Strategy Mapping

Imagine that you are a general taking your troops into foreign territory. Obviously, you would need detailed maps showing the important towns and villages, the surrounding landscape, key structures like bridges and tunnels, and the roads and highways that traverse the region. Without such information, you couldn’t communicate your campaign strategy to your field officers and the rest of your troops.

Unfortunately, many top executives are trying to do just that. When attempting to implement their business strategies, they give employees only limited descriptions of what they should do and why those tasks are important. Without clearer and more detailed information, it’s no wonder that many companies have failed in executing their strategies. After all, how can people carry out a plan that they don’t fully understand? Organizations need tools for communicating both their strategy and the processes and systems that will help them implement that strategy.

Strategy maps provide such a tool. They give employees a clear line of sight into how their jobs are linked to the overall objectives of the organization, enabling them to work in a coordinated, collaborative fashion toward the company’s desired goals. The maps provide a visual representation of a company’s critical objectives and the crucial relationships among them that drive organizational performance.

Strategy maps can depict objectives for revenue growth; targeted customer markets in which profitable growth will occur; value propositions that will lead to customers doing more business and at higher margins; the key role of innovation and excellence in products, services, and processes; and the investments required in people and systems to generate and sustain the projected growth.

Strategy maps show the cause-and-effect links by which specific improvements create desired outcomes—for example, how faster process-cycle times and enhanced employee capabilities will increase retention of customers and thus increase a company’s revenues.

From a larger perspective, strategy maps show how an organization will convert its initiatives and resources—including intangible assets such as corporate culture and employee knowledge—into tangible outcomes.

Why Strategy Maps?

In the industrial age, companies created value by transforming raw materials into finished products. The economy was primarily based on tangible assets—inventory, land, factories, and equipment—and an organization could describe and document its business strategy by using financial tools such as general ledgers, income statements, and balance sheets.

In the information age, businesses must increasingly create and deploy intangible assets—for instance, customer relationships; employee skills and knowledge; information technologies; and a corporate culture that encourages innovation, problem solving, and general organizational improvements.