When you work in a small business, such as a startup, you can get everyone to play off the same sheet of music more easily. The larger your organization, however, the greater the challenge of understanding the end-to-end experiences you want to enable and why. Hierarchy, functional silos, and distributed teams create communication and collaboration barriers. Strategy is distributed in slides with terse bullet points that get interpreted in multiple ways. The vision for the end-to-end experience is lost in a sea of business objectives, channel priorities, and operational requirements. The result: painful dissonance when the dream was a beautifully orchestrated experience.

This chapter is about working with others to craft a tangible vision for your product or service—a North Star. These approaches will help your organization embrace a shared destiny and collaboratively create the conditions for better end-to-end experiences.

In the late 1980s, management consultants Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad studied the reasons Japanese companies were eclipsing their Western competitors in innovation and business outcomes. They coined the term strategic intent to codify how these organizations focused their employees on the same target. Instead of a generic mission statement, there was a simple, inspiring rallying cry. Yearly strategic planning was replaced with pairing near-term goals with the freedom for employees to determine the steps to achieve them. [1] Hamel and Prahalad argued that these practices motivated employees to find inventive ways of creating great outcomes despite relatively scarce resources.

In the decades since, many corporations have begun to embrace the concepts of strategic intent, as well as its close sibling, lean management. If you work in a medium- to large-sized organization, you likely see the tentacles of lean making their way into every nook and cranny—small, cross-functional teams, kanban boards, value stream mapping, SMART goals, and so on. The uniting philosophy behind these tactics is to empower small teams to deliver upon strategic intent through extreme focus and collaboration, as well as to streamline or remove processes that don’t directly result in customer value. In this way, lean management is one of the primary means to drive to the destination evoked in the strategic intent.

Another strain of intent common in organizations derives from the military: commander’s intent. In this context, intent is a commander’s concise statement for the purpose and desired end state of a military operation. Well-crafted intent “must be understood two echelons below the issuing commander” and “focus subordinates on what has to be accomplished in order to achieve success.” [2] While this sounds top down, commander’s intent sets the context for a dialogue between those responsible for conceptual approaches and those crafting detailed execution plans. Figure 9.1 shows the relationship between intent and execution, from the U.S. Army’s The Operations Process (ADRP 5-0) field guide. [3]