This article is part of our Organizational DNA series and is tailored for businesses. For an overview across all sectors, read the main article here.
Business leaders frequently tell me they are overwhelmed by competing initiatives: digital transformations, customer experience projects, cost-reduction efforts, and growth campaigns all vie for the same limited resources. Annual planning and budgeting often start with current projects and are heavily influenced by internal politics or whoever argues most persuasively, rather than by clear strategic contribution.
There is a better way.
Instead of starting with what you are already doing, start with your business’s DNA. When you start with your organizational DNA, you choose and prioritize projects that directly support your strategy. A focus on organizational DNA identifies strategic performance measures, strengthens project tracking, focuses corrective actions where needed, and improves alignment of people, processes, technology, and budgets to strategic goals.
What is Organizational DNA?
By “organizational DNA,” I mean the strategic objectives that describe your company’s strategy. Just like human DNA, each company’s strategy is unique. These powerful building blocks of uniqueness form the core of your strategy and drive your selection and prioritization process.
Strategic objectives are specific, actionable statements of intent. Examples for businesses include:
- “Reduce customer wait times”
- “Improve customer experiences”
- “Increase regional or international sales”
- “Reduce operating costs”
Why Strategic DNA Matters for Business
Collectively, a dozen or so well-crafted strategic objectives, when linked together in a strategy map, tell the story of how your company creates value for customers and shareholders. The strategy map uses cause–effect logic to visually show how value is created and sustained.
When businesses prioritize projects based on strategic DNA, they achieve:
- Better alignment between initiatives and strategic priorities
- Stronger focus on customer and market outcomes
- Clearer line-of-sight between investments and profitability, growth, or risk reduction
- Improved coordination and communication across functions and business units
- Better employee understanding of how their work contributes to strategy and performance
Government agencies and nonprofits benefit from the same approach, but in the private sector the emphasis is often on customer experience, operational excellence, innovation, and financial performance.
Start With the End in Mind
Drawing on Stephen Covey’s principle “Start with the end in mind,” the approach is straightforward but requires discipline, a “connect the dots” mindset, and the willingness to move beyond siloed, project-by-project decision making.
For businesses, that means beginning with vision and strategy, not with “What projects are already on the roadmap?”
- Translate vision and strategy into three or four high-level strategic themes and results (goals), such as “Delight customers,” “Drive profitable growth,” or “Optimize operations”
- Develop approximately a dozen strategic objectives – the actionable components of those themes
- Link the objectives in a strategy map to show how investments in people, processes, and technology drive better customer and financial outcomes
These objectives form your business’s DNA – the structural blueprint of your strategy.
Once that structure is in place, strategic performance measures, project selection and prioritization, and program, process, technology, and workforce alignment become much easier and more defensible. A concise, one-page balanced strategic plan clearly communicates goals, direction, priorities, and accountability to leaders and employees.
The example shown here is an international energy company. If you work in a government or nonprofit, see the government and nonprofit editions of this article for sector-specific examples.
The Strategic Prioritization Process
In the figure above, the rightmost column is the result of a disciplined prioritization process, with initiatives linked directly to company strategy. The steps are:
- Identify potential projects (initiatives) – create the starting list of potential investments
- Develop strategy-supporting selection criteria and a project proposal template – create a level playing field for evaluation
- Describe candidate projects using the template – understand project benefits, costs, and strategic impact
- Select a prioritization ranking framework – promote consistency and build consensus
- Consider additional influencing factors – apply informed judgement (for example, political priorities or regulatory requirements) to analytical results
- Rank projects against the selection criteria – create A list, B list, and C list project portfolios for budget discussions
- Fund prioritized projects based on available resources – build the STRATEX, CAPEX, and OPEX budgets
Improving Strategy Execution in Business
We have used this strategic prioritization approach successfully with private-sector clients in many industries and countries over the past 25 years. Companies that adopt this approach build more defensible portfolios of projects – with a logical way of saying “yes” to initiatives that support strategy and a clear, evidence-based way of saying “no” to those that do not.
If you want to start with the end in mind, use strategy DNA to improve project selection and prioritization and to improve customer and financial outcomes, consider attending one of our facilitation workshops or our professional certification programs, offered worldwide in conjunction with George Washington University College of Professional Studies:
Strategy Execution Professional
Key Performance Indicator Professional
Balanced Scorecard Professional
OKR Professional
Howard Rohm is President & Co-Founder of Balanced Scorecard Institute, a Strategy Management Group company. Howard is an author, performance management trainer and consultant, technologist, and keynote speaker with over 40 years’ experience.