Category: Starting a Business

The Drivers Model is Leadership Strategies’ methodology for strategic planning and the ultimate tool for masterful planning. The Drivers Model process covers seven key principles for masterfully planning any activity. The seven principles are summarized below. Let’s break down each one.

Seven Principles of Masterful Planning
1. Be clear on purpose.
2. Start with an accurate assessment of today.
3. Create a shared vision of success.
4. Identify your critical successful factors and barriers.
5. Define the drivers: your strategies and priorities.
6. Monitor and report results.
7. Have rewards and consequences to build accountability.

1. Be clear on purpose.

With any activity, start with purpose: Why are we doing this? With the house example, our purpose was to find a house that was more suitable to our needs. Purpose always answers the question why.

2. Start with an accurate assessment of where you are today.

You should always start with an accurate assessment of where you are today. Why is that important? Because you may think that you have overcome certain barriers when you really haven’t.
Perhaps an example will illustrate the importance of starting with an accurate picture of today. Let’s say you wanted to drive from Atlanta, in the southeastern United States, to Los Angeles, on the west coast. You would have to drive west to get there. But what if your perception was that you were in Atlanta but, in reality, you were in Seattle also on the west coast. What happens when you drive west? Let’s just say you might end up a little wet, which probably was not part of your vision. So, you may create a compelling vision of where you want to be. However, if you do not clearly define where you are today, you may end up thinking you are outside certain barriers. As a result, you can end up doing the wrong things and not getting the result you want. Therefore, key point number one is that you must start with an accurate assessment of where you are today.

3. Create a shared vision.

Once you have an accurate picture of today, you then create a shared vision. Not just a vision, but a shared vision. You can probably imagine what would have happened if I and my wife had a different vision of the type of home we wanted.

Yes, we would end up getting the house my wife wanted of course! But can you imagine the conflict and struggle along the way? Because we would want different things and would be pulling in different directions, many of the decisions we needed to make along the way would have resulted in a major fight over whose vision would prevail.

By creating a shared vision up front, we have the “fight” only once. Once the vision was created, we would be able to make decisions together in line with achieving that vision.

In many organizations there are entire departments that have different visions of where the organization needs to be. Imagine the chaos when each department goes off in a different direction. And sometimes those different directions are mutually exclusive – if one is successful, the other has to fail. What a waste – all resulting from lack of a shared vision.

4. Identify your critical success factors and barriers.

With that shared vision defined, principle number four is that you then focus on identifying the major barriers to achieving that vision. You ask yourself, “Why haven’t we achieved our vision already? What’s standing in our way? What’s keeping us where we are today?”

Then, you must understand your critical success factors. What’s critical to getting you where you want to be? What are the key conditions which, if you create them, will drive achievement of the vision?

5. Define your drivers.

After identifying your barriers and critical success factors, principle number five is to define your drivers. What are the key strategies that are going to get you to your vision? Remember that the strategies have to address each of the barriers and critical success factors.

6. Monitor.

With principle six, you monitor your progress to keep on track and stay motivated to achieve your vision.

7. Have rewards and consequences to build accountability.

Finally, be sure to have rewards and consequences to build accountability. Even with a monitoring process, if there is no form accountability people quickly learn that it is not essential to perform.

Learn more on strategic planning and the Drivers Model with this helpful tool: A Quick How-To on Strategic Planning

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Certified Master Facilitator Michael Wilkinson is the CEO and Managing Director of Leadership Strategies, Inc., The Facilitation Company and author of the new The Secrets of Facilitation 2nd Edition, The Secrets to Masterful Meetings, and The Executive Guide to Facilitating Strategy. Leadership Strategies is a global leader in facilitation services, providing companies with dynamic professional facilitators who lead executive teams and task forces in areas like strategic planning, issue resolution, process improvement and others. The company is also a leading provider of facilitation training in the United States.

Want to start a small business, but missing some skills? Here’s one option: take some online classes, where you might learn what you need, for a fraction of the time and cost. Improve your business plan AND your business.

There are 100s of web-based business classes, many of them free (open source) or for a small fee. Many are taught through world-class universities, and offer more interactivity than you would get if you attended classes there.

Online Business Classes

Check out a few of them in “What’s Available Online?” Might just be one there for you.

Good luck!

• Copyright © 2013 Rolfe Larson Associates
• Social Impact App, find social enterprises nearby and online
• Venture Forth! endorsed by Paul Newman of Newman’s Own
• Speaker, Social Enterprise Summit, Minneapolis, May 19-22, 2013

When considering whether to invest in a company, bankers and venture capitalists look first at the entrepreneur, then at the plan. They invest in people, not plans. It’s not the content of the plan that matters, but rather what it says about the entrepreneur — how she thinks, how she collects confirming and disconfirming data, how she uses it to build a strategy for success, how she builds a team. Continue reading “Your Business Plan is About You”

As you take on strategy development, a critical step is to ensure that you and your team have a common understanding of the language of strategy and a solid process to carry you through strategy development.

