Strategy Blueprint Revised

Ever feel like your strategy meetings are more about paperwork than progress? Ever come out of a strategy briefing more confused than before you went in? There’s a reason for that.

Put simply: the nature of strategy has changed but our approach to creating it hasn’t. Core to the problem, I believe, are the many divergent perspectives on what “strategy” is. The term gets tossed around so much, it’s lost its importance and impact.

On the one hand, strategy gets confused with analysis. This includes everything from market size to technical assessments to financial prognosis. The result is often reports that fill up dozens of pages (often by high-paid consultants).

On the other hand, strategy more often gets conflated with planning. You’ve probably witnessed annual strategy retreats in your organization, where leaders spend several days forging plans for the upcoming year. They then emerge from seclusion with detailed roadmaps and financial plans that become quickly obsolete.

Analysis and planning, while necessary inputs and outputs in the strategy creation process, are not the core of strategy. You can’t analyze your way to strategy: the answers don’t magically emerge from data. And detailed roadmaps don’t provide the rationale for the activities they organize. Strategy does.

Strategy is about devising a way of overcoming key challenges to reach a desired position from which new growth opportunities can emerge. It is, in part, a creative endeavor, not based on analysis and planning alone. In this sense, strategy is the logic that connects analysis and planning. Ultimately, it’s how your organization makes sense of its actions and decisions over time while showing the path forward for sustained growth.

Skipping the step of creating a strategic rationale connecting analysis to planning has consequences later on. Don’t assume that everyone knows why they are doing what they do. Getting teams aligned is critical for achieving strategic success; a good strategy is the bedrock of getting there.

Who creates strategy, then, has also changed. While key leaders may ultimately be the deciders, involving others and a diversity of perspectives is needed now more than ever. Why? But the nature of organizations has changed along with the nature of competition. The tools and processes that got us here won’t get us to where we need to go. Enter the Strategy Blueprint.

Revising the Strategy Blueprint

I developed the strategy blueprint in 2014 as a tool to visualize the central rationale of strategy. In those ten years, I’ve not only used it extensively in my own work but have also gotten feedback from many of you who brought it to the strategy table. And, as a popular template in the Mural library, I’ve seen how it gets applied across regions, industries, and markets.

From these observations, I’ve gleaned a few learnings that I’ve incorporated into a revised version of the blueprint and into this post. Fundamentally, the structure of the canvas stays the same, but the labels and prompts have been updated. My intent here is to clarify each section of the canvas and also avoid confusion with other frameworks I work with, primarily jobs to be done (JTBD). I’ve also learned more about the benefits and value of using the Strategy Blueprint to align teams, which I share below.

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Strategy Blueprint by Jim Kalbach, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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The elements in the strategy blueprint are based on research in the field. First, it borrows from Henry Mintzberg’s five Ps of strategy from his book Strategy Safari. These are combined with Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley’s five questions of strategy in their book Playing To Win. See the list of resources at the end for more recommendations on strategy and strategy theory.

The table below summarizes and aligns these two existing frameworks. The last column reveals their thematic intersection, yielding six common elements of strategy.

The Elements of Strategy

Each strategic element is given a separate box in the Strategy Blueprint, and each represents a discrete conversation with the entire team.

Challenges. Strategy implies the need for change, but something is currently holding you back. There are opposing forces you which to overcome. Use this section of the Strategy Blueprint to honestly identify and understand your key obstacles. These could be internal, like a lack of certain capabilities or resources. Or they could be external, like new competitive pressures in the market or new customer behavior that changes the playing field. This is a useful place to start, but you can also start with your Ambitions in the next section.

Ambitions. Strategy needs purpose. Identifying your north star guides you forward. Use this section to explore what you want to become, as well as who you want your customers to become. Themes that emerge from these conversations provide the heart and soul of strategy. Customer-centric organizations will focus on the transformation your solutions bring to people. But don’t forget about your team or organization and its ambitions. Strategy, after all, is about aligning customer needs with your strategic intent. Both perspectives have a place in strategy.

Target areas. Setting a scope for your strategy helps you concentrate effort on the things that matter most. Think of the target areas as the key levers of change or the pillars you need to focus on to succeed. Two key aspects emerge: who you will target and what jobs to be done will you focus on. Other target areas should also emerge and be noted here. For instance, for corporate strategy, target areas may also include regions, capabilities, or partnerships. For product strategies, in another example, the target areas may be tech stacks and types of experiences to drive change. Generally, any one strategy might have 3–5 key target areas to focus on.

Guiding principles. These represent how you will show up and what values teams need to adopt in order to execute the strategy. What beliefs will guide behavior? What mantras will unite teams and unify decision making? Depending on the level of the strategy you’re setting, this may overlap with company values. But they can also be more specific to your efforts, particularly with lower-level strategies, such as a product strategy.

Activities. What types of activities are needed to implement the strategy and achieve your ambitions? This is not about making a detailed roadmap or plans, but rather looking at categories of action that are required. Note that these may require skills or capabilities you currently don’t have. Strategy isn’t just about reconfiguring what you already have, it may require acquiring new resources.

Success. Start with the outcome in mind to help shape the other elements of strategy. Explore not only what success looks like but what it should feel like for the team and for customers. Drafting a fictitious future press release can help think through success. Of course, you’ll want to identify key results and measurable results as well. The idea is to get agreement from everyone as to the most important things to define success at the beginning of your endeavor.

The strategy blueprint allows you to explore options with no initial risk. Try alternatives, cross items off, rework ideas, and start over again. Strategy is designed.

Why Visualizing Strategy Matters

Over the past 10 years, I’ve learned a lot about the power of visualizing strategy. Below are a few ways that using the Strategy Blueprint can improve your strategy process.

