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Making research relevant to strategy

Kirk — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 22:22:27 +0000

Planning/Research methodology used to be based on spending hundreds of hours pulling massive amount of unprocessed data into a single place and essentially using high priced employees to screen for relevance. 90% of what was in the report was only marginally relevant to strategy and maybe 3% had a significant yet indirect impact on decision making. This is based on a model where no integration with a planning model was in place. This was also based on the quiet assumption that executive had an monopoly on important thinking within the organization. How very 1960’s of us.

Wouldn’t it be something if you could spend only hours disseminating data that would have a very significant impact on how hundreds or thousands of people made decisions, and you never again heard a single complaint about topic relevance. This can only happen when the research function experiences full integration with planning. You will spend your time refining the quality, and determining the implications of the data rather than gathering it. It then becomes something that is far more useful and valuable.

The realization:
Have you ever been bothered by the fact that continuity between research reports and environmental/risk/SWOT discussions in planning have little to no continuity? You’re constantly starting the discussion from a blank page. Teams are isolated in their experience because they’re not learning from each other. There is no common source of iterative wisdom.

Through the process of planning, you should discover the factors that have the greatest impact on your success (supporting and resisting). THIS is the beginning of relevance for research. When what you’re producing is relevant to the decisions executives need to make around successful implementation of strategy - EVERYTHING you produce is relevant. It has to be relevant, because they have already told you it is. Pull data that challenges and supports what the company thinks they know, but the topic is always on the mark.

Environmental monitoring/planning/risk management/strategy become a single conversation that is fully iterative and flows throughout the organization. Constantly take what you know, and use the existing meeting structure to refine the data further. Make it more insightful… this is where planning and research become almost the same thing. Think about how you can involve more groups in what your data means.

Once you have momentum, feed ALL your teams with this insight. Feed their team planning sessions. Share the knowledge. Your job just got easier, and you’re now making everyone else look good too.

Stimulating thought

Kirk — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 21:53:49 +0000

It's funny how many research hours go into creating massive and comprehensive documents that are used by such a small percentage of the organization. Many organizations don't have the structure to regularly convert data into any kind of wisdom on a large scale. I'd like to suggest that in order to really capture the collective [...]

Is your entire organization aligned to a single value discipline?

Kirk — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 01:07:32 +0000

At the core of every competitive strategy is a specific value discipline and a desired market position. Of course, it’s different for every market and industry. It’s fundamentally integrated with the concept of brand. It’s about delivering a clearly defined value proposition to a specific market. Consistency in delivery and value [...]

Simplementation

Kirk — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:10:54 +0000

How well does your organization manage the implementation of strategy? If you said yes, statistically speaking, you are lying to yourself! Take that with a grain of salt, but also give that a minute to soak in. It's been proven that most companies aren't effective at taking their strategy and making it [...]

From 100 feet or through a microscope?

Kirk — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:59:51 +0000

More often than not, we perceive organizational challenges to be more complex than they really are. We hire expensive consulting firms to create metrics that can only be reported in the form of a circumplex, a composite score or something else that justifies the price tag. I fully support complex analysis and your [...]

Exec planning: What is the point?

Kirk — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 02:34:14 +0000

Somewhere between board planning, executive planning, division alignment, team alignment and personal performance planning, a fuzziness of what to focus on in your planning can at times emerge. The surface issue that seems to distract a lot of people is the operational challenge of the day. For many companies, they never really [...]

Nothing stays the same

Kirk — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 22:15:07 +0000

There's a fallacy in how many organizations think around their overall position in the market. The same concept pertains to most areas of life. Here it is... "Things are staying about the same." Nothing stays the same. Changes can be marginal, but it's still a change. They increase and decrease, [...]

Determination of residual strategy gaps against your projected environment

Kirk — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 02:02:37 +0000

Research is as relevant to your discussion as it is to your strategy. Sounds simple, until you think about how many times you have sat in a room going through pages and pages of research that you can't correlate back to any kind of decision that will impact your business. In those cases, [...]

Balancing the art and the science of metric analysis

Kirk — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 21:49:12 +0000

There’s an art and a science to the management and analysis of measures. Some people seem most happy converting the mass of numbers into composite scores and overall indicators, while others seem to have no formula to their approach whatsoever. I believe the secret to this whole conundrum is to realize that there’s [...]

What makes for a good strategy?

Kirk — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 01:13:02 +0000

Everyone does it differently. This is my version of the truth... A good strategy: - Is built with a set of assumptions about the emerging future environment (Research) - With analysis of the expected implications of this environment (Collective analysis – wisdom of crowds) - And a realistic view of your unique set of assets, skills, positioning and [...]