Lucent Compass: get your bearings on strategy
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
When Alice in Wonderland poses her question to the Cheshire Cat, she has already faced numerous trials including being pulled into different shapes and sizes, encountering a White Rabbit, a cryptic Caterpillar and an angry Duchess with her pig baby.
After experiencing an exhausting 18 months grappling with a whole host of challenges posed by Covid-19, senior leaders may well feel like asking the same question.
Charities and non profit organisations have been through such a period of rapid service redesign, digital and organisational transformation. To answer the question “Where do we go from here?”, you need first to understand where your staff and trustees are starting from. Or as Luen Thompson, CEO of Forget Me not Children’s Hospice, put it:
“Coming out of the immediate aftermath of Covid, I wanted to give staff and trustees the opportunity to reflect on where we are at as an organisation.”
Chief Executive of Birthrights, Amy Gibbs, faced a similar challenge: “I wanted to check in on staff and trustee views on our strategy, but we were looking for an objective and independent way of doing this.”
This was the impetus behind the development of Lucent Compass – a new tool to help senior leaders get their bearings on an organisation’s strategy. Working with Chief Executives from across the social sector, we devised a customised insight tool, in the form of an online survey. Using the framework of our Strategy Ship, this gives you an ‘at a glance’ perspective on what’s working and what needs more attention.
We’ve seen that staff and trustees feel more comfortable sharing their honest perspectives when it is an anonymous survey – and being analysed by an out-of-house consultancy also helps people share their views candidly.
A key element of the Compass tool is a ‘Focus’ session for the CEO and/or Chair with two Lucent consultants. Drawing on our experience working with clients across the social sector, this is a valuable opportunity to reflect on the findings and identify next steps.
As Amy explains, “Working through the three-step Compass process with Lucent gave me reassurance on what was working and what needed attention and showed me where to focus my time and energy moving forward.”
Lucent Compass aims to bring senior leaders a deeper understanding about their organisation’s strategy. This should mean that, unlike Alice, they can more easily answer the Cheshire Cat’s pithy yet pertinent retort: “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
Interested to find out more? Contact us at hello@lucentconsultancy.co.uk or call on 07939 257040 for an initial discussion about how Lucent Compass can help you to kick-start your strategy.