

Dreaming is a must. Do we think big enough? How could we work ten times faster? Everyone says it’s impossible. In the old way, yes. But what if we worked in a new way with new technology? It’s possible to work in a completely new way.

Dreaming is vital. Our job is to take the customer on a journey to the future. People in the company jump into a time machine and travel five years into the future. There they write a story about what they see and experience. With this story the company can find its vision and the great things they should take advantage of in the future.

Brutal Reality

During the Brutal Reality workshop we analyze everyday life, see what needs to be fixed and draw a conclusion.

Why are we in a constant rat race against the company’s development debt? The management thinks the company should be further than they are. Why are we not going forward? What should be fixed? This is a great challenge in every organization. What stops us from being better? Are we trying too hard?

Marmalade phenomenon

The Marmalade phenomenon is a great example. Every organization has a tablespoon of marmalade that represents their resources, including money, talent, factories, and office space. The management can decide how many pieces of toast are chosen:

If the company takes 32 pieces of toast and only a spoonful of marmalade, the toasts will taste mostly like bread, which means competing businesses will overtake the company in a heartbeat. Instead, what if the company chooses five, seven, or 12 pieces of toast? If they only pick one, there’s too much marmalade and the business should be downsized. What is the optimum amount of toasts for the company’s single spoon of marmalade?

It’s important to understand how many projects are going on at the same time. The management is performing badly if it doesn’t fill the calendars of its employees. However, it is also bad if it asks too much from them.

Paranoia

It’s important to also hold a Paranoia workshop. We need to dare and think about the right questions. Can somebody, in one way or another, come between us and our customer to steal our income stream from us?

I often hold intense exercises about how the business in question is completely destroyed. After that we think about how we save ourselves from this situation and also how great things are accomplished. We try to figure out what the competition is up to and how we respond to their performance. Again, all information is brought together and compressed into a Strategy 1Pager.

I think Uber is such a great example of disruption. First, the passenger called the dispatch to get a taxi. The dispatch gave the customer a number, but no information was given if a car was on its way and when it would arrive.

What did Uber do? It swam between the customer and taxi driver with digital technology, while showing on a map where the car is and when it arrives. No more waiting outside in the cold for a car to arrive, it’s enough to go out a minute earlier.

The same happened with Airbnb. Before there was a hotel and a guest. Airbnb offered private residences more affordably than a hotel. Hotels.com and ebookers also came between a traveler and a travel agency. Then, however, came Trivago, that came between ebookers, hotels.com and the customer and snatched everything.

Digital technology enables somebody to come between us and the customer while replacing us entirely.

Pretty dramatic, I’d say.

Tough decisions

When trends, dreaming, brutal reality and paranoia have been looked at, it’s time for tough decisions: prioritizing and prioritizing. What big things should we be doing?

One can say that every task we do is a lever that can be small, medium-sized, or really big. The question is about which choices we make, strategy means choices.

Will we focus on the same core business also in the future, or do we need to move onward higher up in the value chain? What transformation awaits us and when will it take place? It’s certain that a transformation will happen, but what is it and when will it take place? Will our values and culture work in the future as well?

In all of these processes, it is worth focusing on the variety of questions that you answer during the workshops.

I can say, that after facilitating close to a hundred strategy processes, this is absolutely a killer way of challenging people’s strategic thinking! Different, sure. The point is how you challenge an old operating system together with all of your colleagues and how you find amazing new opportunities thanks to the process. Enjoy!

Ignite your strategy! Read more.🔥

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Stradigo

Stradigo is a brand owned by Rdigo Oy (Business-ID: 2120844-1).

Learn more from our Imprint.

Rdigo Oy is registered in Finland as a Limited company. We are a strategy consultancy located in the Helsinki capital region.

We’ve been in business since 2007. The company name comes from the latin word Redigo, meaning both ‘I shape’ & ‘I renew’.

Stradigo combines the word strategy with Rdigo.

Strategic Planning

1.07 Include everyone in the strategy process

Post author By Markus Westerlund
Post date March 22, 2021
5 Comments on 1.07 Include everyone in the strategy process

Include everyone in the strategy process — 1.07

Markus Westerlund

Strategy is my passion! I love to simplify complex work and finally squeeze the strategy on one single page, the Strategy 1Pager.

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Today the topic is how to get everyone to join the strategy process. It has been almost impossible to include everyone in the old world, because it has been too expensive, too slow and time consuming. Now it’s possible thanks to technology.

Last time I introduced the Strategy Journey and how a strategy is ignited. This model above has been of great help to me because it clarifies how to update a strategy in a new way.

Strategy shouldn’t be a yearly cycle. It has three loops that rotate non-stop. We have the Act phase that rotates in every business, but we also need to lead and steer the strategy. It’s not just the leader that leads, everyone leads themselves in this process.

