Strategy Sprint at IRT
Cards are being redistributed quickly in our current business world. Geeks working out of their parents’ garage have built empires while former business empires have walked all the way into obsolescence.
In Australia where I live the Aged Care sector is ongoing massive change triggered by legislative and regulatory changes, by a shift in customer behaviours and, like so many other sectors, by technology (robotics, wearables, etc.)
As long as the sector had been massively government funded, all aged care providers shared pretty much the same business model. Strategy was a secondary question then, sometimes an absent one, and when the strategy question popped up it was either about the company’s positioning on the quality spectrum or about resource allocation for a “strategic” efficiency initiative. But now it has all changed, and for incumbents in the Aged Care sector the strategy question is a business survival matter.
In Q3 2016, Gy Wallace and I started to work together on the strategy for the In-Home Care business at IRT. Gy had just been appointed CEO of IRT’s In-Home Care business and felt the business was missing the required clarity, sense of purpose and focus that a strategy could bring. In some ways, his business was keeping its head in the sand, not ready for the next curve balls thrown out by our VUCA world. Gy was ready to try something new.
Together we drafted design principles for the strategy work. The strategy was to be designed via a collaborative, iterative process, showing regular, tangible progress. The strategy had to bring clarity (no fluff), had to address challenges of the future and be prescriptive on immediate actions.
Ever since I discovered Agile methodologies, and particularly Scrum, I had the intuition that this framework would be ideal for strategy work. (For more on Agile, you can refer to my blogpost “Could Agile be the Trojan horse for a bottom-up business transformation?) Scrum defines itself as “a simple yet incredibly powerful set of principles and practices that help teams deliver products in short cycles, enabling fast feedback, continual improvement, and rapid adaptation to change.” So, thinking of the strategy as the product, we took inspiration from Scrum for the mechanics of our Strategy Sprint, and designed 3 iterations of 3 weeks each, with a small but empowered team of 3 dedicating 3 days per week plus I, acting as ScrumMaster. In the first iteration of work, we made time stop for the team to go on an exploration, a deep dive into current shifts in the Aged Care sector, their learnings from the In-Home Care business journey in the last few years, customers’ feedback, as well as their own aspirations as leaders for the future. This iteration led them to a deeper and different understanding of the problem they were trying to solve with a strategy. The second iteration was all about prototyping and getting feedback. How could the various challenges identified be solved? A lot of “what if?” questions and scenarios for the future. The third iteration was about defining precise action plans for the various parts of their strategy that had survived the prototyping phase.
This Strategy Sprint ended up covering all elements of Richard Rumelt’s strategy kernel described in his book Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It matters.
“The kernel of a strategy contains three elements:
(1) a diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge,
(2) a guiding-policy for dealing with the challenge, and
(3) a set of coherent-actions that are designed to carry out the guiding-policy.”
– Richard Rumelt.
So, the engine was there but did it fire up? What was the outcome of the Strategy Sprint?
This Agile, collaborative process Gy and I had co-designed did produce the desired outcome. On the last day of the third iteration, Gy presented the In-Home Care strategy to a room full of his key stakeholders. The Strategy Sprint was fast (9 weeks), cost-efficient (around 100 man days), the strategy was fully owned by Gy’s close team and endorsed by key stakeholders within IRT Group. The following week, Gy was ready to take the road to present the new strategy in the different regional offices.
