Strategy Map Definition
A strategy map is a powerful visual tool that helps organizations see their entire strategy on a single page. It shows how different parts of the strategy connect and influence each other, making it easier for everyone in the organization to understand goals and their role in achieving them.
Why Strategy Maps Work
Unlike lengthy PowerPoint decks or complex reports, strategy maps are simple, visual, and easy to understand. They provide a clear way to communicate an organization’s direction, priorities, and how initiatives are linked. This clarity helps employees at all levels see how their work contributes to the bigger picture.
Encouraging Collaboration and Engagement
Strategy maps foster collaboration across teams. By inviting input from people at all levels, they create a more comprehensive and inclusive strategy. When employees feel heard, they’re more likely to stay engaged and committed to achieving strategic goals.
Tracking Progress and Adapting Strategy
Another benefit of strategy maps is that they make it easy to track progress and adjust initiatives as needed. Everyone stays aligned, focused on common objectives, and can adapt quickly when priorities shift.
In short, strategy maps help organizations communicate their strategy clearly, align teams, and drive consistent action.
Strategy Mapping as a Strategic Planning Method
The technique of strategy mapping is designed to help management teams explore and discuss strategy in depth. It enables organizations to:
- Develop implementable strategies
- Align mission, vision, and goals
- Identify potential challenges and risks
Key Benefits of Strategy Maps
- Discover hidden strategic issues
- Evaluate vision, mission, goals, and actions effectively
- Communicate strategy in a simple, actionable format
- Monitor and manage strategy implementation
- Stimulate discussion and understanding of organizational priorities
Origin of Strategy Maps
The concept of strategy maps was popularized by Robert Kaplan and David Norton in their book “Strategy Maps”. It evolved from their earlier Balanced Scorecard framework and has been widely adopted for strategic planning and execution.
Principles of Developing a Strategy Map
- Strategy balances contradictory forces – consider competing priorities and constraints.
- Strategy is based on a differentiated value proposition – define what sets your organization apart.
- Strategy consists of simultaneous, complementary themes – multiple initiatives should work together.
- Strategic alignment determines the value of intangible assets – people, culture, and knowledge must support objectives.
Key Components of a Strategy Map
A strategy map is more than just a diagram, it’s a visual blueprint of how an organization achieves its strategic objectives. Understanding its key components helps teams see the cause-and-effect links that drive success. A typical strategy map includes four main perspectives, each with specific objectives that connect to the overall strategy:
1. Financial Perspective
Focuses on tangible outcomes like revenue growth, cost reduction, and profitability. It answers the question: “How do we create value for shareholders?”
2. Customer Perspective
Defines the organization’s value proposition and how it delivers value to customers. This perspective helps identify objectives that improve customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty.
3. Internal Process Perspective
Highlights critical internal processes that enable the organization to deliver on its value proposition efficiently. It includes operations, innovation, and regulatory processes that drive productivity and quality.
4. Learning and Growth Perspective
Covers the organization’s intangible assets, employee skills, knowledge, culture, and technology, that are essential to executing strategy effectively.
Other common components you might see in a strategy map include:
- Strategic Themes: Key focus areas that run across multiple objectives, such as innovation, sustainability, or customer experience.
- Cause-and-Effect Relationships: Arrows connecting objectives to show how achieving one goal contributes to others.
- KPIs & Metrics: Measurable indicators to track progress against each objective.
By combining these components in a visual strategy map, teams can clearly see how each objective supports the overall strategy, making it easier to communicate, align, and execute initiatives effectively.
Why and How Strategy Maps Benefit Organizations and Teams
A strategy map is more than just a visual diagram, it’s a powerful tool for aligning people, processes, and resources with your organization’s strategic goals. Whether you’re leading an enterprise, product, or marketing team, strategy mapping brings clarity, focus, and actionable insight to your strategy execution.
Gain Clarity on Strategic Goals
Strategy maps provide a clear picture of your organization’s objectives and how they relate to one another. Teams can see exactly what they’re working toward, understand their role in achieving strategic goals, and avoid conflicting priorities. By visualizing the connections between goals, initiatives, and outcomes, everyone is aligned on the bigger picture.
Make Better Decisions
With a strategy map, leaders can evaluate different perspectives and ensure decisions align with overall objectives. By highlighting key drivers of success, organizations can focus resources where they matter most, identify areas that are over- or under-allocated, and adjust quickly to changing circumstances.
Enhance Resource Allocation
Strategy maps help organizations allocate time, money, and human resources effectively. By identifying critical objectives and drivers, teams can prioritize initiatives that create the greatest impact, ensuring that every resource contributes to strategic success.
