It's not about following up -- it's about following along!

The daily routines and urgent tasks of the operation in many places range from time to time for follow-up to development measures. This means that the expected value creation is not reaped. There is always more energy at the beginning than at the end of development and strategy processes. Persistence and simplicity in the approach to follow-up can take a toll on process fatigue.

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Many organizations do not follow up on the strategy process, even though there is actually a high level of ambition. Evaluation and follow-up is not a good thing, but a necessity that is often overlooked. We see that follow-up can help to:

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1. Strategic development initiatives achieve the goals with clear results and thus give the desire to continue working with development tasks - also close to operations
2. The value of the time invested is converted into new workflows and entrenched behaviors that can be felt either by citizens or on the bottom line
3. It becomes an integral part of the organization's self-understanding, continuously keeping up with it by working systematically and simply with learning and scaling

Keep up with us

It is important to lay out a follow-up plan for the strategy process so that the next strategic steps are designed along the way. Especially when the strategy process is an iterative process, the dynamics must be kept going. Put another way, the strategy process is ongoing, and therefore development must be followed — and not just followed up.

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One way to stay focused on reaping the value creation of the strategy in practice is to work systematically with documentation and evaluation. This can be through both qualitative and quantitative approaches and methods. An important consideration is to work with several methods at the same time, so that both the human experiences and what can be counted and weighed are included in the evaluation. In order to ensure a systematic culture of documentation, it is essential to make initial measurements or to find existing data that give a picture of what kind of starting point the strategy is moving away from.

Find the crucial moments that make you move

One element of creating a continuous and systematic follow-up to the strategy is to strengthen the learning and feedback culture in the organization. Working with learning and feedback can be a challenge for many organizations, as we are often better at starting new things or dealing with urgent tasks than evaluating and reflecting from a backward perspective. The purpose of establishing a feedback culture is to ensure that you build on both strengths and successes — but also draw learning from failure and failure.

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We are looking for the crucial moments for your successful and challenging strategic moves. Since feedback and learning culture can be challenging to maintain, it is obvious to integrate it into existing meeting and dialogue formats to ensure systematics. As with everything else, you need time and attention. A first step may be to clarify which forums are suitable for learning dialogues and feedback processes. Should it be at weekly meetings of the team or at daily board meetings?

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Start with a simple framework that gives you a fixed structure for the learning dialogue. An easy methodological approach is, for example, to work with the 3:1 logic of feedback, where the dose is 3 acknowledging, curious and asking questions and 1 critical reflection.

Make it relevant to keep up with everyday life

Our recommendation is that you both work with the strategic learning around the strategic initiatives — but also connect with everyday practices where it makes sense. Often there is more correlation than we can first see between strategy and core task. When the strategy is based on a core task, it is about being able to alternate between short and long-term thinking, as well as individual episodes and analytical and more abstract patterns in the development of the meeting with citizens and the pressure on the core tasks.

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Therefore, it may be relevant to create close links between everyday operations and strategic developments. This can be, for example, through the use of board management or something that makes the development work visible.

What systematic monitoring and documentation is relevant to you?

Think Scaling and Spreading in from the Start

It provides value in terms of saved resources and time to magnify successful strategic actions via scale-ups within the organization and via dissemination to other organizations. A new release from the Center for Public-Private Innovation (CO-PI) shows that seven out of ten public innovations are actually either direct copies from others or inspired by others' solutions. So spreading happens in practice — even if it can be difficult to inherit someone else's success — or to line up on the beer box and tell about your own valuable solutions.

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Within organizations, there are the best opportunities to steal with pride, since the context across teams and entities is the same after all, although the professional differences are of course present. The aim is to activate the 'recycling lens' so that they show patterns that are similar, although legislation and customer types may be different.

Share concrete materials with others

A tip to promote dissemination is to share the concrete 'boundary objects' in the form of materials with insights, analyses, models, experiment descriptions, documentation schemas, etc., while sharing the honest story of both success and missteps. In other words, it is a matter of sharing 'the dirty laundry' that was washed clean along the way, as part of both internal and external scaling and spreading processes. So that we not only receive a polished success story. Help is available for the dispersal work in Co-Pi's Spreading Guidewhich helps the conversation between parts and recycler on the way.

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If you want to find inspiration in other organizations' success stories in dealing with complex challenges, you can also follow Find & Enlarge the Movement, which Resonans supports with a number of researchers, Center for Public-Private Innovation (CO-PI) and Djøfs Forlag.

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Read more in the box and join the event on October 3, 2023.