The Organisation Strategy Map

I sometimes take the organisation value chain a stage further and represent the whole business strategy map focusing on the organisation value chain rather than the other three chains.  This is shown here.

I’ve dived down deeper into the learning and growth perspective which now becomes the organisation value chain

I’ve grouped the rest of the business strategy map together into one perspective which I call business impacts.  This doesn’t mean that operations, customers and financial results are unimportant but is simply a consequence of the fact that we don’t impact them directly and therefore don’t need to focus on them quite so much.  And I call the perspective business impacts rather than business results as our results are really the final step in the organisation value chain ie the human capital and other outcomes.  The business impacts are then the things the business can do as a result of our results - they’re not the direct results of the work we do on the organisation value chain.

Presenting the business / organisation strategy map in this way has a number of benefits:

• As opposed to the organisation value chain, it doesn’t show outcomes / organisational capabilities being created in isolation.  Again, these only have value if they do in fact lead on to business results.
• As opposed to the normal business strategy map, it doesn’t lump everything to do with HR together in one perspective.  
  

The business strategy map is a really useful model for a business because it provide a business with a balanced range of perspective (i.e a business should have approximately equal numbers of objectives for its financial, customer, processes and learning & growth perspectives) and therefore the ability to track the flow of objectives through these perspectives i.e the ability to identify lead and lag indicators of particular strategies.

Using the business strategy map is also useful for HR as it helps integrate HR into the rest of the business i.e. every time the business executive meet to talk about the business using the strategy map, they’ll be talking about learning and growth, i.e HR, as well.

However the business strategy map is otherwise a less useful model for HR, since all of our objectives are in learning & growth we don’t have the benefits of balance or of flow.  Representing the business strategy map as the organisation strategy map gives HR these benefits, i.e HR can now track the flow between the objectives within these four perspectives, and set lead indicators for inputs and activities and lag indicators for outcomes and business impacts.

Ie HR can now track the flow between the objectives within these four perspectives, and set lead indicators for inputs and activities and lag indicators for outcomes and business impacts.