Improve Communication and Engagement
A strategy map communicates goals clearly to employees, stakeholders, and partners. When everyone understands the strategy, it fosters collaboration, builds buy-in, and ensures that teams are engaged and motivated to achieve the organization’s vision.
- Makes strategy easy to explain to teams and stakeholders
- Supports cross-functional collaboration
- Encourages input from all levels of the organization
Focus on Key Strategic Objectives
By visualizing strategy, organizations and teams can focus on the most important initiatives. It helps prioritize work that drives results and prevents time or resources from being wasted on less impactful activities.
- Provides a framework to track progress
- Aligns team objectives with organizational goals
- Supports the development of KPIs and performance metrics
Align Teams and Drive Execution
Once the organization’s strategy is mapped, each team can create their own aligned strategy maps. This ensures that all efforts support corporate objectives while maintaining clarity on responsibilities, initiatives, and measurable outcomes.
In short, strategy mapping turns complex organizational strategies into actionable, visual plans that drive alignment, engagement, and measurable results.
How to Make a Strategy Map
Most of the value the strategy provides to the organization comes from discussion and thinking generated during the process of designing it. Now that the strategy map definition is out of the way, let’s focus on the steps you need to take to create one.
Step 1: Define Your Mission and Vision
- Mission: Why your organization exists; guides internal focus.
- Vision: Short- and long-term goals; paints a picture of the future.
- Why it matters: A strong foundation helps everyone understand the organization’s purpose.
Most organizations already have mission and vision statements and values defined.
While the mission is an internally focused statement that describes why an organization exists and the purpose toward which its activities are directed, the vision statement (a more concise statement) outlines the short and long-term goals and objectives of the organization, creating a picture of its future.
The mission and the vision statements are crucial in helping the company stakeholders understand what the company is about and what it intends to achieve.
And having them well-defined will help you with the foundation for your strategy map.
Step 2: Analyze Your Environment
- Stakeholders: Identify customers, suppliers, competitors, investors.
- Tools: Stakeholder Map, Value Chain Analysis.
- Goal: Understand trends, risks, and value creation opportunities.
Tip: This step sets up the customer perspective on your strategy map.
Before putting together your strategy, you need to understand the context; the landscape, and the industry in which your organization operates. Identifying the trends in the industry that may affect your strategy is equally important before you start mapping your strategy.
When analyzing the environment of your organization, one key aspect to focus on is the different stakeholders (customers, suppliers, competitors, investors, etc.) you interact with, what roles they play and what issues they may create.
A tool you can use here is the stakeholder map which will help identify everyone who has a stake or interest in your strategy and how they relate to the organization.
Another key aspect you need to focus on here is how you serve and add value to your customers and you can conduct a value chain analysis to understand this.
Through this stakeholder and value chain analysis, you will be able to identify the assumptions, issues, and risks that you may want to keep an eye out for as you implement your strategy.
Having completed this step will help you immensely when you are defining the customer perspective of the strategy map.
Step 3: Define Your Strategy
- Outline activities that create a sustainable competitive advantage.
- Example: Deliver higher value to customers than competitors.
- This strategy forms the backbone of your map.
With an understanding of why the company exists, its general objectives and direction, and the environment in which your organization exists, you need to now focus on defining a strategy to accomplish the said mission and vision.
Your strategy describes the set of activities that you need to take to ensure that your organization will create a sustainable difference in the marketplace. For example, you can create a sustainable difference by offering a product that would deliver greater value to your customers than your competitors.
Step 4: Translate Strategy Into a Map
Objectives: Represented with ovals, categorized under four perspectives:
- Financial Perspective: Revenue growth, cost reduction
- Customer Perspective: Value proposition and customer goals
- Internal Process Perspective: Key processes to deliver value
- Learning & Growth Perspective: Skills, knowledge, and systems
Tip: Use your balanced scorecard to align objectives.
This is where the strategy map comes into play. It helps make your strategy seem more meaningful and actionable for your employees.
In a strategy map, the objectives in your balanced scorecard are represented with an oval shape. These objectives are then categorized under the four perspectives that we introduced earlier.
Financial Perspective
Specify the plans and strategies to improve revenue and lower costs. There are two dimensions to financial strategies – revenue growth (long-term objectives) and productivity (short-term objectives). The overarching financial objective of a strategy should be to sustain growth in shareholder value and therefore should comprise both short-term and long-term objectives.
For example, deepening relationships with existing customers to sell them more existing products or services or selling entirely new products is a common revenue growth strategy.
Productivity improvements can occur when companies reduce costs by lowering direct and indirect expenses which enables them to produce the same quantity of output while spending less on resources.
Customer Perspective
Understand who the targeted customers of the organization are in order to identify the objectives and measures for the value proposition it aims to offer them. It is based on the organization’s strategy for its customers. A value proposition canvas communicates what the company expects to do for its customers better or differently than its competitors.
