Turning Vision Into Reality: A 3-Step Guide to Delivering Strategy with Conviction

This thought piece is authored by Josephine Gianni, Innovation Director & Co-Founder of Sandbox, a leading Strategic Design & Innovation Agency. With deep experience helping organisations navigate complexity and design for the future, Sandbox specialises in leveraging design-led approaches to create, and translate, ambitious visions into actionable strategies teams can rally behind. INTRODUCTION

Delivering a strategy requires the alignment of a group of people around a common vision. Misalignment often occurs, not because the strategy is wrong, but because the vision is too abstract to work towards.

Plenty of frameworks help translate strategy into action. But in the cascade from vision statements to a clear program of initiatives, there’s a step missing; articulating, with sufficient detail, what the destination looks like. This is about expressing how our vision might play out in practice for our customers, and describing how multiple initiatives fit together before the deep-dive into execution begins. It’s neither strategy development, nor a roadmap, it’s a bridge between the two.

We often hear that the vision already exists, and it does, in the form of aspirational statements. Breathing life into those statements adds substance. It strengthens the strategy and provides stronger parameters for execution. Done well, this step builds buy-in, clarifies objectives and accelerates delivery. It also surfaces differences in interpretation early, avoiding costly detours. A tangible strategy is a clear strategy, one that everyone can see and believe in.

Given the impacts of AI, organisations will need to undertake consequential and lasting decisions. These decisions demand care and consideration before committing to a path that is too hard to turn back from.

AN ACT NOT AN OUTPUT

Making strategy tangible and visual should be an active, ongoing process.

A client recently shared that their colleagues were moved to tears when they finally saw a visual representation of a vision that had been in discussion for years. The vision had become real. The artifact itself is an undeniably powerful communication tool and catalogue of decisions made. However, its greatest value comes from the collaborative process of moving through the following three steps:

1. Define your core value – Clearly articulate what core value you will provide to your customer and other stakeholders in practice – the value framework.

2. Bring the vision to life – Describe how that value is delivered – an illustrated ‘customer’ journey that describes your vision in practice.

3. Determine the work to be done – Pinpoint what needs to happen to get you there – the actions and operating model.
   

DEFINE YOUR CORE VALUE

Strategy is fundamentally a story about value, therefore the first step towards making a strategy tangible is to elaborate on the value you will provide to your customer at various points across their journey.

When everyone agrees on the core value you provide, maintaining focus becomes easier. What value you provide tends to answer fundamental customer needs. Notwithstanding a pivot in your offering, those needs tend to remain consistent and rarely change. How you will deliver that value however must evolve with technology and shifts in customer expectations. This is a useful distinction in the current environment, where executing strategy whilst navigating global uncertainty and an AI revolution demands constant revision and agility. A value framework acts as a compass keeping you on course towards the vision.

Creating a useful framework involves moving a step beyond what’s in your strategy and spelling out what it means to your customer. For example, if ‘education’ is a pillar in your strategy, how does that break down into key moments of value for your customer beginning to end (personalised programs, application of learning etc)? These milestones form the outline of your future state journey. Each value milestone can be ascribed a measurable goal that can be benchmarked and tracked as you move towards the vision.

BRING THE VISION TO LIFE

If your value based framework acts as a compass, the journey is a map that brings to life what we collectively believe the destination will look like. A process of giving form to our imagination.

There are many ways to do this, but in our experience a concise, visual customer journey narrative works best. Start with your value framework and walk through those key milestones end-to-end, defining how you will deliver that value to a customer. The story needs to be high level enough to see the entire picture end-to-end, yet capture enough detail to demonstrate how it will work in practice. At this stage, the aim is a picture that directionally reflects the goal and describes how multiple initiatives will work together. Avoid getting stuck by remembering that dedicated deep-dives into each initiative will come at a later date.

Once there’s agreement, distill the vision into its simplest, most visual form. Keep asking: What is essential to convey how we will deliver value, in as few words and images as possible? Even complex, multi-step processes can be distilled into a representative image or two with a description. Stay focused on the core value you provide.

This is a creative process, one that will spark unexpected questions and decisions. If what you describe doesn’t seem right, it’s best to know now. Working through this collaboratively creates true alignment, because the people involved have wrestled with how the vision should come to life and therefore believe in it. Expect to revisit it, and refine it over time.

Once your vision is captured as a journey, it becomes a baseline for subsequent work and interrogations. You can apply different lenses, for example; to assess risk end-to-end, stress test edge case scenarios, or examine the ethical implications of what you’re building.

DETERMINE THE WORK TO BE DONE

Once the vision has been made tangible, the operational requirements tend to reveal themselves. There are now more parameters to help determine what is, and isn’t required to achieve the vision. Because the vision is built around the customer journey, it is inherently cross-functional. Teams will be able to see what they are accountable for and where there is crossover with others.

To extract the initiatives, walk the journey end-to-end to identify what is needed to realise each step of the vision. Capturing the work to be done will encompass multiple different areas that impact that journey, both directly and indirectly. Operational layers typically include: data, required systems, roles, policy and even culture. This is where realistic conversations can take place about what the organisation can and should focus on, and in what order.

KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK

We have yet to encounter an organisation that has not benefited from a simple, jargon-free visualisation of what they are aiming for. But the best results come when your tangible vision becomes part of the operating rhythm, a living system for managing change. One of our clients held leadership meetings around a physical wall dedicated to their vision and efforts to get there, refreshing it to track results, changes, and progress. This process kept her team focused, accountable and in-step.

If this is too ambitious, a meaningful first step is simply to spend time mapping out what your vision might mean in practice for your customer. It is surprising how much comes to light when you bring the future forward by making the vision tangible. Time and care spent on this step has a multiplier effect downstream, creating the alignment, clarity and buy-in to accelerate teams in executing the vision with intention. In our decades of doing this work, organisations never regret taking the time to be concrete, the payoff is well worth the effort.

Sandbox is a Strategic Design & Innovation Agency. To discuss how we can help craft your vision, reach out to us at: hello@sandboxcompany.com.au