You can’t decide where to go or how to get there if you don’t know where you are.
The Truth about Today forces an open and honest assessment of a company’s recent history and current performance and future challenges. The inquiry is based on three precepts:

1. The past is the best predictor of the future. Understanding past sources of profitability allows the executive team to understand the probability of future success in the absence of change.
2. To understand what’s going on, you need to look outside the organization, to understand what’s going wrong, you need to look inside, according to the business educator and author, Jim Collins. The Truth about Today exercise begins with an understanding of the customers’ experience as the acid test of market viability. The analysis is objective and fact based, organized to drive focus on the most important and dynamic aspects of the environment, structured to ensure a shared understanding of the facts, and facilitated to generate accountability for future commitments.
3. Executives must confront their inherent informational biases in order to understand The Truth about Today without illusion or delusion. Collective—and often difficult—truth telling is required to generate honest interpretations of both strong and weak signals foretelling future market developments.

If you can’t get it onto one page, then you don’t really know what’s important.
Strategy on a Page (SOAP) is developed through a facilitated process with the executive team to crystallize a strategic direction. That direction is often characterized as a Customer Promise, which articulates the organization’s recipe for customer value creation and competitive advantage. In addition to an overarching strategic statement or Customer Promise, the SOAP includes four to six imperatives which highlight the key domains for action, and clearly defined measurable business outcomes. The Strategy on a Page is a simple, yet comprehensive format that reduces complex intentions into an explicit formula for success that can be broadly understood and communicated. It is the meta framework for the downstream activity of organizing actions into appropriate programs and projects.

A new strategic direction requires a new organizational context.
Operating Model development enables an executive team to architect a powerfully integrated business model to execute the strategy. The Operating Model is a conceptual blueprint of the organization that distinguishes governance processes from value producing and enabling processes, identifies common and unique resources, and demonstrates the relationship between all components of the business model: processes, resources, structure, and capabilities. To design an Operating Model, the executive team explores both the explicit aspects of its organization as well as the Hidden Logic of Performance, a unique formula living below the surface that propels the organization towards its “default future” that will mirror past performance in the absence of effective actions to change course. One critical outcome of the Operating Model design is a set of Operating Principles which define the essential design criteria for a new business model. Co-created by the executive team in facilitated sessions, these design criteria identify the most important attributes of the new model.

Implementation begins with Execution Action.
Integrated Roadmap for Action translates organizational intentions into executive responsibilities and timeframes. The Roadmap enables accountability by ensuring integration of priorities, actions, and processes across functions and throughout all levels of the organization from the executive suites to the front line. The executive team prepares the Roadmap as a predecessor to detailed programs and projects to implement plans. In the process of creating this Roadmap, the executive team is forced to confront the downstream questions of resource allocation, cross-functional collaboration, capability building, and sacred cow destruction—issues which often stall or even destroy future plans.

The Playbook chapters force public conversation on the fewest number of things that matter the most to future performance; but it is the process through which The Playbook is created that drives understanding, commitment, and capability to execute the strategy. The Playbook process is designed to disrupt the current state, creating sufficient “white space” for the executive team to authentically align on a future direction and plan. The Playbook process is built on five hallmarks:

1. Use the process to build capability to execute by practicing the cultural disciplines required for future state success
2. Ground the discussion in the harsh realities of today by ensuring the “private and public” conversations amongst the executive team are the same
3. Orient analysis to prescription over description to avoid the distraction and time of too much data which obscures the few things that matter most
4. Structure the process to produce deliverables quickly to maintain momentum, excitement, and interest amidst on-going responsibilities
5. Engage the right leaders to co-create The Playbook to generate an aligned coalition of executives who own the game plan they developed

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