Expedition Mapping Part 1

This article introduces expedition mapping, a strategic planning and execution methodology that helps ensure success at reaching difficult organizational destinations. Expedition mapping is a new method for strategic implementation that blends together storytelling, action planning, resource analysis, and adaptive, ongoing environmental scanning – and it is delivered in a mix of face-to-face and online collaborative activities. We will discuss what it’s like to go on a strategy expedition and how maps help guide the organization toward its future. We will describe what expedition maps look like and give instructions, tips, and insight about how to build and use them. Finally, we will summarize the importance of the developmental aspects of expedition mapping and how it builds the ability of individuals, teams, and organizations to undertake successfully more ambitious expeditions than ever before.

Strategic Planning as an Expedition

Conscious strategic planning is an organized effort to maximize an organization’s potential over time as the environment shifts and changes. While traditional strategic planning techniques often begin with an environmental scan, the futures they seek often become quickly outdated as they are based on increasingly distant pasts. The strategic expedition adapts to changing conditions and remains fresh through the planning horizon. There are a number of useful tools to help us navigate and create the future.

Effective strategic planning incorporates three primary activities,
planning – capacity building – execution,
while a large number of tools are used in the process.

An operational definition of strategy is consistent, focused behavior over time adapting in response to emerging conditions. It begins with intentions about how to move toward the envisioned future. Along the way, the environment continues to change, sometimes in surprising ways. These emerging trends and conditions impact intentions, causing them to morph and change. What results from the interaction of our intentions, actions, and the changing environment are a number of realized strategies. When our intentions do not become reality, they are unrealized elements of strategy. When new strategic elements emerge, they may not be as intended; good or bad, they are facets of what the future may hold.

Organizations can be characterized as one of three kinds of planning types: 1) those that plan for planning’s sake, yet do not leverage planning to create their futures; 2) those that plan with the best intentions, yet cannot overcome their opposing internal or environmental forces to make much happen; and 3) those that master the requisite skills and competencies of successful planning and create their own futures. The turbulent environments we are experiencing today is awash with forces that act to derail strategy and execution. We developed expedition mapping as a tool to help organizations easily become the third type. Let us explain.

The Expedition Map as Guide to the Future

Going on any kind of journey has several key activities, whether it be a weekend road trip, a week-long bicycling adventure, or a month-long safari – you need to decide where you are going to go, you should figure out one or more ways to get there, you must gather the necessary resources to sustain yourself along the way, and you need to take the actions necessary to put yourself in motion. The process of moving an organization from where it is today to where you would like it to be in the future has many parallels. Our approach to mapping strategy implementation is more like an expedition than a train ride along a pre-lain track.

Any journey has two conditions – where you are and where you are going. In expedition mapping we call these current state and future states. A vision is a picture of the organization in some future state. In terms of a defined, set-term planning process, this particular future state is the end state, a description of the destination. There may be many way stations or particular future states along the way. Fully built expedition maps should take the priorities and strategic actions through a potential timeline, year by year for five years and quarter by quarter for the first two years.

Unless you are traveling alone, to go on any kind of journey each participant needs a reason to take the first step and motivation to end up at the destination. For organizations, these needs can be met for strategic expeditions by focusing on real value creation, both for employees and for customers, and being specific about creating compelling stories and targeting outcomes, descriptions and metrics about what the destination will be like.

Reaching the destination requires resources. The weekend road trip takes a car, gas, food, and a place to rest. For a long and tiring effort such as a week-long cycling adventure, we must first condition ourselves and build the capacity to sustain the hills and the elements along the way. The longer safari requires supporting partners, supply chains, transport systems, and a deep knowledge of the territory ahead of time. Organizations should treat their strategic expeditions with great care and consider and target all of the necessary organizational capacities to optimize success.

Unlike our travel examples, organizational expeditions involve large, complicated systems with many people, structures, and processes in place. This requires a high degree of coordination and activity alignment. Expedition maps require that we be specific about actions and activities, especially those that need to happen first. When completed, a strategic expedition map serves as a guide to the future for the organization. In parts two and three, we will get a bit more specific about the components of the map and how you can build one.