A Super Simple Tool for Translating Strategy into Action

Transforming Vision into Action: A Practical Framework to Bridge the Gap Between Strategic Aspirations and Immediate Steps

Pascal and I just wrapped a future-ready leadership program that we facilitate a few times each year for a long-time client of ours. The design for the multi-session program is relatively light on content and long on collaboration and conversation, and at its conclusion, participants leave with a solid set of practical tools and frameworks from the foresight and futures domains – many of which tools (for elaborating trends into Disruption Maps, working back from a preferred future via a backcast, designing a killer competitor from the ground up, etc.) will be familiar to readers here. 

We spend most of our time on this program encouraging participants to push into the future and use these tools to explore emerging opportunities and adjacent possibilities, but we typically wrap with a simple and not particularly sexy framework for connecting the possible concretely back to the present. But make no mistake: That closing of the loop is actually the trick to making futures work yield real value.

The simplicity of the framework is key here, and I’ve come to love it for its applicability to just about any conversation around strategy that needs to eventually work its way back from future visions or a distant North Star to the brass tacks, what now? next steps of near-term action planning. The idea is to dig into the delta that exists between the business as we envision it and the reality on the ground today and then to get as concrete and specific as possible in identifying discrete actions that could be taken to begin closing that gap.

We break these actions down into three distinct but interrelated buckets:

• Things we should START doing today to learn our way in the direction of our long-term vision

• Things we should STOP doing today that stand in the way of or pull energy and resources away from exploring that long-term vision

• Things we should SPEED-UP that we’re already doing today but could accelerate our progress in learning toward the vision if given more energy or resources

These things might be practices, processes, new experiments, current initiatives or priorities, behaviors, patterns of thinking, etc. The buckets are loosely defined to support wide-ranging reflection and conversation, but the ultimate objective of the activity is to identify concrete, specific, and even measurable steps and actions to be taken. As a facilitator, this often means asking participants “What initiatives would contribute to that?” or “What exactly would that look like?” when generalities along the lines of “Become less risk averse” or “Increase our agility” pop up – which they surely will.

Deployed well, this framework consistently distills high-level conversations into actionable, measurable, and ownable steps that build a dynamic link between possible futures / big-picture strategy and the present practice of leadership and decision-making on the ground today. It’s easy to use. It’s nicely focused. It’s broadly applicable across a range of contexts. And it can help your org keep the vision big, the strategy simple, and the execution not only clear but also clearly aligned with a bold business-level strategy. 

@Jeffrey