Many organizations liberally throw around the word strategy. They form task forces, hire consultants, and write extensive plans. Yet statistics show that the vast majority of organizations fail to implement the plans they have spent so much time, effort, and money creating.

Strategic thinking is the process by which leadership envisions the organization's future and defines the critical assumptions, factors, and business philosophies necessary to achieve it. In essence, strategy is about leveraging limited resources in clever ways that result in nonlinear performance gains.

Most leaders face two common challenges in developing and implementing a successful strategy. First, leaders must ensure that the strategy does not reflect the biases of the management team, which are often rooted in the organization's past successes. Second, leaders must ensure that once a viable strategy has been chosen, resources are allocated in a way that accurately reflects the strategy. Research shows that such alignment rarely occurs, indicating a need for a methodology of strategic thinking and planning that can give leaders a systematic way to develop and implement successful strategies.

The Stagen Strategy Methodology, coupled with its proprietary Performance Focusing System technology, provides a solution that is specifically geared for high-growth mid-market companies. Stagen consultants help clients innovate better strategies in three steps: first, clearly identify the driving forces that the company's strategy must address; second, formulate the strategy itself; and third, create a plan for managing the many projects through which the strategy can be implemented.

1. Identify the Driving Forces

The business world's graveyards are filled with organizations whose executives implemented elegant answers to the wrong questions. Stagen consultants help clients identify the root causes of their issues, referred to as strategic drivers. Identifying the driving forces a group of leaders are facing makes it much easier for them to unite behind a strategic course of action. Stagen consultants use visual tools such as charts, graphs, and illustrations to make assumptions about strategic issues explicit. They then help client management teams narrow their myriad strategic drivers to two or three core factors so that leadership teams can identify, understand, and clearly communicate the key issues that must be intelligently addressed for the organization to achieve its goals. Once these key issues are thoroughly understood, the implications for strategic action often become obvious to the entire team.

2. Formulating a Strategy That Addresses the Driving Forces

Once leaders have clearly perceived their situation, Stagen consultants help them develop an approach that can leverage limited resources to achieve the desired aim. These approaches are then mapped to an organization's functional areas. Next, strategic themes addressing the key drivers are developed and applied to different aspects of the organization's functions and levels of operation.

3. Creating a Plan to Implement the Strategy

Often, intelligently conceived strategies fail to help a company because managers do not sufficiently define the projects throughout the organization that are required to implement the strategy. Even when specific projects are proposed, daily decisions about which ones have the highest priority and how they will be resourced can be inconsistent with the strategy due to conflicts between short-term and long-term organizational needs.

In order to execute a strategy successfully, it is essential to link and align the strategic initiatives, objectives, and projects. Strategies can only be executed if leaders use a deliberate mechanism to ensure that capital, labor, time, attention, and other resources are allocated in alignment with the strategy. But few leadership teams possess such a deliberate mechanism. The Stagen Performance Focusing System^TM (PFS) provides this mechanism. The PFS operates on three core principles: strategy, focus, and alignment. The PFS makes strategy the central organizational agenda, replacing the budget as the primary nexus of organizational planning and decisions. Further, by providing a common language and framework for discussing strategy, it enables leaders to describe and communicate strategic initiatives in a way that the entire organization can understand and act upon. Focus is widely touted as a key to success, yet few leaders can honestly characterize their organizations as "focused." Most management teams spread their attention very thin, feeling pulled in different directions without a clear sense of how to proceed. All business focusing approaches are not equal. Some are moderately efficient, some are actually counterproductive, and a select few offer tremendous leverage to move an enterprise forward. Experience shows that by strategically withdrawing attention from certain areas and amplifying focus on the key drivers, organizations can achieve dramatic boosts in performance.

To reach its full potential, an organization must become aligned so that all processes are moving in the same direction in a concerted, synergistic fashion. This is easier said than done. Because leaders have no "dashboard indicator" for people and relationship issues, they tend to miss the subtle emotional and political currents pulsing through their organizations. Alignment is not the same as agreement. An aligned organization is coordinated so that all efforts support the organization's highest priorities as reflected in its values, vision, and strategies. Alignment helps ensure the achievement of crucial strategic objectives by linking and fine-tuning roles, systems, and processes and aligning them to a common "map and compass." Alignment also ensures that distinctive competencies are identified and put into action in the context where they will make the greatest impact.

In effect, the Stagen strategy methodology becomes the operating system for a new strategic management process. It retains the important financial measures of past performance, but supplements them with measures of the lead indicators of future performance, revealing the drivers of superior, long term value and competitive advantage. This results in a high performance organization that constantly innovates and can quickly and easily adapt to changing market conditions, threats, and opportunities.