Our own model · Method
Critical success factors.
An exercise built on two questions. What has been the foundation of the company you have today, and what do you think is critical for the company you're going to become. The answers get sorted into four piles: keep, change, add and remove. It sounds simpler than it is, because the first question forces out what you're actually good at, and the second forces out what you're prepared to let go of.
Two questions, not one
The usual version only asks the forward-looking question, and then the answer becomes a wish list that looks like any other strategy presentation.
The backward-looking question is the one that makes the exercise honest. What has actually brought you here. Not what you tend to say in the sales meeting, but what held when things were heavy. Often the answer is something quite different from what comes first in the presentation, and fairly often it’s a person or a relationship rather than a capability.
Four piles
Keep. What carries you today and has to survive the change. This pile is almost always forgotten, and it’s the one that makes changes fall apart.
Change. What works, but not at the scale or in the direction you’re heading towards.
Add. What’s missing. Too much ends up here if you start here, which is the reason this pile comes third rather than first.
Remove. What costs without carrying anything any more. The hardest of all four, since somebody built it once and often is still around.
Why it mustn’t become a list
The exercise is worthless if it ends in a document. The point isn’t the four piles, it’s the conversation that arises when two people sort the same thing into different piles, and one of them wants to keep what the other wants to remove.
That’s where the direction gets set, and it’s why the exercise is done together rather than sent out as a survey.
In practice
We run it early, often as the first proper working session, because it gives a shared language before the decisions start. It often lands in the kind of circles and intersections described in The offering, but those are the result of the exercise and not the same thing as the success factors. Which ones they are is decided by the company, not by the template.