Management guru Peter Drucker once wrote that there is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. A good strategy helps define those things that are worth doing, freeing up time and space that otherwise might be taken up with all those useless activities (you know the ones).
Strategy is often over-complicated and a whole industry has grown up around tools and processes for developing it. They link the strategy to company visions and mission statements, undertake detailed analyses and lengthy off-site management retreats. But, at its heart, it is simply big picture thinking that can be broken down into two key questions. Firstly, where do we want to go and, secondly, what are the key objectives that tell us when we’ve got there? Having determined these, it’s relatively straightforward to break down into an action plan to implement.
Of course, nothing is ever as easy as it seems. The hardest part in busy roles can be finding the space amongst the day to day activities to give strategy the attention it needs. This is particularly difficult when you do it for the first time, but if you set a good strategy it should free up time in the longer term. It’s about breaking the vicious circle of being too busy to develop more efficient ways of working.
There are some key components to setting strategy and working towards achieving it.
Taking the time
Strategy involves thinking about the forest rather than the trees, but the trees often block the view, so you need to get these out of the way. Set plenty of time aside and clear the diary. Start planning well in advance to make this easier – the later you leave it, the less chance the relevant people will be available. Do not underestimate how long you need. Strategic thinking needs a different mindset to operational thinking and it takes a while to shift mental gears. A change in environment also helps with that shift, meaning it can be useful to get out of the office to do it.
Similarly, plan progress review sessions well in advance. You’ll need to review your strategy regularly to make sure it’s still the right one and that you’re tracking well against it. I usually have a detailed strategy refresh each year with progress reviews somewhere between quarterly and six-monthly.
Time horizon
Strategy typically involves a three to five year time horizon. Your plan for next year is not a strategy. Many organisations simply have an annual H&S plan based on improving from last year, but this does not help with clearing out unnecessary work or driving genuine change, which can rarely be managed within a single year. Strategy has also been described as clearly understanding what it is you don’t do. With a long-term future focused approach, it is easier to justify not doing something.
Business alignment
Your H&S strategy should be clearly aligned with the overarching business strategy. If not, you will spend most of your time fighting conflicting goals with other departments and will end up with a mismatch between where you’re going and what the business needs (you will lose this battle!). It is no good developing a H&S strategy that requires significant additional recruitment and retraining of the team when the rest of the business is cost-cutting due to commercial pressures. Similarly, a company that is on a growth curve acquiring new businesses with radically different operating cultures and risk profiles will need a very different H&S strategy to one that is concentrating on its existing core business.
This is probably the single biggest failure that I see in H&S strategies. As a discipline, we tend to be too inward looking. We focus on what our needs are rather than how we can support the business meet its objectives. Strategy setting needs cross-functional understanding. It is usually set by the senior management within an organisation and it is no coincidence that senior managers tend to have generalist tendencies – they can see issues from the various perspectives of other leaders in the business and act accordingly.
Where do we want to go?
Once you’ve understood how H&S fits into the overall business strategy, you’ll need to overlay that with your intended direction for H&S performance. This is a combination of a pull towards a vision for a better future and a push from things you’re not satisfied with.
Investigate others for what good looks like; learn from H&S thinkers to get new ideas; ask your people what their ideal view of H&S management would be and also look for current shortfalls or concerns you want to fix. Combine all of these and turn them into a set of high-level objectives. Probably somewhere between four and eight.
Be careful how far and fast you want to move. Imagine change to be like stretching a rubber band. If you pull one end, you set up a tension that pulls the other end towards you, but if you pull too hard it snaps and you’re moving on your own. This means you need to understand where you are now, warts and all, so you can be realistic in your ambitions.
Change
A key challenge is that sudden change may make your strategy obsolete. No plan survives first contact with the enemy or, as Mike Tyson phrased it, “Everyone has a plan until somebody punches them in the face.” Many a business has developed a strategy and followed it blindly to their own destruction (think Kodak or Nokia). In his book How to Lead a Quest, Dr Jason Fox calls this succumbing to the ‘Kraken of Doom’ and suggests ideas for incorporating innovation and experiments into strategic decision making. Responding to change should be built into your strategy, but the degree of uncertainty makes it hard. Include some ‘no regrets,’ low-cost trials towards possible alternative futures – for example, you may make a strategic move towards much more tech adoption and build your strategy around that. But keep some more manual improvement work ongoing, just in case an AI funding bubble blows the market and the systems you were banking on don’t become available.
Then, review the strategy routinely and don’t be afraid to change direction if the environment changes. If your future position is clearly articulated, it is easier to find different paths to it when one becomes blocked.
Culture
Drucker is also (probably wrongly) credited with the phrase, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” While this may be arguable, the impact of organisational culture in successfully executing a strategy is huge. If you have a very mature, settled organisation you may find the culture unsupportive of a strategy that is intended to drive rapid change. In such a case you will need to either slow the process down to align more closely with the culture (don’t snap the rubber band) or work out in your implementation plan how you are going to deal with the fallout. On the other hand, if you are in an innovative and fast-moving organisation, rapid change may be the best way.
Implementation
Share the strategy widely. Make sure people know what it is and agree with its content. If you consulted them in the development, this should be straightforward.
Now is the time to develop your annual plan. For each of the strategic objectives, choose a few actions that you can do within the next year that move you towards that long-term goal. Give them dates, give them owners and work the plan. The key here is not to attempt too much. Better to execute a few things successfully than make little progress against lots of actions. Remember, just like the original task of setting the strategy, this is something that must be done on top of your day to day activities.
So much time in H&S is spent treading water – investigating accidents, counting near misses, writing reports and doing audits – that there is no opportunity to get better at what we do. Developing and implementing a clear, well thought-through strategy allows you to make genuine improvements so you can look back in the future and see genuine progress towards a safer and healthier workplace.
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