15 Questions to Help Create A Minimum Viable Strategy

Removing the Guesswork out of Locating Your North Star

Walt Disney Co. has taken nearly 100 years to execute its strategic plan. Following the masterful acquisitions of Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox, there can little doubt that the production powerhouse has realized the bold vision it crafted back in 1923: to become the “world’s leading producers and providers of entertainment and information.” Showing no signs of slowing down, Disney is delivering on its mission to “develop the most creative, innovative and profitable entertainment experiences and related products in the world.”

For your organization to succeed, everyone aboard needs to align with its vision, mission, values, purpose, and principles. Gallup’s 2016 report, How Millennials Want to Work and Live, found that only 40 percent of millennial employees surveyed felt firmly connected to their company’s strategic objectives. It’s a disturbing disconnect that I’ve watched play out time-and-again, especially among well-intentioned teams: leadership gets caught up in a reactive workflow and develops active inertia resulting in a lack of direction. This in turn produces aimless and disengaged employees, ultimately causing the organization to stagnate, or worse, fail. No strategy, no success. But if crafting a strategy is so crucial, why are so many organizations finding it challenging? More often than not, I’ve seen that leaders either overestimate the challenge or simply don’t know where to start.

Whether I’ve been tinkering with my own companies or consulting for my clients, over the years, I’ve returned to this article from Harvard Business Review to find my bearings. While the piece does a great job of clarifying the differences between the several components of a strategy (mission, vision, values, purpose, and principles), it’s not as actionable as I prefer. Therefore, in order kickstart the strategy discovery process, I crafted a handy set of questions for teams to quickly assemble a minimum viable strategy —just enough structure to guide the organization, but not so much as to make structures, goals and ways of working too rigid. Here they are:

VISION: The organization’s dreams of the distant future.

1. What do we want people to say about our organization 100 years from now?
2. What is the perfect version of our organization?
3. If we had all the resources in the world, what would be different about us?

MISSION: The business the organization is in (and isn’t).

4. What exactly is the business we’re in?
5. What exactly is the business we’re not in (but often get confused for)?
6. Who are the people we serve?

VALUES: The organization’s desired culture.

7. What are the values we believe/practice that make us effective?
8. What are the values we believe/practice that make us likeable?
9. What are the values we believe/practice that make us great?

PRINCIPLES: The employees’ set of directions.

10. How do we express our values?
11. What are some things that our leaders preach?
12. What are we passionate about?

PURPOSE: The organization’s impact on the lives of its end users.

13. How do we impact the lives of our end users?
14. How is the world a better place because we exist?
15. What is the legacy we’re likely to leave?

Now you might be thinking, “my organization is already succeeding without a clearly defined strategy.” Well, if your organization is already doing well, there’s a good chance that you’re already guided by some semblance of mission, vision, values, principles, and purpose. All you need to do now is write them down, and give them to your team to get them on board and keep them engaged and aligned. You might also be thinking, “how do I make this actionable?” Easy — the shared language which takes shape should be given to every single employee, and the text should find itself physically across touch-points in the organizations, such as walls, beams, stickers, sites, etc. And if it gets hokey and people start using it jokingly, you’re doing it right.

Articulating your organization’s strategy, no matter how minimally, is an act of discovery that can help you uncover things that you previously may not have otherwise known. And well-articulated strategies enable you to get to know yourselves better and to discover your reason for being. Know yourself in order to increase your chances of success.

Gather your team and critically think about who you are and why you matter.