Starting a new venture or embarking on major change? The Collective Ambition process will help you plot the path to success.
Contact us today >You open your email to see the invite to the strategic planning session. Yes, that’s right, it’s that time of year. Again.
Cue the familiar sinking feeling at the prospect of hours of tortuous deliberations with the rest of the senior team. With precious little to show for it at the end of the day.
Of course, there will be fine words spoken about strategic challenges, aspirations and priorities. Even a few promising ideas. But why does there never seem to be an outcome that anyone – even the senior team – really buys into? Why does the write-up of the meeting languish somewhere on the cloud or at the bottom of an inbox? How come all that strategic pontificating so rarely leads to meaningful change, especially on the frontline?
Well, guess what? It doesn’t have to be that way.
Collective Ambition: Turning complexity into clarity
Here at Axiom, we’ve evolved and harnessed a process for co-creating a compelling summary of why your organisation exists, what it intends to accomplish and how it’s going to get there. This then becomes the rallying cry for the whole organisation; the ‘North Star’ that guides everything that you do.
We call this our Collective Ambition process. It’s based on a model first identified by academics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011 and set out in the Harvard Business Review.
A Collective Ambition brings together six key elements required to achieve and sustain excellence. We use it as the framework to shape conversations with leaders and teams who are setting up new ventures, embarking on major organisational change, or simply evolving their strategy.
With our expert independent facilitation of the process, it’s a remarkably effective tool for cutting through tortuous discussion, securing consensus and turning complexity into clarity.
It’s called Collective Ambition for good reason. It’s created through an inclusive, collaborative process – hence collective. And it’s ambitious, stretching and propelling your team into the future.
“Through our ongoing partnership with Axiom, our actions now align with our new co-created Collective Ambition, we understand how to work even more effectively with each other and our stakeholders, and we’ve got a clear plan to take those relationships forward. Throughout the process, Axiom were responsive to our evolving needs and, as always, inspiring and fun to work with.”
Leading pharmaceutical client
What’s in a Collective Ambition?
The six elements of a Collective Ambition are:
- Purpose: your organisation’s reason for being or core mission; the reason you get out of bed in the morning. Purpose is the centre around which all the other elements orbit.
- Vision: the position your organisation aspires to achieve within a specific timeframe.
- Strategic and operational priorities: the actions you will take in pursuit of your vision.
- Brand promise: the experience you will provide to stakeholders: customers, investors, employees, partners and communities that they will enjoy and benefit from.
- Core values: the principles that dictate what you stand for as an organisation.
- Leadership behaviours: how leaders need to act on a daily basis as they seek to implement the company’s vision and strategic priorities; what they will curate and celebrate – and, just as importantly, the behaviours they won’t tolerate, that need to be consigned to the trash can of history.
Together, the elements of the Collective Ambition speak to our emotions (the why) and to our thoughts (the how). In that way, it can win both hearts and minds.
See the Collective Ambition in action >Distinctive and memorable presentation
One of the essential features of the model is that each element has a fixed, non-negotiable definition. This helps focus the conversation and produces clear, concise statements of intent. It saves you from those all-too-familiar, endless circular conversations. You know, the ones that start ‘What do we mean by vision?’ and go on for hours. Free of that, you can get on with actually identifying what your vision is.
All six elements are brought together in a simple graphic of concentric circles. Purpose lies at the centre. Orbiting around it are the vision, strategic and operational priorities, brand promise and core values. The outer ring shows the leadership behaviours.
The graphic can be fitted onto a single page, slide, poster or screen. It’s distinctive and, most important, memorable.
Facilitation finesse
For over a decade, we’ve co-created Collective Ambitions with leadership and colleagues in more than 25 organisations from all over the world and in many sectors.
What often works best is to form a guiding team of between six and 12 people, trusted and empowered to shape the future of their organisation or team. We can facilitate the process in-person, virtually or a combination of the two and be flexible about how we structure the sessions. For example, we can hold three highly focused two-hour sessions, with a gap between them to harness the power of reflection and to be cognitively inclusive. Alternatively, we can run the sessions either side of an overnight break.
This approach has real pace and momentum. At the same time, it ensures we capture input from all personality types – not just the more outspoken ‘activists’ and impatient ‘pragmatists’, but also the more considered ‘reflectors’ and ‘theorists’. And it allows for robust conversation to resolve differences and drive a successful outcome.
Doing all this in a group where there are likely to be strong opinions is no mean feat. Our skilled facilitators are experts at managing dialogue at the top table. We manage the interpersonal dynamics and take care of the wordsmithing, which leaves you and your colleagues free to concentrate on content. In short, we take the pain out of the process. So much so that participants often tell us how much they enjoyed it.
Clear, comprehensive and cohesive
Ultimately, the Collective Ambition process generates a clear, comprehensive and cohesive path to success for your organisation, co-created by your very own people and so both grounded in reality and trusted.
When disseminated well via a strong communication campaign, it will then serve as a guiding light for all stakeholders, often being converted to a Big Picture. Mangers and frontline employees can see exactly where the organisation wants to go and target their effort, decisions and ideas accordingly. Meanwhile, it bolsters trust and confidence among customers, investors, partners and communities.
So, if you want to avoid that sinking feeling when you need to set the strategic agenda, it’s time to bring in Axiom to help you shape your organisation’s Collective Ambition.
Talk to us to find out more >