What are Strategic Pillars? Bringing them to live in a strategic planning tool (2024)

Think Of Strategic Pillars As Battlegrounds
You Must Win

Strategic pillars are the key areas of focus or priorities that an organization chooses to achieve its long-term vision. They are also often called ‘Battlegrounds’.

Strategic themes or pillars are the broad areas of focus that underpin your overall business strategy. They represent the key priorities for your organization over a given period of time — typically one year — and provide guidance on where resources should be allocated.

For example, if one of your strategic pillars was “Simplicity & Value,” then all initiatives related to improving your products would fall under this pillar. This could include things like implementing new features, training staff members on best practices for interacting with customers, or conducting surveys to gather feedback from customers about their experiences.

By defining these overarching themes upfront as part of the planning process, everyone within the organization has clarity around what’s most important at any given moment in time. This helps ensure alignment across teams so that everyone is working towards common objectives rather than pursuing individual agendas.

Put simply, Strategic Pillars are the building blocks upon which your strategy is built, helping to guide decision-making and resource allocation across the business.

How you decide on your pillars is a social process. In and across teams, in the markets you want to play, and for the customers you want to serve in those markets, you need to work out and propose to serve them better than your competition.

To arrive at your objectives that can be clustered and prioritized to form your pillars you should have considered a range of challenging questions, questions like:

Do’s and don’ts to consider when defining strategic pillars

Do’s:

Ensure alignment with your organization’s vision, mission, and values.
Involve key stakeholders in the process.
Make the pillars clear, concise, and actionable.
Regularly review and update your strategic pillars based on changes in the business environment.

Don’ts:

Avoid having too many strategic pillars, as it can dilute focus and resource allocation.
Don’t ignore emerging trends or changes in the business environment.
Avoid being too vague or overly ambitious in your strategic pillars.

Strategic Pillar Examples

Google’s Strategic Pillars

Organize the world’s information.
Make it universally accessible and useful.
Focus on long-term innovation.

Amazon’s Strategic Pillars

Customer obsession.
Long-term thinking.
Operational excellence.

Microsoft Strategic Pillars

Create more personal computing.
Reinvent productivity and business processes.
Build the intelligent cloud platform.

Apple’s Strategic Pillars

Design and innovation.
User experience and simplicity.
Integration of hardware, software, and services.

Tesla Strategic Pillars

Accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.
Develop cutting-edge technology.
Improve affordability and accessibility of electric vehicles.

Airbnb Strategic Pillars

Create a sense of belonging.
Drive sustainable growth.
Foster trust and safety within the platform.

IBM Strategic Pillars

Focus on high-value segments of the IT market.
Leverage data and AI for business transformation.
Deliver innovative solutions through a hybrid cloud platform.

Strategic Pillar Recap

Think of Strategic Pillars as the three of four areas of focus your business has decided to focus on as a results of a strategic planning process. They are often referred to as the ‘battlegrounds you must win.

Like all forms of strategy the role of Strategic Pillars is simple. To focus and align the people, productivity and resources in the company on the areas that will help the company maximize growth by serving you target customers better than the competition.

You should see Strategic Pillars are an opportunity to clearly articulate your strategy to your teams so that they might create OKRs that support and align with them – more that that it a moment.

Execution is the achilles heel of Strategy

Simply having a strategy is not enough; you need to be able to execute that strategy effectively if you want your business to succeed.

One way of doing this is by using strategic themes or pillars together with OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). In this article, we’ll explore what these terms mean and how they can help you achieve your goals.

Research by Kaplan and Norton found that only 10% of organizations successfully execute their strategies. Organizations should align their strategies with objectives, measures, targets, and initiatives, which in turn can improve execution and overall performance.

Introduction and Context Setting:

Briefly explain the purpose and objectives of the workshop.
Provide an overview of the current market landscape, competitive dynamics, and industry trends.
Discuss the importance of strategy in achieving a sustainable competitive advantage.

Analysing Internal Capabilities

Assessing External Opportunities and Threats

Encourage the team to explore the external environment, including market trends, customer needs, and emerging opportunities.
Conduct a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) to identify potential areas of growth and challenges.
Discuss how the company can align its offerings and value proposition with the identified market opportunities.