Inclusion
The way we approach strategy has evolved. Gone are the days of top-down, command-and-control systems. With empowered teams working in distributed environments, it’s essential to involve everyone from the start. If you want people there for the landing, they need to be present at takeoff. The Strategy Blueprint makes it possible for everyone to participate in the process.

Co-Creation
It’s not just about contributing from the sidelines. The open format of a canvas allows strategy to be co-created, bringing in diverse perspectives. Visualizing strategy together gives teams the chance to shape their own path forward. And by creating strategy as a team, you foster buy-in and align different mindsets from the outset.

Creativity
The Strategy Blueprint encourages exploration. There’s no penalty for removing a sticky note and trying a new direction. In fact, the Blueprint can be duplicated to test multiple strategies — like different ambitions or focus areas. Teams can ask, “What if?”, and rule out options before deciding on a strategy to pursue.

Activation
There’s often a gap between what leaders think people in the organization understand about strategy and what they actually know. This gap has only grown wider with more complex organizations. Strategy Activation is an emerging field aimed at closing that gap. By involving teams early on and visually laying out the strategy, the Blueprint helps make sure everyone understands the “what” and the “why.” Use it to engage others and activate your strategy.

Agility
The Strategy Blueprint helps teams see the cause-and-effect of their strategy, showing how different parts fit together. Remember, strategy is a hypothesis: “If we do this, then we should see that.” Visualizing it allows teams to pivot quickly — and, most importantly, in an informed way. Long planning cycles and expensive consultants are becoming a thing of the past. Today’s strategies need to be agile, and the Blueprint is designed to help you stay resilient and adaptable.

Strategy Building: A Team Sport

Building strategy is a team sport. How it’s created matters just as much as the end result.

To involve everyone, systematically explore different options for each section of the Blueprint by asking questions like, “What if?” or “What would need to be true?” With the Strategy Blueprint, there’s no risk in trying alternatives: cross things off, move sticky notes, rework ideas, crumple them up, and start again. The key is to design your strategy together.

Instead of simply listing things in each section, consider “plug-in” activities. For example, when working on the Challenges section, I like to use the Sailboat Retrospective. This exercise gives you a clear picture of challenges, represented as the “anchors” under your sailboat. Cluster those challenges into themes and add them to your Strategy Blueprint. These types of activities help teams reflect and explore before diving into each section of the canvas.

It’s usually best to start with either Challenges or Ambitions. From there, you might move left to right across the Blueprint — or skip around. That’s okay. The Blueprint highlights dependencies in strategic decisions, so you’ll see how the pieces fit together no matter how you approach them.

When to Use the Strategy Blueprint

• Kickoffs: Bring a printout of the Blueprint to kickoff meetings or briefings. It serves as a checklist of key questions and keeps your notes concise, all in one place.
• Workshops: In strategy planning sessions, hang a large poster of the Blueprint and use sticky notes to fill it out as a team. This keeps discussions focused, builds consensus, and ensures everyone’s voice is heard.
• Reference: Make a completed Blueprint available for quick, frequent reference. Summarize your key strategic decisions on a slide and start meetings with it. Keep your strategy visible at all times.

Share your strategy as often as possible. It’s nearly impossible to over-communicate it. Print it out, hang it up, start every meeting with a strategy slide, and even use it as placeholder text in wireframes instead of lorem ipsum. Repetition helps reinforce your message.

Once all elements are agreed upon, consolidate your strategy. A good, clear strategy should fit on two pages or less. Tailor the format to your audience — whether it’s a presentation, document, or graphic.

Developing strategy is both a craft and a process of exploration. It requires creativity and systematic thinking. The Strategy Blueprint helps with both, giving you a bird’s-eye view of all the parts. By doing so, it simplifies strategy, making this complex task more tangible and accessible for everyone involved.

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FURTHER READING

Nilofer Merchant. The New How (2014)
From a leading voice on strategy, this book exposes the flaws of past strategic approaches and calls for an overhaul. In particular, Merchant points to filling the critical gap between high-level vision and daily activities, which she calls the “air sandwich.”

Henry Mintzberg. Strategy Safari (2005)
This landmark book on strategy looks at the underlying principle of strategy. Although somewhat dated, the concepts are still relevant. You might have to take some of the examples used with a grain of salt. Instead, focus on the analysis of what strategy is and isn’t. See also his insightful article on types of strategies along with James Waters called “Of Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent” (1985).

Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley’s Playing To Win (2013)
This more recent book provides a fresh and simple view of strategy, reducing it to five key questions. Martin continues to teach this approach and expand on it, keeping the concepts fresh even a decade after it first came out.

Rita McGrath.The End of Competitive Advantage (2013) and Seeing Around Corners (2021).
This pair of books from Columbia Business School professor Rita McGrath brings new thinking to the field of strategy. In them, she shows how resiliency and adaptability are key aspects of strategy execution — to keep moving and exploring strategic paths forward.

Richard Rumelt. Good Strategy, Bad Strategy (2011)
A foundational book on strategy, Rumelt connects strategy to leadership while debunking widely-held assumptions of strategy. He offers practical approaches to addressing challenges in creating a good strategy and ways to avoid a bad strategy.

Martin Reeves, Knut Haanaes, Janmejaya Sinha. Your Strategy Needs a Strategy (2015)
Not all strategies are the same. This book provides a clear typology of types of strategies to pursue depending on your needs. Geared toward corporate strategy specifically, the authors give practical advice on how to first frame the type of strategy you’re aiming for to ensure alignment with the organization’s outcomes from the start.