Then we have the Direct phase, where the strategy is decided. This is often called a strategy process, but the implementation phases, which are the second and third phases, also must be included. It is not so that we make a strategy and that’s that. We also need to implement it.

Strategy phases

Act

Let’s begin with the third phase. This is where we help our customers and take them on a journey – we call it the Customer Journey. One must renew one’s working methods to be able to help and react to a customer’s needs even better. Some working methods have become obsolete because today technology helps us to do the job more effectively. We should take advantage of technology!

Prioritize

If we look at phase two, it has to rotate weekly as the previous one rotates daily. We must prioritize our work constantly while also taking the strategy into consideration. At the end of the day this a great talent, that is also difficult to master. If one tries to do too much, everything is delayed. People ask for more resources, and that is a sign of bad leadership.

According to some, all problems are leadership problems. Everyone has their hands full. The leader is bad, that doesn’t fill the days of their employees. Of course, we must give everyone as much work as they can take, but if they don’t have the time to do the most important thing, that’s bad. The skill of resourcing means that we must guide, follow, and lead ourselves. Prioritizing must be done constantly.

Direct

The directing phase is where the strategy is made. In the end, strategy is a sector in which we sail every day depending on where the wind blows. The ‘Direct’ loop must rotate quarterly.

The topic I’m addressing today is to invite everyone to participate through technology. Why so?
Because that is how implementation takes place, almost like it happens by itself. At this point, people challenge themselves, make big decisions, and compress it all into a Strategy 1Pager.

As I’m writing this, I’m in the middle of a process, wherein the first workshop we got 3129 written suggestions from the staff. 3129! That’s an amazing amount! Those suggestions need to be gathered, prioritized and compressed.
My own definition of strategy is simply: How do we proceed into the future?

Strategy is HOW

The above image is the ideal picture with the board and the management included. The strategy always somewhat changes when we renew it. Otherwise, there’s no point in doing the whole thing if we continue business as usual. In the ideal world people obey and immediately go in the same direction. Often the reality is, however, that they don’t go in the same direction but continue with inertia as before.

But the reality is often this

In this picture the board and management “workshop” a lot and they are excited that the challenging task is finally complete. Then a big meeting is held, and the strategy is explained to the staff, who seem very interested. The staff isn’t being mean if they keep going straight as before, but somehow, they don’t understand what the high-quality ideas in the strategy mean in their work.

If there weren’t high-quality thoughts and one wouldn’t rise high up to look around, one wouldn’t see how everything works. Herein lies a gap, and we must close it.

Helicopter perspective

During the five-day war in Kuwait, general Schwarzkopf gave a press conference every day. He said, if you’re down at where the sand dunes are and see the enemy, you can easily make good decisions. But, if you rise to the helicopter level, then you know what to do on a grander scale. If you see fifty tanks approaching you know exactly what to do.

We need both: The head in the clouds, but with really long legs firmly on the ground. One must know how to think with high quality and then you need really long legs. That has been my motto for a long time. Think high quality thoughts, which business are we truly focusing on?

Strategy – The new agile thinking

When everyone is included in the strategy work, the strategy becomes agile. The owners define the sector in which the staff works. The owners have a right to say where they invest their money. They recruit others to further their business, and people want to join in, because the business purpose towards the clients is so fine. The sun symbolizes the business purpose.

If you include everyone from the start, they understand everything more profoundly. It is in fact very affordable and cost-effective for everyone to take part in an online meeting. If you create a strategy inside a standard face-to-face conference room and then try to get people to commit to the strategy, they have great difficulties understanding what the strategy means for them in practice. Involve and include them all from the start!
I’ll tell you how it’s done.

Authentically together

This is the principal model we have used for many years. At the moment I’m in my 93rd strategic process and this is exactly what we do. Meetings, in which the staff is included are marked red. The kick-off is just an hour-long meeting. During the kick-off we ask people to write comments and to vote on a digital board. Recently we got hundreds of comments! We use an affordable software that even makes it possible to take part through your phone.

We asked the kickoff participants: How do we grow faster? What doesn’t work?

We immediately got a lot of comments. After the kick-off we held workshops in smaller groups. Everyone who wanted to take part in them, was allowed to take part! I have also been in projects where the whole staff was included in the workshops. In these cases, the companies are smaller, perhaps 50 employees. In a bigger company with a thousand (or more!) employees, it’s impossible to include everyone in every single workshop. That’s why we ask for volunteers that are interested in joining. The fact that one asks is in itself a pretty big deal. Those who are passionate will join.

Check-up meeting

After the first workshops a check-up meeting held with the whole staff. A half-finished strategy is presented to the staff and they give their opinions. We ask:

“Are we going in the right direction?”

