Our Approach
Drives you forward
Our Performance Design process drives you and your team forward, moving from initial insight to a delivery plan in around ten weeks.
Think of Performance Design as a flexible tool for meeting your needs. For example, in one project senior leaders met six times over five months to develop a new regional shared ambition. In another, over 100 staff from eight local authorities met every week for ten weeks to oversee transformation to a publicly owned trading company.
We understand why organisations' strategies fail.
There are five reasons that strategies fail:
1. Poor alignment of ambition and objectives
Teams are often poorly aligned with limited agreement on their ambition and objectives. A poorly aligned team cannot deliver a successful strategy.
2. Solutions are based around existing structures
Change is often attempted within existing organisational structures. Failure to address the challenges within the organisation can only deliver incremental change.
3. Lack of collaboration fails to harness innovation within the team
Internal stakeholders do not respond well to being told what to do. Their skills and commitment are crucial for success and they have to be brought on the journey.
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4. Poor alignment on programmes required to achieve the objectives
Plans agreed at senior level can lose shape as new programmes are introduced. Initial progress can rapidly drift away from the strategic imperative.
5. Planned and agreed changes lose momentum
The passing of the baton from the executive to the organisation is often where strategic imperative and momentum is lost. Any lack of engagement by the team is likely to precipitate failure.
We Understand How
to Create Success.
1. A compelling business case
The numbers must create a compelling reason for action, often being the unifying factor in the strategic debate.
2. A simple and rapid process
This maintains momentum from decision making through programme identification and into implementation.
3. Cross functional solutions
A cross functional group with an agreed ambition, objectives and programme of activities drives effective action.
4. Engaged leadership
Leadership provides impetus, challenging thinking and supporting cross-functional working. Leaders spend time aligning themselves before passing on the development of solutions.
There are four elements that create successful strategies:
Fourth Story Performance Design
Delivers
Speed
The process moves from initial Insight to a delivery plan often in just ten weeks. The Performance Design process combines the principles of design thinking and agile, lean methodologies to compress months of work into weeks. We maintain pace with weekly meetings of the same people, at the same time, often in the same place.
Inclusivity
The recommended solution is developed by and for the organisation. We do not need to sell the solution to the team as it is already theirs. Often by week four the team lose their individual organisational hats and become focused on solving the problem; critically this starts to create a new team which is vital for driving innovation and change.
Output
Ownership
Senior and operational teams work together. The senior team can be the solution team but often they act as a project governance group and receive regular feedback with an opportunity to shape and direct the work. Critically, senior, and operational leaders work within an agreed framework towards agreed objectives.
Challenge
We act as an independent broker to challenge the group, often inviting external contribution to transform thinking. In a recent project, a senior financier in the City of London helped a team think about investment options. In another, a new technology provider shared a vision of what was possible in remote production monitoring. These sessions change the pattern of thinking whilst encouraging a more innovative approach.
The programme provides business plan outputs and next steps. At each meeting we develop output that is reviewed and enhanced at the following meeting. In this way the final deliverable emerges from the team’s thinking. Detailed financial and operational analysis (legal, HR, policy etc.) flows into the project through short pieces of ‘homework’ that allow the team to develop holistic solutions.