You and I both know that having a solid plan is the only way to win as an entrepreneur or business leader. But let‘s be honest – most strategic plans end up long-winded PowerPoint decks collecting virtual dust or dense Excel financial models impossible to decipher.
Bringing your plans alive through visual strategy mapping is a game-changer for leadership teams aiming to build company-wide alignment and results. This guide will walk you through what strategy mapping is, core principles for doing it right, 8 awesome mapping templates to choose from and tips to ensure your visual masterpiece makes an impact!
Why Visual Strategy Mapping Matters More Today
Firstly, let‘s get clear on what business strategy entails. Your strategy lays out key goals and objectives across crucial areas:
- Financials – Targets for revenue, profitability, growth
- Operations – Internal processes, structures and optimizations
- Customer – Client personas, needs and desired experience
- Innovation – New products, services and investments to fuel growth
Research shows that only 5% of the workforce understands their company‘s strategy. But organizations that communicate strategy clearly see 32% higher returns than those failing to connect teams to strategic priorities.
That‘s why visually mapping your plans is mission-critical – it builds alignment and focus by literally showing everyone how their work ladders up to big picture goals.
6 Principles for Strategy Mapping Success
Before we get to the awesome tools available, first understand these fundamental principles for developing effective, high-impact strategy maps:
1. Balance Stakeholder Needs
Creating value requires meeting mutually important needs – understand key wants across senior leaders, middle managers, frontline staff and external stakeholders.
Neglecting any group can degrade execution. For example, focusing obsessively on shareholder returns without valuing employees commonly causes retention issues and damage to long-term performance.
2. Link Activities to Value
Every element within your visual map should clearly link back to business value creation. Activities that can‘t tie back dilute strategic focus. Annual strategy cleansing assessments help sort the wheat from the chaff in terms of the relevance of current initiatives.
3. Differentiate Your Value Proposition
What makes your business uniquely compelling? Defining and embedding differentiating value propositions within your strategy mapping provides purpose and focus for commercial teams.
4. Think Complementary
The beauty of strategy mapping done right is highlighting virtuous cycles – where progress against one goal fuels energy towards others. Complementary thinking expands possibilities rather than limiting options through "either/or" constructs.
5. Work Top Down
Cascade from big picture aspirations to lower-level objectives. This prevents getting stuck micromanaging incremental tasks without proper context of the overall destination intended.
6. Revisit and Refine
Effective strategy remains dynamic to accommodate changing business conditions, new data or lessons from execution. Set regular monthly and quarterly meetings to inspect, adapt and improve your mapped strategy.
Now that you‘re armed with core principles, let‘s explore powerful templates to visualize your strategic plans!
8 Strategy Mapping Tools To Energize Your Plans
1. Creately
Founded in 2011, Creately swiftly rose as a preferred strategy visualization solution for over 50,000 companies including Samsung, Oracle and Amazon.
Its user-friendly editor requires no prior design expertise to model strategy systems and processes. Over 250 strategy templates support diverse approaches from SWOT analysis, PEST analysis through to porter‘s value chain mapping.
Creately makes it simple for teams to take an all-in-one approach to scheming, mapping and tracking strategic delivery. Seamless exports even enable using your maps in external presentations or documents.
"Creately helped us diversify our product lines successfully by facilitating clear, visual 5-year strategic plans cascaded down to our various business units." David Lee, Samsung Electronics
Key Features
- Intuitive browser-based drag and drop
- Hundreds of strategist-approved templates
- Editable shapes, icons and color schemes right balance of creativity and structure to document plans
clearly without limiting flexibility needed as strategies evolve.
Pricing
Free – $6 per user/month
2. Canva
With over 60 million users spanning 190 countries, Canva democratizes design through ease-of-use. Its strategic planning toolkit simplifies building elegant strategy documentation.
Choose from roadmap, timeline and alternative creative layouts before dropping in your own vision, mission, values, objectives and performance indicators. Canva‘s suite of graphic editing features bring your plans to life beautifully and impactfully.
Non-designers can create boardroom-worthy strategy visualizations in minutes aided by Canva‘s 5000+ curated graphic element library.
"As a startup competing with industry Goliaths, we needed to punch above our weight through presenting world-class strategy plans. Canva gave us the tools to look like a big, established player from day one." Laura Cho, Foodbox
Key Features
- Huge range of graphics and strategic templates
- Intuitive editor focused on simplicity
- Library of 5000+ design elements
- Animated presentations and graphics options
Pricing
Free – $12.95 per user/month
3. Ayoa Mind Mapping
Founded in 2014, Ayoa pioneered online mind mapping empowering visually-rich strategy planning – perfect for dynamic thinking required in early ideation stages.
