Strategy
Our principles
- A strategy is always needed to help people pick priorities and align with the goals of the team or company.
- Communicating the strategy is just as important as defining it. It should be explicitly announced, easy to find and referred to regularly.
- Strategy should be defined top-down, but works best if input from the entire organisation is taken into account in a transparent manner.
- What to do is almost as important as what not to do. There is no art or use in defining priorities if it's not clear what will not be prioritised.
- The alignment of the strategy with the purpose should always be explained explicitly. just like projects should be defended in line with the strategy.
Our practices
- OKRs: We use Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) at company and team level to clarify what the current strategy is. The OKRs are defined every quarter, though sometimes more or less often if the strategy required it.
- Metrics: We learned to take time for defining strategy as well as for translating it into concrete metrics and projects. Creating new metrics often costs a lot of time, because the systems are not ready or the definition is not clear. Try to not create a new strategy with new metrics at the same time.
- Accountability: Holacracy does not define how to define strategy, although it's the explicit accountability of the Lead Link role. We amended that role to include setting OKRs for the circle.
- Personal: Some people translated their team's OKRs to personal or role based OKRs to keep track of their progress.
- Advisors: We created the extra role Strategy Advisor at Alignment level, which was assigned to a few people permanently as well as a few rotating from different parts of the company. This helped to improve buy-in as well as tought more people how to have strategic discussions.
- Escalation: If someone felt another team or person should prioritise differently, they could simply ask the relevant role holder to check the strategy and change course. Holacracy already has a process for this, escalating via the team's Lead Link to (if needed) override the priority of projects in the team. In practice, the peer-to-peer discussion solved most of these disputes by coupling the strategy to data to make a case.
Original description from the OS Canvas model:
Strategy – How we plan and prioritise; the process of identifying critical factors or challenges and the means to overcome them.What are the critical factors that will mean the difference between success and failure? How do we develop, refine, and refresh our strategy? How do we use strategy to filter and steer day-to-day?