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Story As Strategy: Set Your Rhythm

Make planning and measurement more regular occurrences.

Part 3 of the Strategic Story Masterplan is the Journey- aka, Set Your Rhythm.

In a story, the journey is the path that the Main Character takes to go from the start of the story to happily ever after. The journey involves the decisions the Main Character makes and the resulting outcomes. The Main Character learns and grows by completing the journey.

For strategy, rhythm refers to operating rhythm, i.e., the methods, habits, routines and protocols that the Main Character (the project, team, or organization) employs to go from where it is today to where it envisions itself at the completion of the strategy. The rhythm encompasses how objectives & goals are set, how how decisions are made and how progress, learning and growth are measured and communicated.


The Journey - Set Your Rhythm

What

Set annual, quarterly and monthly planning and measurement routines. Stay focused on the end goal while responding and adapting to what’s happening now.

Why

Make planning and measurement more regular occurrences. Respond to changes in priority. Reflect the most current reality of the progress you’ve made.

When

Annual and quarterly strategic planning. Monthly and weekly task planning and measurement.


The Strategic Story Masterplan Framework

The Strategic Story Masterplan is my own story-based framework for defining or refining strategy or a strategic initiative for a team, product or organization.

As a framework, it is meant to serve as a guide. A collection of parts that can be used individually or in any combination that make sense for your situation.


Subscribe to my Youtube Channel to learn how to

Tell Your Story, Set Your Operating Rhythm and Establish Your Systems.

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Why Traditional Strategic Planning Doesn’t Work

You and your team have just finished setting your strategic plan. A few months into the year… everything changes.

Why Traditional Strategic Planning Doesn’t Work

You and your team have just finished setting your strategic plan. After several days of workshops and breakout sessions, you’ve come up with the goals and initiatives that you want to focus on for the next year or more. You feel good about the direction you’ve chosen to take and the clarity you and your team have after coming up with a strategy together.

A few months into the year… everything changes.

The operating budget you thought you would get was significantly less than expected. You also found out that you’ll need to upgrade all of your laptops and office applications to comply with a new federal policy before the end of the year. You have a surge of new clients that you didn’t anticipate, but you’re also spending a lot on adding new resources to meet the extra demand.

The strategic plans and projects that you just decided on just a few weeks earlier suddenly seem unimportant. There are more pressing issues to deal with. The projects are put on hold or completely abandoned. They may or may not be reconsidered at the next strategic planning session - the following year.

why Story makes an ideal framework for defining (and redefining) strategy

4 Reasons Story Makes Sense for Defining Strategy

  1. It’s engaging, emotionally evocative, and flexible enough to keep up with the changing conditions that often require continual adjustments to strategy.

  2. A story lends itself to being edited and revised while still progressing toward a pre-determined outcome. As external and internal circumstances change, a story-based strategy allows the ‘what’ of the strategy to remain constant and the ‘how’ of the strategy to unfold one chapter at a time.

  3. Organizations and teams who adopt a story-based planning framework create an environment that encourages rapid learning, adaptation and resilience.

  4. Storytelling invites more input and participation from all levels into strategic planning and decision-making.

 

The Strategic Story Masterplan Framework

The Strategic Story Masterplan is my own story-based framework for defining or refining strategy or a strategic initiative for a team, product or organization.

As a framework, it is meant to serve as a guide. A collection of parts that can be used individually or in any combination that make sense for your situation.


define your main character

map your motivation

set your rhythm

establish your systems



Subscribe to my Youtube Channel to learn how to

Tell Your Story, Set Your Operating Rhythm and Establish Your Systems.

Read More
strategy kisha solomon strategy kisha solomon

A Masterplan Is Better Than Goals

Goals are pretty good as a to-do list of of things you want to accomplish or achieve. But when you're in a leadership position and you have all of these moving parts to orchestrate, goals alone aren't enough.

Video Transcript:

When you start to reach a certain level of self-development or evolution or even when you're in a position of leadership, whether that just be self-leadership or leadership of others, I think you start to recognize that goals are not enough to drive how you're going to move from the current level to the next level.

Goals are pretty good as a to-do list of of things you wanna accomplish or achieve. But when you're in a leadership position and you have all of these moving parts to orchestrate, goals alone aren't enough to encapsulate all that needs to be considered as the person who is sitting in the middle of all these moving parts and having to be the orchestrator of all those moving parts, or having to be the one who maintains the constant vision.

For that, you need a masterplan. And the master plan it's a term that I borrowed from civic design in that a master plan is basically a strategy for a physical place. For a physical location. So it's a community or a neighborhood or a block and the civic designer develops a master plan for that physical geography to say that this is how it exists now, but over a period of time, this is how it's going to evolve, and this is what the future vision of this physical or geographic location is gonna be.

If they just were like, here are the goals for this plot of land, or Here's the goal for this community, that's a little too simple because when you're transforming physical geographic space and it's a huge amount of space with a lot of moving parts, there's infrastructure, there's neighborhoods, there's homes, there's commercial areas. A lot of things have to work in concert to make this vision a reality within this physical space. And that takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of negotiation, takes a lot of conversation, it takes a lot of campaigning, it takes a lot of re-explaining the vision over and over again. Sometimes you may have a priority for the current year that maybe the budget isn't there, or you ran into an infrastructure roadblock and you've gotta deprioritize and come up with something else that still pushes towards that full master plan vision.

And so when we find ourselves in leadership positions, and that position of a leader is really that same idea of having to transform something that is comprised of a lot of moving parts. Transform that over time from where it is now to what it will be when it's this future vision, then you have to have a master plan, even if that thing that you're evolving over time is you as the leader.

So this is why I promote not only having goals, but also having a master plan that stretches over a period of time, and that is flexible enough to evolve and adapt as the situations change. As you encounter roadblocks, as budget or resources are not available or are available, you can have this overarching master plan that you can refer to over and over again to recenter yourself on the long-term future vision while still having all of the pieces you need to do on a day-to-day, month-to-month, year to year basis, to keep progressing along a timeline that will lead you to that vision.


Do you manage your team or business using goals or do you have a masterplan?


IF YOU WANT TO CHANGE YOUR FUTURE

CHANGE YOUR STORY.

Write your next chapter with a story-based strategic framework that evolves as you do.

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