Your problem is that:
• You need a way of quickly 'looking into' the organization(s) you control
• The traditional tools your have used are long text-based documents which are inaccessible or short text-based summaries which are too simplistic
Your solution is:
- To recognize the power of: 'a picture tells a thousand words'.
- Get your staff to use DoView Visual Planning and produce for you a visual 'Outcomes DoView' of your organization. This is a visual model of your outcomes and the projects they're doing to achieve them.
- If you work out how to use it properly, you'll have an 'X-Ray' of your organization which you can then use to quickly peer into it to see if everything is aligned and on track
- Always insist that they discuss organizational strategy, priorities and results by working directly with this model and you will get past your current problem of a barrage of irrelevant information or overly simplistic reporting
How can you work out 'what is actually going on' in your organization?
While you're responsible for controlling your organization, you usually have very little time to work out exactly what's going on in its bowels. Any responsible leader finds this scary because they're being held responsible for its actions without having a tight mechanism to ensure that things are on track. In cases where you're responsible for more than one organization, and where such organizations are large, your job can be really daunting.
At one extreme your staff bombard you with long written inaccessible reports, while, at the other, they give you brief summary reports which oten don't contain enough meat for you to figure out exactly what's really going on.
The visual solution - 'looking into' your organization
What you need is a new way of actually 'looking into' the organization(s) you are responsible for. Recognizing that a picture is worth a thousand words, DoView Visual Planning lets you do exactly this. You can then 'drill-down' into any area as far as you want, to see what is going on.
How does it work?
Your organization builds a visual Outcomes DoView using DoView outcomes software. This DoView is a picture with boxes on the right showing all of the higher-level outcomes you are seeking and moving to the left, all of the lower-level steps you need to get to your final destination.
The organization's current priorities (e.g. for the next year) are then mapped onto the DoView. What do you get from this? You get a way of immediately seeing what your organization's priorities are and you can quickly work out if these are also your priorities.
The next stage is for your organization to map its activities/projects onto the DoView. What do you get from this? This mapping lets you immediately check for 'line-of-sight' between what the organization is actually doing on the ground and the outcome priorities which have been shown on the higher-level outcomes within the DoView.
The DoView can also be used for many other purposes. For example, mapping performance indicators next to the boxes that they measure; identifying which performance indicators are controllable by your organization (and are therefore its direct KPI accountabilities); putting evaluation questions next to the boxes they relate to; and for visually reporting back results in a visual dashboard format.
The end result is that by your and your organization learning to work with a visual Outcomes DoView you suddenly have a transparent way quickly 'peering into' your organization. This was something that you could not do anywhere as fast by just using traditional text and table strategic planning documentation.
What does it require of you?
The approach does not try to over-simplify the complexity which you have to deal with in leading organizations. Dealing with complexity is part of why you enjoy being a leader. What it does do, however, is to provide with the most efficient tool for managing this level of complexity.
For a largish organizational Outcomes DoView, it will take you about ten minutes to familiarize yourself with how it works. You need to put in this time to get the most out of using your Outcomes DoView.. However you will get this time back in increased efficiency in the future when you want to quickly find out exactly what your organization is doing and get it to do what you want it to do.
If the DoView is kept up-do-date, whenever you want to very quickly overview what's happening, you can immediately look through it to refresh your memory of what's being done. The idea is that the DoView is then used for all strategic and other discussions. The time saved in the future will more than repay the ten minutes or so of concentrated time you need to initially find your way around it.
Having a completed Outcomes DoView is also a wonderful way of demonstrating that you have ensured that the organization has total clarity about its outcomes, priorities and strategic alignment of its projects.
As a leader you will have put the time into teaching yourself to understand how organizational accounting reports. To understand how organizational Outcomes DoViews work take you a fraction of this time. And you will be able to sleep at night knowing that you have, and more importantly you can prove that you have, organizational alignment around outcomes.
What does it cost?
Building a DoView for an organization should be thought of as similar to investing in setting up an accounting system - but at a fraction of the cost. DoView software which is used, is affordable as it's widely used by a range of organizations large and small. However, the main investment is in getting the DoView initially built by your organization. It is also really important that your organization invests in training its staff in how to use and update their DoView so that at any time you can use it to get an up-to-date snapshot of exactly what is going on.
Using an Outcomes DoView for a whole sector
Some leaders find themselves not just leading a single organization, but having to overview entire sectors involving multiple projects and multiple organizations attempting to achieve similar outcomes. This is a significant leadership challenge and the traditional tools - using lengthy text-based documents and tables setting out long lists of projects which you have to somehow make sense of - just does not work. At best you get a patchy picture of what's going on.
The DoView Visual Planning approach, when applied to a sector, starts by building a visual model of the destination where the sector wants to get to and all of the steps which need to be taken to get there. The projects which are being undertaken are then visually mapped onto the outcomes in the visual model. This immediately shows whether the current mix of projects is focused on sector priorities (it is called showing 'line-of-sight' and it allows you to very quickly identify gaps and overlaps in the current mix of activity.
Obviously, this visual approach is ideal for forming the basis for sector-wide strategic discussions with other stakeholders.
Where to from here?
Get your staff to look at this OutcomesCentral.org website where they will find resources for using the DoView Visual Planning approach.
A simple overview DoView
A detail from a DoView, showing priorities (A, B, C) and the number of projects focused on each priority (the white numbers in small gray boxes).
A poster version of a sector-wide DoView showing shared outcomes; projects (in gray), and the organizations undertaking the projects (the line of boxes with logos along the bottom). When you work with the electronic DoView software version of an Outcomes DoView you can easily navigate around it and drill-down to ensure that sector projects are tightly focused on current priorities. Is the diagram below complex? Yes. But that level of complexity exists within many sectors. Can working with an electronic version of a DoView easily make this level of complexity relatively easy to handle? Yes. Leaders who are unwilling to use appropriate tools to deal with the level of complexity involved in coordinating sector activity aren't making the complexity go away - they're just failing to grapple with it.
Remember, resources that your staff need to implement the DoView Visual Planning approach are available from this OutcomesCentral.org website. If you have more questions don't hesitate to contact us using the Contact form on this site.
This page is available from http://resultsroadmap.com/leaders.html