The Vital Few

What one thing does your organization value above all else? Is that clearly communicated?

In most organizations, making things simple is an almost impossible task. There are too many strategies because all of them are important. Action plans abound because they all must be done. Organizational performance measures proliferate because everything is critical.

Dan and Chip Heath, the authors of Made to Stick, argue for simplicity in “Analysis of Paralysis” (FastCompany, November 1, 2007). They describe a research study in which doctors were told of a man with chronic hip pain who had been given drugs to treat his pain but they had been ineffective. The only remaining option was hip replacement surgery, but then one more medication was found. Would the doctors try it or opt for the surgery? Forty-seven percent chose the medication.

Another group of doctors received the same facts except that two new medication options had been found. More options are better, right? Not for the doctors: Only 28% chose to try either medicine. “More options, even good ones, can freeze us,” write the Heaths, “leading us to stick with the ‘default’ plan, which in this case was slicing open someone’s hip. This is clearly not rational behavior, but it is human behavior.”

Too many organizations overwhelm their people with way too many goals, strategies, initiatives, action plans, measures, policies, and other options for guiding their behaviors and activities. That includes values. The Heaths mention a…

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Miami-Dade County’s Baldrige journey, which began in 2000 with some basic performance measurement and departmental business planning, has evolved into a systemic approach to both planning and measurement that aligns all activities with the goals of the organization through a 5-year strategic plan and balanced scorecards. The strategic planning component of the county’s management model is shown below.

You will learn more about Miami-Dade County’s journey during a free webinar being presented on November 9^th by ActiveStrategy. Just click on the banner at the top right of this page to register. The webinar will cover:

• The steps in the journey to excellence
• How they applied the Sterling/Baldrige criteria
• Examination of practices that have worked for them, as well as lessons learned from their successes and shortfalls
• Discussion of specific results achieved
• The role that ActiveStrategy Enterprise software has played in their journey.

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When Innovation and Planning Collide

Are a systematic strategic planning process and a formal strategic plan detrimental to innovation and agility?

I’ve recently worked with an entrepreneurial company that has more than two thousand employees worldwide and annual revenues approaching a half-billion dollars—and it has no strategic planning process. Its “strategic plan” is whatever the founder and CEO decides to pursue, which means the plan has many consistent elements year to year plus a stream of new ventures that aren’t even on the radar screen when the year begins. It’s a highly innovative, flexible, and agile company that has grown by 15% or more a year for nearly three decades. Such results suggest that its “strategy” is working.

From a Baldrige perspective, however, I can see how a more systematic approach could be beneficial, especially in the areas of:

• Involvement by more participants. More voices in the discussion would help clarify the issues and the opportunities and engage more people in owning the plans they help design.
• Inputs to the process. A more formal approach to gathering and analyzing critical information upon which any plans are based would minimize the risk of missing something important.
• Alignment. A company aligns its people with what it is trying to accomplish through a strategic plan and performance measurement system. If you have neither, the risk is that resources are being wasted on irrelevant activities.
• Communication. A strategic plan and the deployment of that plan through action plans communicates what is important…

Start Aligning Now!

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Baldrige Award winners is the alignment they achieve of processes, individual performance, measurement systems, strategic plans, and results with the mission, vision, and goals of the organization. When everything and everyone is pulling in the same direction, an organization can produce and sustain performance excellence.

According to the Monfort College of Business at the University of Northern Colorado, organizations that decide to systematically improve their management systems can and should work on alignment right from the start. In a presentation at the twelfth Quest for Excellence this year, Monfort emphasized four dimensions that need to be aligned right away:

• Stakeholder needs and relationships
• Organization structures and systems to address those needs
• Performance measures to track performance and progress
• Strategic goals and objectives

You can view the slides in the presentation by visiting Monfort’s Web site here. The presentation is relevant to any type of organization because the concepts, like the Baldrige model, are applicable to all organizations.

The sixth slide in the PDF presentation shows how Montfort defined a student-centered process framework, identifying key stakeholders and their needs and relationships on one slide. The next two slides overlay Monfort’s management control system to show who is responsible for meeting these needs.

Like many organizations, Monfort uses a color-coded stoplight system to show progress on key performance indicators. Slide 11 places the 20 KPIs and the supporting performance indicators on the process framework to show how performance measures…