Big Dream: Business Model Canvas & Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

Strategy Deployment Workshop 

 

One of the most difficult challenges we have observed in our clients is breaking out of silo thinking and deciding and executing on identified priorities together as an organisation. Over the past few years, we have developed a straightforward and energising approach to help leadership teams simplify their decision making and communication. Using this approach, one of our clients Elavon recently won the award for Excellence in Business Agility at the Agile Business Awards 2023

Our Strategy Deployment Workshop is designed to bridge the gap between strategic intentions and their practical implementation. This addresses key areas such as risk management, operational efficiency, and financial oversight, facilitating informed and comprehensive decision-making. The workshop aids in aligning various organisational functions, streamlining resource distribution, and honing in on impactful initiatives. Ultimately, it provides a framework for clearer strategic direction and efficient operational execution.

Our Approach

We start by asking the leadership team to imagine the world when they are getting everything right – for their customers, for their staff, for their shareholders.

We help the team to agree and be able to articulate what this bright future and sense of purpose looks and feels like. A very uplifting and motivating activity.

Once we have established a common sense of purpose, we then move to created shared understanding of the current business as a whole using a tool called Business Model Canvas which enables us to tell the story of any business or organisation on a single page.

Teaching the approach with a fun worked example so everyone is familiar with the tool, we map out the current state of your business in clear and simple-to-understand terms:

Once we have built a shared mental model of the current state of the business on one page, we next start to understand the key changes which are needed to close the gap on the current situation and the big dream. It is important to stress that these are not necessarily new ideas. We are often articulating changes which exist in the organisation’s existing strategic plan (we call this “parsing the strategy”). For each change, we use the Business Model Canvas tool as a storytelling aid to make it compelling. What change do you want to make? What do you expect to happen? What assumptions need to be tested?

The key here is to shift thinking to focus on outcomes instead of outputs, and to encourage experimentation to test business theories / hypotheses. Once we have our story straight, we articulate the changes as OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and roadmap the changes.