Subject: Strategy Spagetti

Hi Iain,

If you are talking about presentation tools which are visually stimulating and allows you to flow content together try out Prezi it is free and pretty intuitive.

Damien

Thanks Damien -that is pretty whizzy.  Its more of a template for building and then presenting all the organisational strategies in one clear table that I am after.

You might like to take a quick look at a piece of (free) software called Compendium, which is designed to explore and map issues a bit like yours. It's an open-source piece of software that you can run on a PC (or Mac, or whatever), maintained by the Compendium Institute at the Open University and it can be freely downloaded.

The Institute is academic and the description may sound a bit daunting, but I've used Compendium out of the box within an hour and was being productive within two without knowing any theory about Dialogue Mapping or Issue-Based Information systems..

And just thinking about what you'd map (rather than how), I've seen nonprofits organise things in different ways, mostly dependent on the nature of your strategic priorities (or whatever you call them - aims, objectives, whatever). 

Some organisations have cross cutting strategic priorities - which are truly 'corporate' (in the sense of across the whole body of the organisation), and to which each team (events, services, income generation etc) make a different contribution.  Here the strategic priorities have the function of unifying the whole organisation's contribution.  In this case a very convincing approach is to use something like a mapping tool to show what/how each contributes in a kind of hierarchical way. Presentation needs to be about how the whole fits together - and something like a wordstorm map or a table would do that.

If you have strategic priorities that are less corporate and perhaps more focussed on strategic areas of delivery - so a priority for income generation that only really the IG team would feel is relevent to them - then its easier.  My preference for large(r) organisations would be for cross cutting, unifying priorities - though they are complicated - they do unify and encourage cross organisation teamworking, which has to stimulate optimum conditions for effectiveness.  Have had a go demonstating this in the attached Powerpoint (made using MS Visio's 'brainstorming' tool).  A big attraction of Visio for me was that it could easily be made to look like spaghetti - and I love that metaphor - thank you!

I've also seen examples of a similar approach to 'corporate' scorecards with linked departmental ones - structured in the same way as above - in a kind of hierarchical way - but joined so that at a governance level performance of the whole can been assessed.  Scorecard theory (so as an example, Kaplan and Norton's Execution Premium) show the facility to take scorecards down to the level of the individual worker - though you'd probably be just as effective simply taking the strategic conversation down to that level!  But at their best, scorecards are a very good way of making what has to be achieved to make the difference/add value etc very visual indeed.

It would be great if someone could upload some real examples.....