Govan Initiative is a public sector organisation founded ten years ago in Glasgow by National Regional and City authorities in order to address the severe economic problems stemming from the serious decline in ship building and heavy engineering in the area. The company currently employs 150 members of staff.

The organisation had just received the results of an external appraisal suggesting that it was time for a strategic review of the company. The Chief Executive and Assistant Chief Executive were both keen to involve as many people as possible from within the organisation in the strategic change process and they also wanted to get the input of key stakeholders for an external, ‘customer-driven’ perspective. The Group Explorer approach to strategy-making therefore appeared an ideal vehicle to achieve this integration of views leading to actionable results.

A flexible, staged process was designed, which enabled the delivery of tangible results at the end of each stage.

Stage 1 - Internal Strategy Workshops

A series of six Group Explorer workshops took place involving the nine members of the management team and various other key members of staff. These workshops all began with a manual oval mapping session in the morning to begin to capture the strategic issues facing the organisation, before moving on in the afternoon to develop and model these further using Group Explorer.

The workshops would ultimately result in a new strategic framework for the organisation, with an agreed goal system and supporting outline strategies. However, before a strategy framework could be finalised, it was decided to bring the organisation’s external stakeholders into the process.

Stage 2 - Involving Stakeholders in Strategy Development

As a local economic development organisation dependent on funding from a number of sources, it was important to select the ‘right’ stakeholders in the strategy development process - those who had a clear interest in the strategic behaviour of their company and were powerful enough to take action to block or support the company in achieving its mission. A power-interest grid was completed and used as a basis for deciding which of the organisation’s many stakeholders to invite to a one-day workshop.

Just before the workshop a number of people rang to say they could not attend, although some sent substitutes. Two of the cancellations were unfortunately key players. However, the workshop had to take place as originally planned, in view of the short notice given. An initial briefing explained the context of the day and invited the participants to help set expectations. The group was then asked to suggest emergent strategic issues that Govan Initiative should address, as before, using the oval mapping technique in the morning, followed by Group Explorer in the afternoon.

The stakeholder workshop was more challenging to run than the internal workshops since there was a wider diversity of views and management styles to cater for. But the process encouraged the diverse perspectives to surface and be valued in themselves. It also provided a means of welding the various views together, enhancing creativity and preventing over-domination by one particularly charismatic individual. By the end of the day, the majority of the stakeholders appeared to have bought into what Govan Initiative was trying to do and fully supported the process it was using. Two stakeholders even went on to use the Group Explorer approach within their own organisations.

Stage 3 - Strategy Delivery

The Chief Executive was now keen to start thinking about strategy delivery. The previous workshops had received such ‘good press’ that many others in the organisation wanted to be involved. How could he involve more of his staff in the exercise of determining more detailed action plans? First, however, it was essential for the management team to consolidate the previous issue surfacing / planning work and to provide a robust strategic framework for the organisation by committing to a goal system and core supporting strategies.

An initial ‘strategic framework’ workshop was therefore planned, to be followed by a series of ‘action workshops’. The first two action workshops were to be facilitated by an external facilitator, and the remainder by the Assistant Chief Executive, who was keen to learn how to take on the facilitation of future Group Explorer events in the organisation.

The strategic framework workshop began with an examination of the draft goal system. Most of the goals as currently expressed were externally focussed and there were few that related to how their core business model might be achieved. By adopting a more process-oriented perspective for some of the high level goals, it would be possible to link strategic issues to strategies, and strategies to goals more effectively. For example, adding the following ending to this goal statement gave it more strategic context and ‘hooks’ into potential lower-level strategies: ‘establish Govan Initiative as a leader in economic development through its excellence, innovation and collaboration’.

After an hour or so the group had agreed to an interrelated set of five goals that supported an agreed mission statement. Next, they had to decide on the core strategies for the organisation. Using the analysis tools within Group Explorer, the facilitator had sorted the material from the previous six workshops into four areas. This clustering of material was designed to avoid the management team being overwhelmed by a mass of data.

After a review of each of these areas to re-acquaint the group with the material, the group was invited to use the preferencing option within Group Explorer to express preferences about which of the key issues should be converted to strategies (see figure 1). Two criteria were used: red spots were allocated for participants to prioritise those key issues they felt were critical and must be addressed in the short term; whilst green spots were used to identify those that were important but could be dealt with in the long term. This was designed to provide a balance between short and long term thinking in the development of a strategy. Participants were unable to see each other’s voting patterns as they expressed their own preferences, so ‘group think’ and tactical voting were eliminated from the process.

