Setting the scene: strategic maturity  

Before the roundtable, two colleagues set the scene. Lana told guests about how they helped North Sea Port in realising their new strategic masterplan. It’s a bold strategy making clear choices, which now needed to become reality. Lana and her team helped set up the organisation for this ambitious future. Because, echoing a previous strategy gettogether: no strategy with execution.

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Freddy followed up with a Strategic Maturity model: a cascade of questions that help us gauge where companies might struggle to go from strategy definition to actual business results.

Learnings that stuck with us 

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Winners choose

Choosing is losing, a wisdom that confronted all of us as children in the candy store. But then came adult age, and with it a new axiom: you can’t have your cake, and eat it too. Strategy is really about focus and choosing what not to do. In May, North Sea Port CEO Daan Schalk told us about their audacious decision to stop focusing on container shipping (a commodity business race to the bottom), and stop doing business with China (a geopolitical risk). Likewise, Inge talked us through some of the segment and product choices that Liantis made. Echoing our inner Michael Porter: “Being ‘all things to all people’ is a recipe for strategy mediocrity.” Easier said than done, Michael: how will you explain that to your sales team, who are now seeing their addressable market, and their goods on display, grow smaller. Well, you talk to them.

Make it tangible

Because if we would have an AI listening in (we didn’t) and asked it for the biggest topic of discussion, it was communication. Managers might like their shiny strategic slide decks, those won’t move the needle if they don’t leave the board room. Invest in educating your middle management, so they can advance the mission and answer questions that arise. But really, you should aim for reaching ‘every corner of the organisation’. And most of all: make it tangible. People have ‘bullet-point blindness’. They will just see more big words. You need to show them how the strategy will impact their work, and why that will benefit clients and the business in the long-run.

Change is constant

This buy-in will be necessary, because an ambitious strategy will cause change in the organisation. One guest spoke up: ‘We stopped calling it Change Management though.’ Many nodded. In today’s business world, change is a constant. Strategy is a work in progress. You need to hire people and leaders who are not afraid of change, but actually thrive on it, and push through when things get hard.

Give a voice to customers

Throughout the conversations, ‘customer intimacy’ was often mentioned as the strategy of choice. We’re always sceptical when we hear those words: talking the talk is easy, but do companies actually walk the walk? We were pleasantly surprised to hear multiple guests had a customer advisory board in place. Or have programs to go in the field. It’s the most honest feedback you can get. 

Another great learning from Inge was using those customer cases as lighthouse stories. Telling colleagues how happy clients became is the best way to show why the strategy matters.

Show the results

In the same vein, there was a lot of buy-in for showing measurable impact of strategic initiatives.  Don’t reinvent the wheel, was the consensus: nothing wrong with Objectives & Key Results. How many objectives and key results, and which frequency, depends on the organisation. But steer away from using things like revenue: that’s a KPI you’re going to measure anyway. Instead, use KRs that teams can control, like increasing the onboarding speed of new customers. Showing how strategy moved the needle is key. Because to close off with one final food metaphor: the proof of pudding, is in the eating. 

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See you next time?

We want to thank all of the guests for joining us in the morning sun, and for being so open. Want to join us for a next ‘Strategy over Breakfast’ session? RSVP here.