A strategy you can't tell in five minutes doesn't exist for the organisation

Let's start with what this document is not. It is not a framework or a theory. It is a canvas for asking questions, a bit like the Business Model Canvas: the value lies in the discussion it sparks, not in the boxes being filled in. You can fill it in without OKRs and without anyone's help from outside. If a company already has its vision, mission and strategy written down, transferring them into these boxes is a test of whether they really are clear, not the production of yet another document. Its brevity can be misleading, though. One page looks like a fifteen-minute exercise, but it is the result of anywhere from two to ten workshops, depending on how well organised the company is, and before the first meeting we can't say how many there will be.

The boxes come in this order. First the vision and the mission, meaning why the company exists and where it wants to be in the distant future. Then the challenge: what problem we are addressing and on the basis of what data. Then the policies, the guiding principles, meaning the decisions and bets with which we intend to address that challenge. Only on that basis come the strategic goals, and next to each one a metric, a way of measuring it and a person responsible for the measurement. At the bottom, the annual goal, the quarterly objective and the team for the quarter. The middle layer is the one most often missing, and it is the most recurrent gap we see. When we ask a company for its strategy, we usually get either nothing or straight away strategic goals, while the decisions those goals are supposed to follow from are nowhere to be found. That is why in writing it down we keep three things separate: the challenge, the decisions, the goals.

Then two places where it goes wrong. The first is a document that rules nothing out. A strategy that doesn't narrow the field of choice is useless, because if all markets, all clients and all actions are allowed, no decision has been made. In the example from the episode, the narrowing runs from a global vision, through the decision to step down from being a generalist to the niche of universities in the USA, down to five universities in one state, chosen because winning in the hardest place closes any later discussion about whether the product is good enough. The second place is the missing box with a named team for the quarter. It surprises people most, and every time you have to stop at it and explain, because the template itself doesn't explain it, and nobody in the company has ever named the group responsible for a strategic goal before. The whole organisation doesn't have to work on the strategy: some people are consulted, some are informed, some check their own initiatives against the direction. But a designated team made up of people from different departments works on the objective week in, week out, and the objective owner is responsible for making the objective happen, not for doing all the work themselves. The absence of that team is the most common reason a written strategy never gets delivered.