Strategy Survival Guide

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Strategy Survival Guide Version 2.1 Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit home | strategy development | strategy skills | site index Strategy Skills > Structuring the Thinking Tools & Approaches • Issue trees • First principles thinking • Systems thinking • SWOT • PESTLE • Creativity techniques The ability to bring structure to complex issues and establish new conventional wisdom is a core skill in strategy development. To influence the way government thinks about an issue, strategy work needs to demonstrate superior thought leadership. Having a clear understanding of the real problem and issues to be addressed is a prerequisite to designing effective solutions. Using issue trees can be a powerful way of identifying the fundamental questions that the project needs to answer. Underpinning strategic thinking is the ability and willingness to go back to first principles and challenge implicit assumptions. A fresh, objective evaluation of the situation may yield surprisingly different conclusions from the current status quo. Keeping the big picture in mind, rather than being tempted by its complexity to focus attention on specific issues, is key to developing effective solutions. Systems thinking techniques can help to understand dynamically complex systems by mapping out how factors influence each other. This can be powerful for helping to establish a common view of the way the world works and when trying to anticipate the likely response to possible interventions. Analysing a situation or system along a defined set of dimensions can help to brake down the complexity and bring structure to the thinking. Two tools that work in this way are SWOT analysis, which involves identifying the potential Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats of an organisation or strategy, and PESTLE analysis which involves identifying the Political, Economic, Socio-cultural, Technological, Legal and Environmental influences on an organisation or strategy. At various stages of the strategy process the team will seek solutions that are not constrained by current thinking and assumptions. Using a range of creativity techniques can help to break through these constraints and free the team to find imaginative solutions. Strategy Survival Guide – Strategy Skills Page 90
Strategy Survival Guide Version 2.1 Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit home | strategy development | strategy skills | site index Strategy Skills > Structuring the Thinking Issue trees > in practice > template Issue trees help to identify the key issue or question that the project should address, and break it down into its smaller component parts. They can be used: • at the beginning of a piece of strategy work to identify key workstreams • to plan individual workstreams • to analyse specific key questions • to communicate the shape and direction of the work. The trees are a useful reference point throughout a project providing context and showing how each piece of work fits into the whole. A well thought out tree should also inform how to structure communications about the project, including the final report. Issue trees Before embarking on the detailed thinking, some time should be spent thinking through the overarching question that the project is attempting to answer. One way of creating this statement of the problem is to note down some of the areas of enquiry and, crucially, those areas that lie outside the scope of the project. The opening question must be wide enough to encompass the full overview of the strategy if it is to be used to plan the project. Defining the starting point can be the most difficult part of building an issue tree. The next layer should set out a series of questions that together answer the question above them in the tree. For example, if the starting question is "How can we most effectively increase employment rates through improving access to childcare?" the next layer in the tree might comprise two further questions: • What are the most effective forms of childcare to help parents into work? • How can government best support parents in accessing these forms of childcare? The answers to these two questions should provide the answer to the original, higher level question. These two questions will then be further broken down, and so on, until a level of questions is reached that address the fundamental root causes of the original issue. Specific analysis can then be designed to address each one. Each time a question is broken out into lower level questions, these lower-level questions should together give the answer to the higher level question. Moreover, these lower level questions should together cover all the issues needing to be resolved, but should not overlap each other. Questions to be resolved should fall into one of the buckets, not both. In more technical parlance, this is known as Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive. Although it may seem cumbersome, writing out the questions in full is very helpful as it forces clarity of thinking. This issue tree template may be helpful. For any problem, there will be a number of ways of drawing out the issue tree, frequently resting on the way in which the first set of branches is constructed. It is worth having a number of attempts at the tree (perhaps done by different members of the team), using different structures. The trees can then be evaluated on the basis of how well they seem to be working best in terms of breaking down the issues into smaller, answerable questions; in terms of breaking the project out into workstreams; and in terms of structuring future communications (reports or other documents). Techniques that can be helpful during the question- Strategy Survival Guide – Strategy Skills Page 91
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Building an Evidence Base 113 Data
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A Framework for Strategic Direction
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Scenario development In Practice 1:
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Scenarios used in the Strategy Unit
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Multi-criteria analysis In Practice
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