The objectives and measures for a particular value proposition define the strategy of an organization.
Internal Processes Perspective
How does the organization manage its internal processes and develop its human, information and organizational capital to deliver the differentiated value proposition of the strategy?
Internal processes help produce and deliver the value proposition for customers, and they help improve processes and reduce costs to boost productivity. Internal processes include operations management processes, customer management processes, innovation processes, and regulatory and social processes.
Learning and Growth Perspective
This section of the map focuses on the skills, knowledge, and systems the organization needs to deliver the intended value.
Step 5: Highlight Cause-and-Effect Relationships
- Connect objectives with arrows to show how one goal drives another.
- Example: Training employees → Improved internal processes → Better customer satisfaction.
Now that you have identified each of the objectives you need to complete in order to deliver your strategy, it’s time to show how the objectives are connected to each other. Draw arrows between objectives in each perspective to show this causal relationship.
For example, if you train your employees well enough, they will contribute to streamlining internal processes. And that’s a cause-and-effect relationship right there.
Step 6: Show Strategic Themes
- Group objectives vertically to highlight focus areas (e.g., sustainability, innovation, safety culture).
- Themes make your map easier to read and communicate.
Some organizations prefer to highlight themes in the strategy maps by vertically grouping objectives. Themes highlight strategic focuses, and they may represent areas such as sustainability, the culture of safety, etc.
Step 7: Cascade the Strategy Map
- Corporate-level maps can be cascaded to departments, teams, or regions.
- Example: HR strategy map, marketing strategy map, product-focused strategy map.
- Ensures alignment of individual team goals with the organization’s strategy.
Corporate-level strategy maps are great at communicating the core strategies to key stakeholders, and most strategy mapping exercises tend to stop at this point of ‘corporate strategy map’.
But the corporate strategy maps can be used as a starting point to develop many lower-level strategy maps. Such examples of cascading strategy maps include the within organization strategy maps (based on geographical, product, service, etc. distinctions), within perspective strategy maps, etc.
Free Ready-to-Use Strategy Map Templates for Any Team
Creating a strategy map from scratch can feel overwhelming, especially when you’re trying to align teams, clarify objectives, and track progress all at once. That’s where strategy map templates come in, they give you a head start, a ready-to-use visual framework that you can customize to fit your organization’s unique needs.
Templates are designed to save time, reduce errors, and make strategy mapping accessible to anyone on your team, even if it’s their first time using one. By starting with a template, you can focus on strategy development and alignment, rather than spending hours designing diagrams.
Time to Make Your Own Strategy Map
Your strategy map should describe how your organization’s values will affect the way you learn and grow to improve your internal processes, increase customer satisfaction and accomplish your financial goals in order to achieve your organization’s purpose and ambitions.
A correct, well-designed strategy map will make it easier to create the subsequent balance scorecard. It will also make communicating your strategy to the rest of the organization much easier.
FAQs About Strategy Maps
What are some best practices for using a strategy map effectively?
- Ensure the strategy map aligns with the organization’s overall mission and objectives.
- Involve key stakeholders in the development of the strategy map.
- Develop specific and measurable objectives and initiatives aligned with the organization’s overall strategy.
- Establish clear roles and responsibilities for team members.
- Regularly review progress towards achieving the objectives and initiatives and adjust the strategy map as necessary.
How often should you update the strategy map?
What challenges do organizations face when developing and using a strategy map, and how can you overcome them?
- Ensuring the buy-in and engagement of all stakeholders
- Balancing short-term and long-term objectives
- Aligning individual team goals with the organization’s overall strategy
- Collecting and using data effectively to measure progress
To overcome these challenges, make sure to:
- Involve all stakeholders in the development of the strategy map
- Develop objectives and initiatives that balance short and long-term needs
- Develop specific initiatives and KPIs for individual teams that align with the overall strategy
- Invest in data collection
How Do You Align Individual Team Goals with an Organization’s Strategy Using a Strategy Map?
The key to aligning team goals with an organization’s strategy is to wait until the overall strategy map of the organization has been developed. Once that is done, each team can develop their own strategy maps that align with the organization’s overall strategy. A few essential tips to follow are to
- Break down the organization’s overall strategy map into smaller, more specific goals and objectives that can be assigned to different teams.
- Develop specific initiatives and action plans that support each team’s goals and objectives, ensuring they are aligned with the organization’s overall strategy.
- Identify key performance indicators (KPIs) that can measure progress towards each team’s goals and objectives and ensure they align with the organization’s overall KPIs.
- Establish clear roles and responsibilities for team members that support the team’s goals and objectives, including specific tasks and responsibilities needed to achieve the goals and objectives.
