Goals Grid
The Goals Grid is an easy to use and flexible tool for jump-starting team dialogue and the strategic planning process.
Four basic categories of goals are expressed on a single page with a Goals Grid: ACHIEVE, PRESERVE, AVOID, and ELIMINATE.
Created by Fred Nickols and Ray Ledgerwood, a Goals Grid will prompt you to think about the Yes and No answers to two simple questions:
1. Do you want it? and
2. Do you have it?
For participants of long-range planning workshops, a visible Goals Grid becomes an important reference point to maintain group consensus and discover any conflicting objectives as strategic questions are debated.
As a team or on your own, creating a Goals Grid and refreshing it annually is engaging, effective and efficient.
Focus
Focus is a tool that will help seasoned executives and new leaders confidently explain their strategic thinking ---- 2, 3 and 4 years out.
Communicating at a glance the depth and width of focus you and your team will apply on key topics like customer segments, industry groups, geographies and solutions is the advantage created using Focus.
Expressed with colour and a pragmatic rationale, the Focus section of your strategic plan will prompt you to describe forward stories, provide guidance to your team and improve the big picture understanding of your audience.
SWOT
At Fundamental Group, we enjoy the challenge of helping you apply common tools in a carefully crafted uncommon way. The classic SWOT analysis is a good example.
Articulating your organisations’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats requires not only research but also the discipline to express it in fewer bullet points that have real meaning, real pragmatic natural meaning to the audience.
Once a classic SWOT 2x2 analysis is complete, imagine doing a pivot from this good research into an insightful action planning SWOT 3x3 framework. This action plan is less common and very powerful.
A SWOT 3x3 asks you to take into consideration the intersection between -- a strength and an opportunity, a strength and a threat, your considered weakness and an opportunity and your considered weakness and a threat.
Balanced Scorecard
Co-created throughout the 1990’s by David P. Norton and Robert S. Kaplan, the balanced scorecard process is a straightforward way to monitor performance against strategic goals and improve your communications.
Designed and applied with care, your balanced scorecard will express a ‘balanced’ view of performance by recognizing traditional financial metrics and strategic non-financial performance measures.
At Fundamental Group, we activate the business scorecard approach in three impactful ways: to improve customer care, to develop service-line solutions and to guide the operational performance of their organisation.
Landscape
Our Landscape tool will help you form a panoramic point of view about the domestic and international trends, issues, events and expectations that either are or should be influencing your organisations outlook.
Designed to spur teamwork, research and strategic conversations, the Landscape tool is flexible. While some cross sections throughout the grid are more useful than others, all cross sections are acknowledged.
Together, we use the Landscape to create an efficient research plan, draw informed opinions and express the key findings.
As it becomes a reliable part of your strategic planning process and annual rhythm, the Landscape will directionally help you anticipate obstacles, shape new market opportunities and tune your decisions.
Holistic yet pragmatic, the Landscape tool and process will generate a “watch list” of things that we should be thinking, be reading, be observing, be asking and importantly, things we should be imagining.
