The Heart n Soul of strategy

If you have ever been subjected to presentations of strategy, had your objectives set on the basis of a strategy or even been involved in creating one, you are likely to approach the subject with anything from mild unease to outright derision, depending on your temperament and experience. Certainly I've lived under poor or ill-thought out strategies - enough to make me quite interested in getting professionally involved in formulating better ones.

A tougher nut to crack is that good strategies also sometimes fail. A well-formulated strategy should be based on a holistic view of an organisation's customers or users, its context and competitive environment and of course its vision and purpose. Crucially it should also take into account the organisation's resources, processes and culture - understanding that these internal factors provide both constraints and opportunities for the execution of a strategy. Building those internal constraints into strategy helps avoid silly mistakes and ground strategies in reality.

But even such a holistic approach doesn't guarantee against failure. In truth, nothing does. A new strategy is a bit like a new car, losing thousands in value as soon as it leaves the showroom. This is true squared when it comes to a strategy that aims at the fast-moving target of digital media. Worse, people tend to treat their cars better than their strategies, which often end up in drawers, ready to glance reproachfully at their sheepish curators if disturbed.

We in Unthinkable spend a lot of time thinking about how to bridge that gap between sparkly strategy and messy reality. There are some less desirable ways of doing this:

• Keep us coming back. Our advice was so good first time round, we've made ourselves indispensable. Great news for us, not so great for the client's budget.
• Make sure that the key individual who understands this stuff and is able to bring the organisation with him/her doesn't get a job elsewhere. (If they understand this stuff, they are likely to have opportunities.)
• Bake the strategy so deep into company processes and objectives that it hardens around the creativity of staff. Whatever you do, make sure that no one has the room for manoeuvre to depart from the strategy. 
• Or do the opposite. Ditch the strategy and get on with the day job in the hopes that things will work themselves out through improvisation and instinct.

We think there is another way, and it is part of what makes us different as a consultancy. We have had enough experience in enough different workplaces to know quite how messy reality is. Which brings us to Heart n Soul. I've made no secret of the fact that Heart n Soul are one of our favourite clients (though of course we love them all). This is partly because of the brilliant work that Heart n Soul do, partly because of their intelligence and radicalism as individuals and partly because they are so extremely civil and pleasant to work with.

But it's also because there has been a meeting of minds on our work with them that has opened the space for us to develop new process and thinking in just this gap between theory and practice. When Heart n Soul commissioned a five-year communications strategy from us, we couldn't help thinking of that new car leaving the showroom, and the junkyard of casualties where many once shiny strategies in our lives have ended up. So we persuaded them to come with us on the journey of minting a new piece of process and documentation.

Now, I ought to acknowledge that a lot of thoughtful people are active in this area. At the more complex end of the picture, this bridging work is often termed service design and entails very detailed and formal analyses of what happens inside organisations, or between companies and their customers. Agencies like Engine and Fjord are establishing reputations in this area, and we certainly take an active interest in developments and see ourselves as part of this world. Indeed, we have been using the term "service design" to help describe our work on this website since we opened for business.

But we know that for many of our clients, a detailed, forensic and process-heavy approach to bridging strategy and reality just isn't feasible in terms of time, money or culture. So, for Heart n Soul we came up with a pragmatic, light-touch approach to the same problem. We called it a "strategic toolkit". It's a document that enshrines a set of actions and challenges designed to renew the strategy periodically at several levels, translate it into tangible short-term objectives and evaluate its success year to year. (The equivalent of a service plan for our car, but where the owner doesn't have to pay through the nose to the dealer to keep their vehicle on the road.)

We wanted to leave Heart n Soul with a tool that would be the nearest thing to having us and our difficult questions in the room with them, without making them dependent on having us back every year. And I'm confident they can make this work. It would be remiss not to admit that my confidence stems in part from my respect for the individuals in the organisation. But more importantly, there is a durable culture at Heart n Soul that we know will see it through many changes, despite the small size of the organisation.

One of the frustrations of the job for me at the moment is that we are all so busy with client work that we are moving more slowly than we would like in articulating changes and developments in our own service offering. Thus this post: if a lot of new thinking for our website and pitching process is still under wraps, at least I can lift up the corner of the paper.

And yes, I'm aware of the irony here. We talked when we launched last year about how we were now taking a more strategic approach as a company. That's true - and we are now increasingly determined to practise what we preach in the transmission of that strategy to our day-to-day reality. It's as if we have built our own car, driven it out of the showroom, provided ourselves with the tech spec and a set of monkey wrenches and... OK, please stop me now.