Virtual sticky notes form building blocks to map objectives, underlying processes, risks, competitors and enablers. Links and arrows crystallize logical connections to bring clarity to multifaceted strategic challenges.
Ayoa‘s infinite online whiteboard facilitates group brainstorming and editing in real-time from anywhere. Category color coding and collapsible hierarchies enable focus on relevant details as required.
"We used Ayoa from our initial kick-off retreat to finalizing implementable strategic actions by function – the end-to-end visual flow brought unprecedented clarity compared to previous Excel-based approaches." _Beatrice Chu, _ZenZERO
Key Features
- Virtual sticky notes for flexibility
- Custom linkages highlight relationships
- Real-time team collaboration
- Easy commenting and task delegation
- Roadmap view to visualize strategic sequencing
Pricing
Free – $7.50 per member/month
4. SimpleMind Pro
Boasting over 6 million downloads and 90,000 reviews averaging 4.6 stars, SimpleMind Pro makes strategy mapping on desktop or mobile devices intuitive.
Its branching tree-structures and drill-down capability empowers systematic thinking flow vital for coherent strategy formulation. Instant search, icons and notes enable rich representations capturing all strategic plan details.
Unique "mental wakeups" coach users through reflective questioning – optimizing strategic quality and consideration of alternate perspectives.
"SimpleMind Pro‘s user experience delivers that perfect sweet spot between flexibility of expression and structured strategic thinking often missed by other tools." _Dr Adam Holmwood, _Cambridge University
Key Features
- Branching tree format
- Notes and icons for detail clarity
- Drill-downs to expand perspectives
- Wakeups coaching engine prompts reflective strategy practice
Pricing
$9.99 one-time purchase
Now you‘re equipped with an awesome shortlist of platforms purpose-built to help visualize and direct strategy excellently. Next let‘s get into the all-important execution tips and tricks…
Bringing Your Maps To Life
With so many intuitive templates at your fingertips, the challenges become populating your strategic diagrams with the right content and maintaining momentum as plans evolve. Here are 8 tactical tips to drive value from visual strategy mapping:
1. Start High-Level
Begin mapping at the highest altitude detailing key 3 to 5 year strategic goals before drilling down into 12-month departmental objectives, specific growth initiatives or performance indicators underpinning that vision. Resist the urge to micromanage by mapping out granular tasks lacking context.
2. Focus on Flow
Use linking arrows, colors and horizontal positioning to indicate the chronological flow as well logical relationships between goals across perspectives. This brings crucial sequencing and interdependencies to life – empowering smarter planning.
3. Map Measurable Targets
Attach specific KPIs and metrics to goals at each level to embed accountability and provide clarity on what success looks like. Quantifiable measures form the basis for assessing progress towards purposeful outcomes.
4. Allocate Ownership
Naming individuals or teams responsible for delivering key result areas creates accountability often missed in text-based plans. This also coordinates seamless handovers between groups relying on each others‘ outputs.
5. Set Review Cadence
Establish fortnightly or monthly routines to revisit and update maps relative to progress, challenges and learnings. This continual adjustment and improvement process keeps strategies alive and responsive to ever-changing business conditions.
6. Encourage Feedback
Share visualizations with both internal and external stakeholders through your intranet or meeting tools to invite feedback for continuous alignment. Interactive commenting allows refinement of strategy and building shared purpose across the entire organization.
7. Present Strategically
Use exported maps as leave-behinds after annual planning meetings or as launch collateral for new strategic plans. Visually reinforcing strategic messaging through existing communication channels amplifies engagement and recall.
8. Lead Strategic Conversations
Print maps as handouts during monthly town halls or quarterly leadership workshops to facilitate rich dialogue converting strategy from top-down directive to shared mission.
Pulling it All Together
In our fast-changing information economy, having clearly defined strategic plans – while crucial – proves insufficient to sustain competitive advantage. Visually mapping and communicating strategy unlocks the power to coordinate and energize employees, customers and partners towards responsive execution.
So be sure to choose one of the versatile templates and tools above to start engaging stakeholders through visualizing your business‘ purposeful direction. I hope this guide provided a robust orientation towards applying leading strategy mapping approaches to set your company up for enduring market leadership. Feel free to reach out if any questions pop up on your value-creation journey ahead!
