Assignment: Group Strategic Map
Dimensions: No larger than an A3 piece of paper Assessment weighting: (10%)
"To ask for a map is to say, "Tell me a story"" (Turchi, 2004, p11).
The task: Visually represent in a compelling manner the important elements and their interrelationships within the strategy that you have conceived in the second assignment.
The rationale for this piece of assessment: Executives of organisations are busy people and they have to make decisions quickly based upon a rapid assimilation of information. Strategists are required to make decisions in complex and often dynamic environments. Strategy has to be communicated succinctly and in a way that stakeholders from various levels within (and/or external to) the business can understand and act upon.
For example:
"Journal of Strategy and Management (JSMA): Congratulation on your 2008 performance - revenue up by 7 per cent, improved margins, EPS performance, and increased dividend payments. What are the key underlying reasons for such good performance in such a difficult time?
Todd Stitzer: There are a number of factors that have led to our success. Great brands, great geographical and category footprints, a detailed plan of execution. This plan is what we call Vision into Action and it's a plan on a page. This enables people to be focused and to link their annual objectives to the company's overall strategic objectives" (O'Regan and Abby, 2009, p.406).
How to approach this assignment: As you begin to formulate your strategy within the second assignment, we recommend that your group collectively draws your strategy as it develops. The purpose of drawing it together as a group is that you can begin to discuss what each of you think is important and what should be kept in and what should be left out of the final diagram. This should mimic also what you think is important in the final strategy. This will help you to think through what you are proposing as a strategy. Diagramming the strategy as it develops helps you to understand which are the important elements within the strategy and what the important relationships are between those elements. The final diagram should represent a coherent group representation of the final strategy.
"Sketches are a useful tool for checking and conveying ideas, for self and others" (Tversky, 2002, p. 3). The process of drawing and re-drawing the map every week will help you to understand your own thinking and it will help others within your group to understand your point of view. We strongly recommend that you integrate the sketching process into your weekly practice and treat each version as a way to check your thinking. The process of drawing the maps is the most important aspect of this assignment as it will help you to improve the content of your second group assignment. While you are required to produce a map at the conclusion of the semester along with your second group assignment, only drawing the map once the assignment is completed is not the point of this piece of assessment. If you draw/sketch as you go, constantly adding and taking away elements until you get to the core understanding of what the strategy is really about, you will have a much stronger piece of work and this should be reflected in your group assessment.
Remember, your final strategy map has to be intuitive and easily understandable by stakeholders from across the organization. To this end when drawing your map concentrate on the following aspects:
Correspondence: The ability to recognize that one set of connected information (e.g. a map) has a relationship to a second set of connected information (e.g. an environment). Don't include new information in the map that is not in your report.
Visual Hierarchy: A clear indication of what is important on the map. This might be achieved through the use of colour, size, shapes etc. You can't include everything in your map, so you have to choose which information to include and which information to exclude. Within this is an inherent choice about the relative importance of those elements that you have chosen to include in your map. It should be obvious in your map which elements are the important elements.
Narrative: A presented account of connected events; a story. Your strategic map needs to be able to be 'read' and understood by a wide audience. Your map needs to tell a story. You might consider structuring your map around a common metaphor (a metaphor is a figure of speech that regards something as representative or symbolic of something else to which it is not literally applicable e.g. "time is money". In this example, time is not actually money, but we understand the symbolic relationship i.e. you can 'save time', you can 'spend time'. Time is like money.) What is the story that your strategy is trying to tell? Is it a story of growth? Is it a story of overcoming challenge? Is it a story of slow decline?
Presentation: Presentation matters. In the digital economy skills such as the production of data visualisation are increasingly important to have. There are many excellent and free software packages available to help you to create a professional looking map. Just as presentation counts in your written pieces, including having a good structure, logical 'argument', and attention to detail, it matters in this piece as well. Imagine you are presenting this work to a board of directors. Aim for a high level of quality.
Check the marking rubric on the BlackBoard site for details of the marking criteria.
References:
O'Regan, N. & Ghobadian, A., 2009. Successful strategic re-orientation: lessons from Cadbury's experience. Journal of Strategy and Management, 2(4), pp.405-412.
Turchi, P., 2004. Maps of the imagination: The writer as cartographer, San Antonio: Trinity University Press.
Tversky, B., 2002. What do sketches say about thinking? In AAAI Spring Symposium. pp. 1-4. Available at: https://www.tc.columbia.edu/faculty/bt2158/faculty- profile/files/2002_Tversky_Whatdosketchessayaboutthinking.PDF.