© 2021, Barry Linetsky & Dobri Stojsic. All Rights Reserved.
While nobody likes to admit it, it is common for executives to put off investing in corporate infrastructure due to pressures to reduce costs and boost the bottom line. Perhaps the reluctance to invest in internal infrastructure is related to higher investment priorities, cashflow issues, or simply a lack of appetite or capacity for the kind of disruption required to upgrade systems, processes, or training.
We have found over the years that after executives have identified their CSFs, they sometimes discovered that there are existing constraints in some areas or in a whole set of elements foundational to successfully executing on the CSFs. We refer to these elements of infrastructure, policies, technologies, or skills as Foundational Strategic Enablers.
Foundational strategic enablers are elements of your business that must be in place and to which you must have a certain degree of competency in performing in order to achieve the CSFs you have identified. They arenotCSFs. Rather, they are necessary to support your CSFs.
Foundational strategic enablers tend to be skills and capabilities rather than strategies. Yes, they are critical by virtue of the need to have them in place to achieve your CSFs, but they are not mission-critical strategies in themselves, hence their status as being ‘foundational.’ You can think of them as required 'core competencies.'
Here is an example of foundational strategic enablers identified by a large Canadian insurance company:
While the achievement of CSFs almost always requires broad organization-wide cooperation to achieve, accountability for foundational organizational enablers more often fall to a single function to coordinate and manage and are often related to internal policies, procedures, and back-office technology.
Once these issues of process or skill deficiencies were identified as a common problem for our clients, we decided to create a place in our strategic planning process to talk about these issues with the executive team, because they affect the ability to effectively execute. In our judgment, the best place for this in the process was immediately following the identification of the CSFs.
Why was this the proper place? Why not wait until later in the process when we would spend time identifying the strategic initiatives and action items?
For the majority of our clients, involvement in the creation of the strategic framework consisted of the CEO and the executive team, without a larger group of subordinate direct reports which we recommend be involved later in the process to brainstorm the strategic initiatives needed to close the gaps and drive the CSFs to achieve the mission. In our judgement, a serious and confidential discussion about systemic corporate shortcomings could be held without embarrassment amongst this group without finger-pointing and ascribing blame, and without a larger group of more junior managers who would mostly participate as silent observers.
Our definition of foundational strategic enablers is as follows:
Foundational strategic enablers are capabilities, capacities, and resources that contribute to the operating effectiveness of an organization or longer-term program needed to effectively execute the strategic plan.
This article is adapted fromUnderstanding and Creating Critical Success Factors, co-written by Barry Linetsky and Dobri Stojsic of the Toronto-based The Strategic Planning Group (tspg-consulting.com), and is available through amazon. It is the third in our Painless Strategic Planning series of strategic planning manuals for executives and managers who seek a better understanding of how to navigate through the facilitation and development of a strategic plan or business plan.
