Strategies are the life blood of the consultancy industry. Almost everybody has got one, but how many agencies really use them? As veterans of the shelf-filler era, we have picked up a few pointers about what makes a good strategy...
- The agency developing it has really got to want to do something, to take itself and its constituents in a specific direction, or to achieve specific outcomes.
- It cannot and should not please everybody; somewhere within a quality strategy should be statements that clearly say that something will be achieved (or at least attempted)... Directly related to this, it should clearly omit (and preferably not pay lip-service to) the things that the agency and its partners and stakeholders are not going to actively drive.
- There should be clarity about accountability; who's neck will be on the block if promised outcomes don't happen.
- We should look again at the term ‘partners and stakeholders':
- Partners are, in theory, actively involved in delivering strategy objectives and should have a degree of related accountability.
- Stakeholders have an interest in the outcomes and may wish to contribute financially, politically or in another format; they are not, however, delivery agents and should not be referenced in this way.
- Evaluation; the generation of measurement baselines and devices to enable assessment of whether promised outcomes are being achieved should be a strategy commitment (and a specific outcome) in itself.
- The direction and outcomes of the best strategies (‘the what') can be encapsulated on a single page; the balance should relate to ‘the how'.
- There is a substantial difference between the volume of work required to justifying a strategy objective and the volume of text needed to explain this.
Having said all this, the best ones are effectively strategic ‘to do' lists; to which people and agencies refer when they are determining which work comes first, which partners to nurture and where and how to invest their human and financial resources. Could yours pass this test?
