What are Strategic Activities?

Strategic activities are actions, projects and other activities that are designed to achieve specific outcomes and objectives.

Each objective and goal should have a plan (made up of activities) that details how it will be achieved. The amount of detail in the plan will determine the amount of flexibility your managers and team members have when implementing it. The more detail provided the less flexibility exists for those that follow the plan.

Our strategy creation process identifies activities that are critical to attaining the organisation’s desired aspirations.  Importantly, it also links individual and collective activities using cause and effect relationships to the desired outcomes and objectives, as shown in the diagram below.  This effectively creates a map of how the activities that the organisation undertakes to attain its objectives and goals and eventually to achieving the organisation’s vision.

As can be seen in the diagram, activities are the foundation of the strategy model which means that they are the most critical element of any strategic plan and are the elements that help translate the strategic plan into a detailed business plan.

It is important to ensure that the activities are linked directly to attain specific outcomes or objectives, as shown in the diagram.  Remember, you are undertaking the activity in order to achieve the outcome or objective, not in the hope that you might achieve it.

This is a crucial distinction and should be applied to every decision that you have to make while implementing an activity.

For example, if you are managing a project and you have a decision to make as to which direction to take in a particular aspect of the project.  In these circumstances you should always ask ‘does this action/activity lead to achieving the outcome that I am aiming for?’  If the answer is yes then it is the correct course of action.

It should be clear from the above that strategic activities are crucial to the development and, more importantly, to the implementation of an organisation’s strategic and business plans.  Identifying the key activities during the strategy creation process is, therefore, crucial to the building a robust strategy.

It is also important to measure the results of strategic activates in order to ensure that they are resulting in the desired outcomes.  The earlier you can identify issues with activities the quicker you can take steps to correct them and get your strategy implementation back on track.