Kennisbank

Involving the workforce in strategy without meetings dragging on endlessly

The answer is not fewer meetings, but one defined ambition round instead of a series of separate conversations. Once everyone responds to the same four layers at the same moment, the round of separate departmental sessions that makes meetings drag on endlessly falls away.

The reason involving the workforce often drags on is not that people have too much to say. It is that there is no fixed structure for that input to land on. Every department gets its own session, every session produces new input, and that input then has to be fed back again. Without a layer to talk against, a circle emerges.

Why separate conversations keep going

A production company of around 150 employees organised a round through teams every quarter to gather ideas for the strategy. After three quarters there was no decision, only a list of one hundred and twenty points without any coherence between them. The problem was not the involvement of people, but the absence of a framework in which that input could find a place. Without a distinction between visie, vision state, target and target state, every idea was weighed just as heavily, from a distant ambition to an operational bottleneck for tomorrow. That also makes it difficult to get what is the difference between a goal and an ambition clear, so every discussion starts again from zero.

One round instead of a series

An ambition round in which the entire organisation participates at the same time works differently than a session per department. Everyone is presented with the same four layers and responds within the same timeframe. This prevents team A from waiting on the outcome of team B, and a member of management having to answer the same question three times. At a service provider of about 90 employees, this approach replaced an annual cycle of performance reviews plus strategy sessions with a single moment at which the four layers were presented and the responses became directly visible next to each other. The turnaround time did not go to zero, but the open questions no longer stayed open for months.

What the double check delivers that prevents endless discussion

The double check on eight dimensions provides a fixed reference point against which responses are measured, instead of every comment being discussed again on its own merits. When a team indicates that a target feels unachievable, the question is no longer "shall we discuss this", but: on which of the eight dimensions does the assessment differ, and is that a matter of capacity, of time, or of something else. That distinction is also where ambition and reality clash: those who have to choose between revenue and margin will notice that a conversation about how do you weigh growth against margin in a strategy goes very differently when a testing framework is already in place than when that conversation starts from zero.

The five confidence gates work in a similar way for the pace of decision-making. Instead of every step being presented to everyone, a gate marks the moment at which enough confidence has been built up to move on to the next layer. That means not every detail has to be flattened out before the entire meeting can proceed.

Where the time savings come from

The time savings do not come from letting fewer people participate, but from removing repetition. Without fixed layers, every conversation becomes a new negotiation about what a goal is, what an ambition is, and what is realistic for this year. With the layers in place, the conversation shifts from definitions to content. At an organisation of 200 employees, this did not reduce the number of meetings, but their length: a session that used to take two hours to reach a shared picture took a third of that time after the four layers were introduced, because the discussion no longer had to start from the beginning.

Whether an organisation can truly move at the pace that the target state assumes is a separate question; how fast can an organisation really change depends on more than just how the meetings are organised. The structure of the ambition round mainly determines whether the organisation ever arrives at a shared picture, not how quickly that picture is then realised.

What this delivers today

To see whether the organisation's own visie is already sufficiently developed for such a round to be meaningful, there is the free test "is your visie steerable": six questions about the four layers, which show in a few minutes where the layers are still disconnected from each other.

The next step after an ambition round is the translation into what the organisation actually needs to be able to do: which roles and tasks the target state requires, and how many of those already exist today. That is a different question from who takes part in the conversation, and relates to which capabilities does my organisation need for this ambition. That capability translation back is the bridge between the shared picture from the ambition round and daily staffing; the difference in hours between what is needed and what is available is worked out in the werkscan at ftetoai.com.