Strategy alignment and renewal

An excellent session today with Arvind Bhambri who started the discussion by asking how we can start taking a long view of ourselves and our institutions. We spent the better part of the day analysing a very successful company. What was clearly outlined here: if you acknowledge your environment in the context of your strategy and organizational process, you can keep constantly changing to stay ahead of the game. In that light:

-look at where you are now;
-look at where you will be in five years, and
-look at where you will be in ten years.

In that respect, a leader can ask his team:

1. What our your strategic challenges?
2. What will competitors do to keep ahead of us?
3. What is your strategy to stay on top?

The example discussed refers to how this dynamic director institutes a program that he names work out the design premise of which is that all organizations are doing a lot of unnecessary work and that you need a process for identifying work that has no value. By instituting a method of feedback from employees, you encourage a system where a great majority of suggestions for change can be implemented, resulting in an improvement in the confidence level of the organization. You start by asking the question: "If there is something that can be done that will improve how you work right away, what would that be?" This actually results in people being able to constantly redefine the work that they do.

This could make for the start of an interesting discussion at our next staff meeting. How do we start a discussion to look at how we can work better, more effectively?

Following this discussion, we moved onto a case study of a U.S. museum that was able to successfully work its way through of a difficult and tenuous position thanks to strategy and collaborative work. Very interesting day!