Your Value CAN Live Forever - But How?

You've got snappy new plans to create Value: how do you make sure it never flops, or flags?

The Value Blueprint is a weekly newsletter for people in business, non-profits, and creative ventures looking to make sense of creating and leveraging on Value for success. For engaging and practical breakdowns of Value creation tools every Tuesday, sign up here:

---

Photo credit: Rahadiansyah on Unsplash

We’re on part 7 in the Qualified for Value, the 10 part newsletter series walking you through the applied aspects of Value creation!

It’s real exciting to build out and implement a new strategic plan, isn’t it? It’s especially exciting when you’re breaking new ground, like when you’re executing Value creation strategies. Even more so when implementation goes well! Pack it up everyone, we won! Execution went well, and that’s all there is, there isn’t any more!

But! If it went so well, then wouldn’t it be an even better idea to… keep doing it?

Essentially, what I’m asking here is:

“How do you embed your Value strategy so it becomes fully part of your operations, not just as a one-off event or project, AND keeps running and winning forever?”

That question is the heart of strategic continuity: turning a moment of strategy into a long-standing movement.

How exactly do you manage that? I’ve got two major approaches you can take to get you there!

Create a story with your Value strategy

As loathe as I am to admit it, people simply don’t remember frameworks in their day to day activities. For the business course/school grads, YOU try remembering the last time you used a framework that you’d learned within in your actual day to day!

Nope!

Teams and the people who work in them remember narratives. Now how do we leverage this?

• Convert your new strategy, and the existing strategy it connects to, into a story:
  complete with villains (the problems your strategy is solving), heroes (your team), and victories (impact).

  • Taking on this perspective your strategy comes alive: to your teams, no longer is it a bunch of new stuff management told them to do, but it becomes part of the larger story they “tell” when talking about or engaging their work

• Be sure to use storytelling techniques when you’re onboarding your teams, partners or stakeholders into new strategies

  • Ultimately, they want to see themselves in the strategy you’re bringing in, so be sure to make that crystal-clear to get buy-in from the outset!

• Embed the incoming strategy into your culture
  Teams should be able to explain how their work connects to the strategic vision

  • Reinforce the strategy through **stories, symbols, rewards, and rituals**.↵ * Culture makes a strategy durable: it spreads norms when no one's watching.

Weave Your Strategy into Your Core Processes

Ideally, your incoming Value strategy should fall into step with the other strategies you’ve got running in your operations. This is ESPECIALLY vital if the Value strategy is going to be ‘shaking hands’ with other existing strategies.

The objective here is to make sure your existing strategy isn’t being left in the dirt in lieu of your fresh new Value strategy, while also making sure that your existing strategy doesn’t “bully” your incoming strategy, ya know?

• Make sure the incoming strategy is incorporated harmoniously into day-to-day workflows, not left siloed in annual planning rituals

  • So for instance: if your Value creation strategy centers client engagement, your KPIs, the way your teams are structured, even right down to your planned meetings must in some way attend to that

• See if your new Value strategy and the existing strategies it will “live” closest to have compatible ways of work

  • The areas of compatibility will go a long way towards harmonizing the two

• Summarize the high-level strategic point of your incoming strategy and translate them into a repeatable pattern of work

  • Aim to answer the questions:

    “What we do connected to this strategy? And why?”

    “How do we make decisions”

• Embed these ways of work into policies, playbooks, and decision trees that will actually be used and reviewed regularly
  Don’t just leave them PowerPoint decks that will be seen once and never again!

  • Ask yourself:
    ”Could a new leader or team follow this strategy without reinterpreting it from scratch?”

---

What’s cool about this is that all this can be applied across every size of enterprise, and every flavour, size and scope of strategy!

When designed, implemented and integrated well, strategy becomes more than just a statement or plan. It becomes a system, a habit, and a language that persists even as people, tools, and markets change.

But before you go:

Strategy integration and continuity can be a lot like herding cats; luckily you don’t have to do that yourself!

Whether you need expert technical expertise to make sure your strategy continuity planning a smooth ride from start to forever, or you just need a specialist to review what you’ve got going on, look no further than the Strategy Facilitation over at Vivre Consulting!

Our Strategy Facilitation consulting offerings are customized to you and your enterprise, tailored for every stage of your enterprise’s development and journey.

Like my work? You can get more of it!

• Listen to my podcast, Inside Value, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube
  (be sure to subscribe!)

• Book me to speak or host a workshop at your event, company or organization

• Check out our Value Creation Toolkit and the rest of our work at Vivre Consulting

• Connect with me on LinkedIn!