It is important to put the language and process in place early to avoid the confusion, debates and the wasted time that comes from a lack of agreed upon approach and definitions.

The Drivers Model is the tool I have been using for over two decades to provide a robust yet simple method for taking an organization through strategic planning, project planning, program planning and numerous other planning activities.

The Drivers Model is fully scalable and applies to Fortune 500 companies, non-profit organizations and government agencies, as well as an entire enterprise, a business unit, a field office, an individual department, or a work team.

Let’s start with the four key strategy questions the Drivers Model answers.

Question 1: Where are we today?

The Drivers Model focuses on four core strategic questions starting with, “Where are we today?” Start by looking at the current situation’s strengths and weaknesses.

Question 2: Where do we want to be?

After understanding where you are, the next step is to understand where you want to be. In this step, you create your vision of the future.

Question 3: How do we get there?

Once you have created your vision, you are ready to turn to defining your drivers – the actions you will undertake to drive your success. Your drivers have to do two important things. First, the reason you are where you are is because there are certain barriers standing between you and your vision.

Your drivers must break through those barriers. Second, along with overcoming barriers, the drivers must also address the critical success factors (CSFs). The Drivers Model defines CSFs are those key conditions that must be created to achieve the vision.

Question 4: How will we monitor our progress?

Monitoring is critical to ensure that you stay on track. Monitoring also allows you to make adjustments along the way as you learn new information, encounter new barriers or identify other critical success factors. But perhaps most importantly, monitoring keeps you motivated.

Typically, it takes considerable effort to move from where you are today to where you want to be. The monitoring process helps keep your vision in front of you and can give you the continual motivation needed to implement the drivers.

These critical questions provide the foundation of the Drivers Model and guide a group during the strategic planning process. In my book The Executive Guide to Facilitating Strategy, I apply these questions using an example of my wife and me seeking to buy a house. How would you answer these questions if you were considering buying a house?

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Certified Master Facilitator Michael Wilkinson is the CEO and Managing Director of Leadership Strategies, Inc., The Facilitation Company and author of the new The Secrets of Facilitation 2nd Edition, The Secrets to Masterful Meetings, and The Executive Guide to Facilitating Strategy. Leadership Strategies is a global leader in facilitation services, providing companies with dynamic professional facilitators who lead executive teams and task forces in areas like strategic planning, issue resolution, process improvement and others. The company is also a leading provider of facilitation training in the United States.

With the emergence of so many “social businesses,” there’s been a widening distinction made with what many people are now calling non-social businesses. The distinction is that social businesses are built around a heroic mission to make the world a better place, while their non-social cousins exist for a crass purpose — solely to make a profit.

Continue reading “All Business (Plans) Are Social”

Two critical components of the Drivers Model are the mission and the vision. When it comes to strategy, do you know the difference between the two? (And, yes, there is a difference!)

Mission

How we at Leadership Strategies define “mission”:

	Definition	Example (Meeting Planners Association)
Mission	A statement of the overall purpose of an organization which describes what you do, for whom you do it and the benefit.	To provide a forum for furthering the growth and professionalism of the meetings industry.

A mission statement answers three simple questions:

1. What do you do?
2. For whom do you do it?
3. What is the benefit?

The mission statement above illustrates an excellent example of how a mission statement can answer the three questions in a succinct form.

1. What do they do? Provide a forum.
2. What’s the benefit? Furthering growth and professionalism.
3. Who benefits? The meetings industry.

Vision

Now, let’s contrast the difference between a mission statement and a vision statement.

	Definition	Example (Meeting Planners Association)
Vision	A picture of the “preferred future”; a statement that describes how the future will look if the organization fulfills its mission.	To be the place where meeting planners meet.

While a mission explains the overall purpose of the organization – what you do, for whom you do it and the benefit – a vision statement gives the picture of the preferred future. A vision statement answers the question, “If the organization fulfills its mission, what will the future look like?” In other words, the vision is a a statement that describes how the future will look if the organization meets its mission.

So, now that you understand the difference between the mission and the vision, you can appreciate why these two terms are not interchangeable.

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Certified Master Facilitator Michael Wilkinson is the CEO and Managing Director of Leadership Strategies, Inc., The Facilitation Company and author of the new The Secrets of Facilitation 2nd Edition, The Secrets to Masterful Meetings, and The Executive Guide to Facilitating Strategy. Leadership Strategies is a global leader in facilitation services, providing companies with dynamic professional facilitators who lead executive teams and task forces in areas like strategic planning, issue resolution, process improvement and others. The company is also a leading provider of facilitation training in the United States.