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2020 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

2. Illustrating an Organisation’s Strategy as a Map

Authors : Thomas Falk, Carl-Johan Petri, Jan Roy, Åke Walldius

Published in: Strategic Management Control

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Business strategies need to be communicated and internalized by employees to make a difference. In this chapter we explore how balanced scorecards and strategy maps can facilitate such communication and dialogue among employees. We build on references from the field of strategic management control and a well-grounded overview of the concept of storytelling from the field of cinema studies. In addition to this, we offer an in-depth case description of how the Swedish €100+ million amusement park group, Parks and Resorts Scandinavia, has deigned their strategy map visually, to engage their employees in talking about the strategy and measuring its execution. Our recommendation is that designers of scorecards and strategy maps should take the learnings from motion-picture storytellers into account and apply these experiences in their effort to make the strategy everyone’s job. We especially highlight the two concepts (1) simple design that creates intense content, and (2) “suspension of disbelief”, i.e. how the designer of the strategy map can strike a deal with the viewers (the employees in the organisation) such that they interpret and trust the content in the strategy map.

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previous chapter Strategic Management Control in Theory and Practice

next chapter Painting the Relevant Organisation

Of course, an organisation’s strategy is not fixed. Rather, the strategy should take into account new findings on which actions seem to work and which to discard. The balanced scorecard can assist the co-workers in the organisation to see if the strategy takes the organisation closer to its goals or if it is time to change strategy.

Kaplan and Norton’s original text clearly defined which perspectives a balanced scorecard should have. The terms used for their perspectives have varied. We avoid describing these variations and mainly use the four terms noted above. Sometimes, however, when we refer to other authors who have used different terms, we use their terms. We will not discuss the pros and cons of the various terms that have been used.

In a yearly survey of the use of management concepts by the global management consulting firm Bain & Company, they found that 40–60% of the respondents said they typically use “balanced scorecard” and are satisfied with them. Since 1996 the satisfaction rating has been around four on a five-point scale [www.bain.com/publications/articles/management-tools-balancedscorecard.aspx].

For a more detailed description of Gröna Lund’s strategy map and its use of the balanced scorecard, see Petri and Olve (2014a, b).

NAV Premium is the opposite of NAV discount (NAV = Net Asset Value) where corporations are traded at a lower price than the sum of the financial value of the operating companies in the portfolio. Parks and Resorts refers to this (in Swedish) as “Substanspremium” (in English: NAV premium).

See for example Hedberg and Jönsson’s (1978) criticism of the too simplistic picture of an organisation’s performance in its financial reporting.

Tufte defended the short version of his principle by responding in a playful and very knowledgeable way to a reader by deriving the “Feynamn-Tufte” variation of the principle: “A visual display of data should be simple enough to fit on the side of a van”. (www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001kE).

How we as spectators can be lured into believing what appears to be pure fiction is the subject of Joshua Wilson’s Suspension of Disbelief (2015), a long essay based on how the device is used in three well known movies by Orson Welles, Abbas Kiarostami and Wes Anderson.

For additional reading about genre, we recommend Yates and Orlikowski’s (1992) often-cited article on how the genres of organisational communication allow us to recognise and participate in various media forms. They describe how different genres have their own themes and formats that conform to the patterns in social and organisational activities. They exemplify this observation with the genre of the memo, which gradually changed as email technology became available in business. In another case study of major consulting projects, Levina and Orlikowski (2009) demonstrated (with a focus on five different workshop genres) how an analysis can offer insights into the power game that unexpected initiatives may provoke. They also show how genres can be created and how new patterns of storytelling can be established.

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Johnson, H. Thomas, and Kaplan, Robert S. 1987. Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

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Title: Illustrating an Organisation’s Strategy as a Map
Authors: Thomas Falk
Carl-Johan Petri
Jan Roy
Åke Walldius
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Strategic Management Control
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-38639-9

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-38640-5

Copyright Year: 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38640-5_2