I have been asked about strategy review meetings on a more frequent basis. The most recent one was "Tell me about the best strategy review meeting you have seen. Why was it so good?" It got me thinking that there are multiple ways to conduct a strategy review meeting: Review objectives that are off track, review everything, review by theme, and review just one objective. In this blog, I'll focus on reviewing everything.

Reviewing everything means that every time the leadership team gets together, they review the entire scorecard. Of course, it doesn't have to be a Balanced Scorecard, but for the purposes of this entry, let's assume that an organization has objectives (or goals) with measures, targets, and initiatives associated with the objectives. Reviewing everything means that the leadership team reviews all of the objectives with associated measures and initiatives each time they talk about strategy.

The Challenge

So, how does this work successfully? For one, an organization needs to have a smaller number of objectives. When we find companies (or governments or nonprofits) with more than 25 objectives, they typically have more than 35 measures and 20 or more initiatives. It becomes very cumbersome to have a strategy review meeting if you have to review all 25 objectives each time you are together. Imagine you only spend 10 minutes talking about an objective. Well that means you have three hours straight on objectives before you get into the associated initiatives and other strategic issues. This becomes a meeting that is six to eight hours in length. It is longer if you have more objectives and measures.

The leadership team gets scorecard fatigue if you try to have one of these meetings each month. Not only does the meeting take up a lot of time, but preparing for the meeting is quite cumbersome. With a lot of objectives, measures and initiatives, the core team (or the group reporting to the leadership team) will spend more than a week preparing for a meeting like this. So if you try to have a monthly meeting, you end up spending an inordinate amount of time preparing for and conducting a strategy review meeting. This leads to scorecard fatigue. Scorecard fatigue is when you spend more time managing your scorecard than managing your strategy, and you end up losing enthusiasm and thinking it is not worth it.

Keys to Success

So, what makes this process work well? It works well, when you have a smaller set of objectives, and when you are conducting a quarterly review of strategy. If you have 10 objectives with 10-15 measures, then it is pretty easy to gather the information and prepare a report. The nice thing about reviewing everything is that you are able to have a full review of what is happening strategically across the organization. You do not have a partial view, or theme view. With a full view, you can see of all of your objectives interact, and you can look at the impact of all of your initiatives on the strategy.

Another benefit of reviewing everything is that you do take the time to celebrate successes in your organization. It is important to review the green objectives (or things that are on track) for a few reasons. One, you may find that you have a team or a project that is particularly effective, and you might want to use them in other parts of your organization. You might find that part of your strategy is ahead of plan and you can accelerate the development (growth in a division or product line) or you can reallocate resources to an area that is struggling. Further, lots of leadership time is spent on analyzing things that are bad or off track. This can be tiring. Don't forget to celebrate success.

Overall, this can be a nice and very effective way of reporting. Don't forget to keep it simple and try to make the reporting process overwhelm the benefits you get from talking about strategy.

• Preparing for a Successful Strategy Review Meeting (January 30, 2011)