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Following the electronic preferencing, the results were examined and the top ten or twelve (of both red and green spots) were selected as potential strategies (see figure 2).

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Further reflection and negotiation followed and the workshop finally concluded with an agreed system of strategies relating to the goal system. Through exploring these strategies as a system in overview, it was easy to see where slight amendments to the wording were needed for the strategies to make sense as a coherent whole.

It was now felt possible to agree the design of the action workshops. Each of these would last half a day, would involve 8-10 participants, and would be facilitated initially by the external facilitator with the Assistant Chief Executive in a support / observer role, and subsequently by the Assistant CEO alone. Those invited to attend the workshops needed to be able to generate and agree relevant actions - some of which might then be allocated to them.

Each of the four action planning workshops focused on between three and four strategies. Each half day began with the facilitator providing a comprehensive explanation of the process that had so far been undertaken and presenting the resultant strategic intent as the ‘non-negotiable’ element of the workshop. Participants were encouraged to ask questions relating to the process or content of the journey so far and its current outcomes. Following this introduction, the material currently supporting each of the three of four strategies the group was addressing was examined to provide further context. Hard copy maps were supplied to each participant to help.

Then, working on each strategy in turn, participants used Group Explorer to contribute their own statements about specific ways to make the strategy happen. They were asked to be practical and to include blockages to success. They were also given the facility to enter links between their own input and the existing statements. If potential actions or blockages appeared without being linked, they were warned that they would be deleted. Each action had to have at least one specific purpose (that is, at least one arrow out of it). Statements flowed quickly and the screen filled up until they had run out of ideas. To ensure that everyone had become familiar with the various options now captured, the facilitator reviewed the material with participants, checking for missing links and amending statements where they were too cryptic because of the use of abbreviations or jargon.

Copies of the screen were printed off during the coffee break. It was clear that the participants had generated many more potential actions than could be implemented by the organisation in the near term. The number needed to be reduced. To help focus the next part of the workshop, participants were asked to identify, in relation to each strategy, their top five actions (using the maps as data sources) and rank them, using the ranking part of Group Explorer. Finally, a review of each of the agreed actions (with the caveat that not all of them could be implemented in the immediate future) concluded the workshop.

The total level of staff participation in the strategic planning process was around 70% of the organisation. This level of involvement was expected to ensure that staff not only had a greater understanding of the emerging strategies, but also were committed to delivering them.

Stage 4 - Managing Performance

The strategy delivery workshops complete, the facilitators now reviewed the preferred actions that had emerged from them. They needed to get the actions reviewed by the management team to ensure that they were feasible in terms of resources (cash, staff and time, etc.) Secondly, they needed to check the allocation of responsibilities for each of the actions. The participants involved in the action workshops had been asked to suggest members of the management team and other staff members they thought would be most appropriate to be held accountable for the actions. In order for each of the management team to be committed to them, they also needed to agree the suggestions. In addition, they needed to check whether any one of them had too many responsibilities - were they overloaded? How should they go about doing this?

The Chief Executive had been very clear from early on that he wanted a system that would help the organisation measure progress. Moreover, the system should match the way they had worked on developing and agreeing the strategic direction and actions. Because of the nature of the organisation’s funding (from the public purse) he needed to have a mechanism that clearly showed how the money was being spent and how much progress was being achieved. Many of the fund holding stakeholders had been impressed with the presentation of the goal system and associated strategies but they also wanted to monitor its effect on the performance of the organisation.

The external facilitator suggested that once the actions had been agreed and time-scales added, Group Explorer could be used as a decision support system to show progress. A colour scheme denoting the level of progress could be adopted. In addition, by identifying a mix of both qualitative and quantitative performance indicators for each of the strategies, their progress could be measured at both macro and micro level. The CEO was enthusiastic but commented that it would be really helpful to the organisation if there was some way to link the strategic direction with the on-going operational tasks. The organisation currently had a Quarterly Monitoring System (QMS) which comprised a large number of very detailed tasks. If the two systems could be linked together, not only could they improve the effectiveness of monitoring progress, they could also potentially get greater synergy from the tasks supporting the strategic actions. It was agreed to give this approach a try.

