An "organizational strategy" (aka "transformation strategy") describes the changes you plan to make in organizational systems such as structure, culture, metrics, and resource-governance processes to achieve your vision of the organization of the future.

Step 1: Visionary Expectations Workshop: consensus within the leadership team on a clearly worded, detailed vision of the organization that will result from the transformation process.

This training and visioning workshop builds on the cumulative work of over a thousand executives in a variety of corporate, government, and not-for-profit institutions over a period of 30 years.

Step 2: Gap Assessment: assessment by your leadership team of the current organization's "grades" on each of their vision statements.

Step 3: Gaps may be validated by input from a broad cross-section of staff and key clients. If you take the time to do this, these two key constituents feel heard and are part of the process. And it improves the odds that the plan will address their concerns. This builds their buy-in.

An "Open Space" Workshop format can be used to gather widespread staff input about concerns gathered in an efficient one-day event that is carefully constructed and facilitated to create a safe, open environment and to capture all staff's comments.

Client Interviews: [optional] Private interviews with key clients at the executive level to gather their concerns about the organization's performance and relationship with their business units.

Step 4: Linking: Linking all staff and client concerns to the vision statements and gaps, perhaps causing a reassessment of the gaps.

Step 5: Root-cause Education and Facilitation: analysis of the root-causes of each gap, leading to agreement on what needs to be fixed.

Root cause analysis is quite distinct from "best practices" where organizations mimic one another. In one study, leaders in three different companies expressed the same goal and the same concerns. But root cause analysis revealed three very different problems to solve, three different obstacles to achieving the same goal.

Had one leader resorted to best practices and imitated the solution implemented by another, he/she would not have solved that organization's unique problems. This is an example of how best practices can, in fact, be worst practices!

While it's good to learn from others, real leadership involves understanding your unique challenges and addressing them at the systematic, not the symptomatic, level.

If done as a team, this imparts a key skill of leadership: understanding the organizational dynamics that would cause the good people to perform below their aspirations.

Step 6: Planning Workshop: clustering root causes into corrective actions, then sequencing the corrective actions based on both urgency and technical interdependencies; results in a consensus on an action plan -- your organizational strategy.

Step 7: Communications Plan: plan to communicate the vision, gaps, and action plan to all staff and to clients.

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