WHAT?! An unfinished strategy is shown to the staff? That’s unheard of!

I get that this is a pretty dramatic idea in the old world. For many leaders, it can feel embarrassing. A leader with a poor ego doesn’t want to show anything that’s not finished. To them, it has to be refined and exquisite. In the new world, a leader’s ego endures with the thought that:

“I’m only human and also capable of making mistakes. These are our ideas, how do you think we could improve?”.

Digital board

In every meeting, we have a digital board to write our agenda and tasks on. The advantage is that everyone can write on the board at the same time. You don’t need to screen share PowerPoint and then ask people to discuss. By sharing a PowerPoint slide a few steal all the airtime and there are many silent introverts that might have the greatest idea of all participants. Everyone else might agree that the emperor has fine new clothes, but that one quiet person says that our catch isn’t good at all!

When you make everyone write, even the introverts get a chance in participating and all of this can happen simultaneously. In two minutes we can get hundreds of comments. Amazing! Those comments take us forward.

When you make big decisions, for example, that you will shut down a business unit, the decision is made with a small group.
In the end the strategy, that is just about ready, is brought to the staff. Is it now as it should be, or does something still need to be tweaked? That’s how one takes things forward and it’s a fantastic process!

We had a process with a company with 50 people. With the whole staff we finished the whole process in just three weeks! The CEO of the company hadn’t in his wildest dreams thought that it’s even possible. Plus, many big decisions were made that weren’t clear to the management before the process started. The picture only got brighter.

Invite everyone along for the journey

Let’s do things authentically together by inviting everyone along for the journey. The meeting has to be online, otherwise it won’t succeed. In an online meeting everyone must be in their own rooms. Not so that a few are together in a conference room. All have to be in separate rooms. If some are in a conference room they converse with each other and not through the meeting media, like the call software. This causes conversations to stays undocumented. In such a situation we also can’t divide people that easily into groups. Everyone sits in their own room, that’s how you roll!

Common digital leap

As I’m writing this it has been four years since I began holding online meetings.

One could say that we have all passed the fourth grade: People know how to use computers, and in that sense, they have done a personal digital leap. Recent events have forced people to graduate to the fifth grade when online meetings and seeing one’s colleagues through video became the norm. In the fifth grade, however, people don’t realize that it’s not just about sharing one’s screen and conversing one at a time.

The sixth grade includes having a digital board, which everyone can write on simultaneously. That’s a big productivity leap. That’s the next collective digital leap. In Finland, we have begun to understand this and it’s great that it’s happening now. We have worked in this manner since 2016.

Ignite your strategy! Read more.🔥

Finding Us On Social Media

Stradigo

Stradigo is a brand owned by Rdigo Oy (Business-ID: 2120844-1).

Learn more from our Imprint.

Rdigo Oy is registered in Finland as a Limited company. We are a strategy consultancy located in the Helsinki capital region.

We’ve been in business since 2007. The company name comes from the latin word Redigo, meaning both ‘I shape’ & ‘I renew’.

Stradigo combines the word strategy with Rdigo.

Digital Sales for Dummies | 5.02

Markus Westerlund

Hot leads

Nurturing

Nurture the customer

Give personal professional knowledge

A personal professional relationship starts to build up. They start to know you.

Automate!

Document experiences

Goal of digital sales: The Meeting

Traffic

Relevant content

The List

Automatic nurturing

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Stradigo

The Game Book of Actions — 3.02

Markus Westerlund

Three loops

What is the WOW factor for us?

The Game Book of actions reforms procedures

What motivates a role?

The WOW catch

Typical Game Book themes

Case: Roles have common joker cards

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Stradigo

Strategy Implementation In Sprints – A Living Digital Board | 2.04

Markus Westerlund

The eternal fight

Strategic and operative work in the same work pile

Workpile onto a digital strategy board

Online meetings are face-to-face meetings

Agile strategy implementation

Agile prioritization

Time-boxed goals

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Stradigo

Strategy Case: Creating A Strategy Together — 1.04

Markus Westerlund

We do the strategy together!

The dreaming workshop

Challenging the way we think

Would you invest two days to think about your strategy?

Summarizing everything on a single page

A cultural change

Result

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Stradigo

How to crystallize a strategy? – The Strategy 1Pager | 1.11

Markus Westerlund

Incredibly great strategy

Strategy sales for the team

The reality

We do it together!

Crystallizing a strategy onto a single page

The strategy funnel

The future doesn’t exist

A one-page strategy

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Stradigo

What kind of strategy model? — 1.03

Markus Westerlund

The Hamburger Model

Top-Bottom vs Real Participation

Case Example

Authentic Participation

Round 1.

Round 2.

Round 3.

Round 4.

Strategic Season

Iteration

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