Maps were to be printed out with each management team member’s currently allocated actions as they related to strategies. Each member would be asked to review these actions and to add to the map their QMS tasks. Once this was done, the management team would then meet in sub-groups to review the maps, check the progress of tasks and ensure that they were linked to the most appropriate strategic actions.

In addition, it was decided to use the management team’s annual off-site review meetings to bring the whole of the team up to date, undertake some further stakeholder analysis and identify performance indicators for the key strategies. A first review meeting began the process and the participants initially identified potential performance indicators for the agreed strategies. At first they made verbal suggestions which were converted into statements by a facilitator and displayed on the Group Explorer public screen. However, once they had identified a number of possible performance indicators for one strategy in this way, they felt comfortable completing the rest by directly entering statements into Group Explorer to speed up the process.

Next, the team assessed their current position against the agreed performance indicators. This exercise provided the organisation with benchmarks. It also served to ensure that the performance indicators would be usable and practical. As the group discussed each strategy’s indicators, new performance indicators were identified and others reworded to avoid ambiguities. In addition, the group agreed that a set of ‘tracking indicators’ relating to improvements in the geographical area in general (and contributed to by other external organisations) would be useful. At the end of the session, the group had a set of measures for both strategies and goals and were keen to work on assessing the allocation and viability of the actions. Having a means to measure not only performance against the strategies and the goal system, but also progress with actions, would provide them with an integrated strategic delivery support system.

The facilitators then spent time ‘off-line’ entering the QMS tasks into the Group Explorer system. These were marked out from the other material by using a new style and colour. During this process, it became apparent that it was easier to use the QMS as the base system. This listed the organisational tasks in columns under: Action Item, Lead Person and Percentage of Progress Achieved. However, the system was amended to include the strategic actions from the strategy model as titles for different groups of tasks. Thus, the strategic actions appeared in both models and acted as an overlap or bridge between the strategic direction and the operational necessities. Because of the relatively large number of QMS tasks, it was decided early on that these tasks could be linked only to actions rather than into strategies directly. In this way, the model could be shrunk using the collapse command in the software onto the strategic direction with the QMS tasks hidden. This made the model simpler to use and more focused on the agreed strategic direction - a necessity as it was planned to be used as the basis of the CEO’s monthly review meetings with his deputy.

Each of the sub-group meetings commenced with an explanation of the new colouring system to indicate progress, and of the coding rules. This was followed by each individual reviewing their allocated actions and tasks, with omissions being captured. Initially, allocated tasks not suiting current roles were redistributed and checked so that the QMS tasks were linked to appropriate actions. Once participants understood the process, they were each given the chance to become familiar with working with the software. This was to aid the translation of the system to their own desk-top computers.

The participants were surprised at how much could be achieved in a single morning - each sub-group was able to realise its meeting objectives in a short space of time. Once the workshops were completed, the organisation now had a pair of connected models. The first was the higher level strategic intent, showing the goals, strategies and strategic actions. The second contained the strategic actions and QMS tasks. These were to be the basis of further dissemination across the whole organisation and also signalled closure.

Since the publication of the strategy brochure to staff, external stakeholder and Board members, the management team has received an astonishingly positive reaction to the process. This has been evidenced in the results of the staff attitude survey, and various stakeholder bodies embarking on the Group Explorer journey-making process themselves. The organisation uses the SDSS at its monthly strategy meetings, updating one another on progress, agreeing changes and reviewing priorities. It is about to embark upon a major progress review and is involving both senior and middle management.

The Chief Executive comments:

"Journey making has been a revelation to our company. It’s not just that we now have a strategic orientation which makes sense for us, our customers, and our stakeholders, but we have managed to engage all of our 150 strong workforce in its design. It is difficult to put a price on the value of individual ownership but we can put a price against the efficient use of staff time and the opportunity costs of getting our strategy wrong and having to return to the issue time and time again.

"However, the real saving is in our implementation phase. Everyone has been involved in shaping the strategy and knows how they fit into the big picture. The synergy this offers is obvious and the feeling of us being ‘in control’ most reassuring. Journey making has added value to our collective ability to capture ideas and points of view and meld them into coherence. It has infected all of us within the company with a rational and consensual approach to decision making."