The North Star

If you find yourself in a situation where you need to lead your team through transformational change, one of the things you’ll need to do is articulate a strategic vision that they can rally around. One way to approach this is by treating it as a mini strategic plan, but depending on the scope this might feel like overkill for a project at a division or department level. And anyway, a strategic plan might not be an easy way into the vision for the folks actually doing the work that will be impacted. (This is especially true if they tend to feel disconnected from your organization’s strategic goals.)

Plus, you might get mired in the “plan” part of strategic planning. You know where you need to get to, but there’s a landscape of unknown unknowns between you and your destination. You may not know the details of how you’ll get there, or what kind of problems you’ll have along the way. How can you plan for all of that if you don’t have the expertise or the time to figure it out? 

This is when you might reframe your strategic vision as your North Star. You can see the North Star, but it’s far away. You can’t really tell how far, or what’s in between it and you. Sometimes it’s occluded by the clouds; at other times you might be distracted by something else in the sky. And you probably have no idea what it’s actually going to be like when you get there. Sounds like transformational change to me.

This worked well for us with customer support. We needed to create significantly more operational efficiency, so we could scale as the business grew. We also needed to improve the customer experience. Ultimately we wanted to set up a customer self-service website where users could find answers to common questions and more straightforward technical issues, and then just as easily submit a support case if needed. 

There was a lot of other work to do before we could build a self-service site, starting with overhauling case handling. I used the self-service website as our North Star throughout the process of building out modern case handling tools and revamping the business processes for support. Having a clear North Star was a helpful way to frame some of the decisions we made. “Will this work for us when…? How do we set this up if we eventually want to…?” 

I find the concept of the North Star also helps when you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed or tired of the initiative. It offers a way to think about your goal that’s less focused on the work, and sets up the destination as something to aspire to reach. Sure, you still have to do all the tasks and actions, but you don’t always need to have them front and center when reminding yourself why you’re doing all this work.