How do you come up with an org strategy — your mission, vision, values, etc.?
One way is to hire an outside firm to help. And that can be a good idea… IF.
IF you find somebody with the right mindset.
What’s the right mindset? This: Your org strategy should be discovered — not invented.
You don’t want a typical agency to swoop in and “create” your principles. Sure, you’ll get something creative, but it probably won’t stick. That’s because it didn’t come from your organization; it came from somebody else.
Here’s what I believe: Who you are and what you’re about already exists in the hearts and minds of your people.
The work, then, is to get those thoughts and feelings out… shape them into impactful phrases… and connect them in a sensible order.
So, org strategy development is a process of mining for meaning. The goal is to uncover ideas within the organization, not import them from outside it.
The job is to compose, not impose.
Who you are and what you’re about already exists in the hearts and minds of your people.
I came to this belief from personal experience. At Counterpart, we’d always hired nice people, but sometimes they didn’t work out. Why not? We sorta knew, but we couldn’t point to anything in particular. That’s because we hadn’t done the work of defining company culture. The culture was there, it just wasn’t articulated.
Is it the same for you?
Honestly, you can get away with that for a while. But not having defined organization principles makes it really hard to scale. I mean, how do you guide people’s behavior and decision-making if you don’t give them a guide? That’s not fair to them.
In my case, I was not only the company leader; I was also a career writer — a skillset that’s essential to this work. So of course I gave a ton of thought to the exact phrases that should steer our organization. And the best thing I did was to get help from our other leaders, too.
How did we know we were successful? When our coworkers saw the core values and said “Yes! That’s us, 100%.” Soon after, they started voluntarily hashtagging our principles in emails.
The ideas caught on, because they came from us.
Before I started Counterpart, I was a product of the traditional agency world. So I’m wired to come up with ideas, and I love doing it. But here’s what I’ve learned: It’s even more rewarding when you help someone else be the hero. When they say something brilliant, and don’t even realize it. That’s when I get to point it out: “That’s it! You’re a genius!”
(No coincidence our company is called Counterpart. That name signals the kind of relationship we have with our clients.)
You know, invention and discovery may be related, but I think discovery is more fun. That’s not to say it’s less work. But it’s a different kind of work — different than the typical agency fare. Advertising rewards originality, boldness, and execution. Org strategy requires listening, interpretation, and synthesis.
Here’s what that means: Lots of homework. Hours of interviews — always one-on-one. Surfacing key ideas, in real words, from you and your people. This is the way we’ve done things for nearly a quarter century. Safe to say we’ve got it down.
If the substance of your organizational strategy can only come from within, why bother with outside help?
Because creative skills are still indispensable. You can mine for the material, but gold doesn’t come out of the ground as a wedding band. Even when the ideas are uncovered, they need to be expressed in concise and memorable ways. They need to be put in an order that makes sense. They need to be connected and feel like a cohesive whole.
That’s exactly what the Single Slide Strategy® framework is built to do: It’s your means of refinement. It’s the structure that holds everything together. It’s the way to make your foundations flow.
All this is what makes your org strategy “feel right.” And that’s the key to getting buy-in… the organizational alignment you need to go to the next level.
Behind it, though? Curiosity. Probing. Listening. Because the framework doesn’t matter without the right frame of mind.
Now you know the right answer — and the right attitude: The ideal outcome isn’t that you admire our thinking. It’s that you recognize your own.
So when we’ve got it all put together — your vision, mission, values, and more — nothing’s more gratifying than to hear you say, “Yes! That is us to a T. How did you do it?”
The answer is, we got it from you.
Yes, we refined the words. Yes, we made the ideas connect. Yes, we distilled it all to a single slide. But what’s on that slide, in the end, feels like you — because it came from you.
Composed. Not imposed.
The ideal outcome isn’t that you admire our thinking. It’s that you recognize your own.
Maybe you’ve never written down your mission, vision, values, and standards. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
The real work is discovering them and articulating them. That’s the difference between imposing an identity and composing one.
If you’d like help with that process, we’d be honored to serve as your counterpart. No imposition whatsoever.
