Getting your strategic 'stack' right

Are you betting your future on a vision or a wish? Could your values belong to anyone? Is your purpose lacking in… purpose?

I have spent a significant % of my life writing what we call the ‘stack’ of core components that every business should use to guide their direction and decisions. Purpose, vision, value propositions, values, service and experience principles, transformation statements… these small sets of words have incredible importance and yet are so often absolutely terrible.

Here are some quick tips; four basic questions you can use to assess whether yours are in good shape or not.

1. The most important, over-arching, golden rule that you must always use as your benchmark question: “could what we have apply to anyone?” Things like ‘to always strive for excellence’ is not a vision, it’s a lame value and a pointless purpose. I’ve seen it used as all of these. It’s generic, unusable and, of course, it could apply to anyone. Be clear and be as specific to you as possible. If it could apply to anyone, bin it.

2. Can you make clear decisions against what you have? You can only ask “does this help us achieve our vision?” if your vision is tangible and well defined. “Does this initiative help us be the best of the best?” isn’t going to get you very far. “Will this help us achieve our goal of making 100% of our cars 80% recyclable by 2030?” will. Dates, numbers and specifics are particularly important with any form of vision statement… or it’s just a wish.

3. Does your purpose define a clear, but infinite ‘domain’? A good example is ‘we exist to eradicate poverty-driven hunger by pioneering advances in agricultural science’ while a bad example is ‘we exist to eradicate hunger’. You can invest within a well-defined domain to achieve the former, while with the latter you might be tempted to try to eradicate traffic jams or meetings that run over lunch (also a worthy pursuit).

4. Are your principles actionable and measurable? Strategic, service, experience… wherever you use guiding principles (and you do, right?) they need to be objective, independently actionable and a robust set of overall guard-rails when added together. ‘Only build what we can’t buy’ or ‘we only launch what we can measure’ both work well individually – and, as part of a set, lead to the right outcomes. Try that with ‘we always deliver’ or ‘we never under-deliver’ (both, again, real examples).

If I’m honest, I love pulling these stacks together – because when they’re well-crafted, they can put an entire company on the right footing for years to come. When they’re good they’re incredibly valuable, but when they’re poor they can do a lot of damage.

Believe me, it’s really worth getting them right.