Service Snapshot: Strategy & Balanced Dynamic

Our Balanced Dynamic programme – the third of our three Penumbra Balance programmes - encompasses activities that improve judgment, communication, learning and change during the planning and implementation of strategy.

Challenge

Our Balanced Dynamic programme is part of a suite of strategy implementation methodologies.

Once the first two parts of our Balance programme – Momentum and Motivation – are under way we introduce our third element – Dynamic. By this point certain trends will be emerging and people will discern that there is a sense of:

• Balance between creative and innovative strategy thinking and a range of ‘Reality Checks’

• Alignment and buy in

• Top-down approach balanced with bottom-up alignment drivers

• Confidence balanced with a sense that the thinking is grounded in practical measures to implement

This indicates that good progress is being made but:

• The strategic process still does not engage people in a dynamic method of working

• People still do not know ‘how’ it will all work

• Management can sometimes be uncomfortable with all this involvement of people

Our Balanced Dynamic programme will enable people to understand these interactions and play their full part in delivering a winning strategy.

Service Solution

Balanced Dynamic creates a dynamic between the management system, operations and key stakeholders by maintaining a dialogue around:

• How that will be viewed by the people it affects - customers, shareholders and employees - the critique

• What we have agreed should be done: the message

• How the effect of what is to be done impacts us: the change

Critique

Critique is from the Greek: “discerning judgment”. This is precisely what we will try to foster within the organisation. It is important to allow a conversation rather than a command to define and refine a strategic direction.

We have seen from many case studies that sometimes a change in strategic direction can be as a result of some sort of critique from outside, for example customers can demand a change to a product, or environmental factors can drive new product development.

This is all what we call a critique, as it forms some sort of judgment about what we are currently doing. Toyota allows the critique of its workforce via a suggestion box culture to drive continuous improvement.

A message can be a form of communication of information, as well as being the information itself. In this way the message embodies information about the strategy from broad brush stroke communications to the details of the operating procedures that inform people of what to do.

Change

This is the process of evolution. By definition, learning is change. We will see that by going through the process we allow the organisation to learn, and to change itself, and by marrying this to the reality of strategic direction, we learn to change to meet the strategic aims.

These are more than just words, they are important activities and stimulus points in the cycle, which will help the organisation to understand when to engage, respond, listen and act in an informed and dynamic way.

Benefits

The model sets a framework that can be used throughout the organisation, at macro and micro level, to help guide people through optimisation, change and re‐alignment, whilst always refocusing on what it is that we are actually doing.

Our unique methodology will take any strategic plan and add life, insight and understanding to it in a way that informs the whole organisation.

If you have a strategic plan, and are uncertain or unsure about how it will come to life, talk to us now about Balanced Dynamic.