Building Out the Plan—The Foundation of Everything

It’s critical that the competitive strategy doesn’t get lost or diluted in the rush to identify action.

This is the first and most foundational area of the Middle Ground®. Without this step done well, everything else—engagement, change management, measurement, capability building—becomes guesswork.

Why the Plan Is THE Foundation

Building out the plan to preserve the strategy’s winning edge is the critical first step in translating strategy into executable form. This Middle Ground™ plan becomes the foundation for all Middle Ground™ work.

The exploration and articulation of the Middle Ground® is the missing piece. It’s the process by which we identify the bodies of work required to deliver on strategy—culturally, structurally, process-wise, capacity and capability-wise. This by default involves change.

It forces us to clarify what we really mean by different strategic decisions and, as a result, builds a crisper, more commonly understood appreciation of the strategy itself. It allows us to consider and choose between multiple options for delivering strategic imperatives. It brings us hard up against our current capability and capacity constraints and allows us to make resourcing, sequencing, and prioritization decisions within a strategic context.

The Strategic Pillars Framework

The plan begins with strategy being articulated in terms of four to six strategic pillars—occasionally more, but a tight critical few is better. These pillars need to capture the primary drivers of growth, differentiation, and the development of core capabilities essential for supporting a winning strategy.

The strategic pillars provide important scaffolding to define what success will look like at specific points in time—say in three or five years to set the horizon, then step back in time to define what success in one year looks like.

One manufacturing client started with four strategic priorities: “Expand into adjacent product categories,” “Dominate a specific market segment,” “Launch a new service line,” and “Assess and pursue geographic expansion.” Later that year, a new CEO took over. During the strategy session, key team members were concerned that the core business—still representing over 90% of revenues—wasn’t visible in the strategy. Attention had slipped, and performance was following suit. The team realized the core business had to become an additional strategic pillar: “Protect and grow the core business.” What gets attention and gets measured counts.

Pictures of Success Drive Initiatives

This is an envisioning exercise and necessarily imperfect. However, it improves your thinking when you step back to today. The combination of strategic pillars and pictures of success for specific, key points in time guides the identification of key initiatives, essential investments, and required capacity and capability.

Enough clarity regarding the strategy is the start. Then enough clarity of the Middle Ground® plan is an essential next step to set yourselves up for execution.

The Middle Ground® Is Where Decisions Get Made

The Middle Ground™ is where all the negotiations occur—where the trade-off decisions and choices are made. This can’t happen at the conceptual level of strategy, and equally can’t happen at the task level.

We frequently hear clients bemoaning the number of projects underway, asking: “How do we prioritize?” “How do we say no to things?”

Too much activity and inability to prioritize are the two primary factors stemming from lack of clarity regarding strategy and weakness in the Middle Ground™ plan. Aligned prioritization cannot occur without these two factors addressed.

What Aligned Prioritization Enables

Without a well-built plan, you cannot:

• Effectively engage hearts, minds, and hands across the organization
• Understand the true magnitude and nature of change required
• Establish meaningful measurements that matter
• Build institutional capability that endures
• Align culture with strategy execution

The plan is not just a list of activities. It’s the architecture that makes every other aspect of the Middle Ground® possible.

The Bottom Line

Middle Ground™ work is very substantial and most often underestimated in terms of expertise, effort, and investment required. Building out the plan is where it all starts. Get this right, and everything else becomes possible. Get this wrong, and even your best efforts in the other five areas will fall short.

Can your team clearly articulate the four to six strategic pillars that will drive your next stage of growth, and the key initiatives under each?