Preparing for a strategy engagement
What can a leadership team do before a strategy engagement starts, to get more value out of it?
The single most useful thing a leadership team can do before a strategy engagement begins is to write down the specific decision the work needs to inform. “Grow the business” is not a decision; “should we enter market X” is.
It also helps to separate what’s already known from what’s being assumed — teams often discover, once asked directly, that a “fact” behind a strategy has never actually been tested. And it helps to identify, early, who needs to be involved and who will have to live with the outcome, so the work isn’t shaped in a vacuum and then handed to people who weren’t part of shaping it. Finally, being upfront about real constraints — budget, time, internal capability — up front avoids discovering them midway through the engagement, when they’re more expensive to work around.
Takeaways
- Write down the specific decision the work needs to support, before the work starts.
- Separate what you know from what you’re assuming.
- Involve the people who’ll have to implement the outcome from the beginning.
Defining useful business performance indicators
Why do so many KPI dashboards exist without actually changing any decisions?
A common cause is that indicators get chosen because they’re easy to measure, not because they’re tied to a decision anyone actually needs to make. Another is simple volume — tracking a long list of numbers dilutes attention, and a dashboard with forty metrics gets checked far less than one with five that someone is actually accountable for.
A KPI without a named owner tends to drift out of use quietly, and an indicator that made sense a year ago may no longer reflect what matters as the business changes — which is why it’s worth revisiting the set periodically, rather than treating it as fixed once it’s built.
Takeaways
- Start from the decision the number is meant to inform, not the data that’s easiest to pull.
- Fewer, well-owned indicators beat a long list nobody checks.
- Revisit KPIs periodically — what mattered a year ago may not now.
Identifying operational bottlenecks
How can a team find where a process is actually breaking down, rather than guessing?
It starts with mapping the process as it actually happens, not as it’s supposed to happen on paper — the two are often surprisingly different. It also helps to look at where work sits waiting, not just where it’s actively being done; delay usually accumulates in the handoffs between people or teams, not within any single task.
Talking to the people who actually do the work, rather than only their managers, tends to surface a more accurate picture — and when the same complaint turns up at several different points in the process, that repetition is often a better signal of the real bottleneck than any single observation on its own.
Takeaways
- The biggest delays are usually in the handoffs, not the tasks themselves.
- Ask the people doing the work — the official process description often differs from practice.
- A short mapping exercise often surfaces more than months of anecdotal complaints.