Defining Strategic Priorities

Facilitate a discussion on the team’s vision for the company’s future and its long-term goals.
Ask the team to prioritize strategic areas that align with the company’s strengths and market opportunities – Strategic Pillars.
Encourage the team to consider trade-offs and make choices regarding where to focus resources and efforts.

Crafting a Value Proposition

Help the team articulate a clear and compelling value proposition that resonates with customers and differentiates the company from competitors.
Guide the team in identifying the unique benefits, features, and experiences that the company can deliver to its target customers.

Formulating Actionable Strategies

Facilitate the development of specific strategies and initiatives to achieve the defined strategic priorities.
Encourage the team to think creatively and explore innovative approaches.
Discuss potential risks and challenges associated with each strategy and explore mitigation plans.
ZOKRI guides and platform the outcomes from these conversations.

Establishing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Metrics

Work with the team to define measurable objectives and key results that align with the strategic priorities.
Identify appropriate KPIs and metrics to track progress and evaluate the success of the strategies.
Discuss how the team can implement a system for ongoing monitoring, measurement, and adjustment based on performance data
ZOKRI will platform this for you.

Alignment and Execution

Emphasize the importance of aligning the entire organization around the strategic priorities.
Discuss ways to communicate and cascade the strategy throughout the company.
Agree the values and behaviours that need to be lived in order to ensure that your vision, strategy and goals are going to be achieved.
Explore methods for fostering accountability, collaboration, and a culture of strategic execution
All of this is done in ZOKRI

Continuous Learning and Adaptation

Highlight the need for ongoing learning, feedback loops, and adaptation in today’s dynamic business environment.
Encourage the team to develop mechanisms for collecting feedback, learning from failures, and making strategic adjustments as necessary – this is automatically done in ZOKRI.

Wrap-up and Next Steps

Summarize the key outcomes and action items from the workshop.
Discuss next steps for further refining and communicating the strategy.
Offer ongoing support and guidance as needed.

What are OKRs?

OKR stands forObjectives and Key Results. These are specific targets set by an organization which define measurable outcomes required for success against each objective identified during goal setting sessions. TheOKR frameworkis adept at acting as a strategy execution framework.

The purpose behind creating OKR’s is twofold: firstly it provides directionality toward achieving desired results while secondly providing transparency into progress made along those lines throughout execution phases thereby enabling course correction when necessary based upon feedback received from stakeholders.

What Are KPIs?

KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are metrics that help you track progress towards your goals. They provide a way to measure the success of specific initiatives and ensure that they’re aligned with broader strategic objectives.

For example, if one of your strategic pillars was “employee engagement,” then some potential KPIs might include things like employee satisfaction scores, turnover rates among high-performing employees (indicating retention), or productivity levels across different departments within the organization.

By tracking these key performance indicators over time and comparing them against benchmarks set by industry standards or internal targets established during goal setting sessions held annually between management team members such as CEO’s/COO’s/CFO’s etc., department heads/managers/supervisors/team leads etc., it becomes possible to identify areas where improvements can be made in order to achieve desired outcomes more effectively while also providing transparency into progress being made along those lines throughout execution phases thereby enabling course correction when necessary based upon feedback received from stakeholders

How Do Strategic Themes/Pillars Work With OKRs And KPIs To Execute Your Strategy?

Strategic themes/pillars work together with OKRs and KPI’s because they provide directionality toward achieving desired results while simultaneously ensuring alignment across teams so everyone is working towards common objectives rather than pursuing individual agendas.

OKR’s define measurable outcomes required for success against each objective identified during annual goal-setting sessions held between management team members such as CEO’s/COO’s/CFO’s etc., department heads/managers/supervisors/team leads etc.. This provides clarity around what needs doing at any given moment in time which helps keep everyone focused on their respective tasks without getting sidetracked by other priorities competing for attention elsewhere within an organization.

Finally, using relevant data points tracked via various types of software tools enables organizations not only monitor but also analyze trends related specifically back down through all levels of management hierarchy thereby enabling course correction when necessary based upon feedback received from stakeholders.

In conclusion, using strategic themes or pillars together with OKRs and KPIs is an effective way to execute your strategy because it provides directionality toward achieving desired results while simultaneously ensuring alignment across teams so everyone is working towards common objectives rather than pursuing individual agendas.

By tracking progress against these metrics over time, organizations can identify areas where improvements need to be made in order to achieve their goals more effectively which ultimately leads them closer towards success!