It is hard to challenge senior people on matters they so publicly say they have in hand, or are so thoroughly expected to be on top of.

Take 2 very sensitive areas – strategy formulation and strategy delivery.

Strategy formulation – easy right? Look at your strengths and weaknesses. Consider the opportunities and threats in front of you. Consider the imperatives you face and the goals of your owners. Understand the importance of all those things. Be clear on your constraints and risks. Draw out what Objectives that need to be defined what Targets for Operation and identify the Challenges for innovation.

Create a couple of versions of that with different mixes with alternate value judgements applied. Pop those into a timeline interspersed with check points and decision points – write a bit of blather on top – job done? Well yes – but there is then the job of getting peer agreement, and getting those objectives targets and challenges off the paper and into execution.

Then we have strategy delivery. To do this of course we need to set priority so that funding resources and leadership can be applied in proportion to the value each item warrants. We then need to decompose the high-level board objective, target and challenge into smaller elements that people can deliver against – and maintain priority. Then we must ensure that from within all work, and all the progress – we can decipher the ‘blather’ we get on progress to determine if we are achieving the right accomplishments or not.

So where does focus come into this? By focus we mean attention and clarity to enable decision and action.

Can we keep focus on our strengths and weaknesses? If they change – are we missing a possibility to exploit a situation, or losing to a customer? Are the Opportunities and Threats the same – in terms of scope and scale? Might the importance of these have shifted? Might we need to adjust our Objectives, Targets and Challenges. This can, of course be hard, so perhaps we lose focus on our drivers a little bit more than we should?

Secondly, can we keep focus on the translation of objective into the deliverables that will enable them? Have a look at the list of strategic projects your organisation runs. How are they described – as verbs (e.g. CRM Solution) or as nouns (Shorter sales cycle). It is easy to lose focus on intent. Can the board not only retain its focus – but also that others focus too?

Third. As actual execution becomes more distant from Board members, can they retain focus on the need to provide facility, leadership and culture to enable those distant matters to happen? Perhaps board members only see PPT and simple data presentation – but there has to be an ecosystem underneath that. Aside from pressing matters within day to day delivery, and key future strategic planning – can Board members maintain focus on the ecosystem that provides them information to function with?



If we have these matters in focus – then perhaps we will be able to focus on the matters that arise in the information we use in our decision making processes. Lose focus on the preceding three – how can your board apply focus to this most important one?