Shared understanding of the critical few: a parameter of strategic planning effectiveness

Our paper presents the findings from a study examining the effectiveness of strategic planning relative to the definition of focus. We describe a process for enabling the corporate strategy agenda to be reduced to a critical few challenges and opportunities, even in complex environments, and we describe the benefits of defining, measuring and tracking the critical few on strategy implementation. We use the theory of shared understanding to explain our findings, and demonstrate how this concept has relevance for strategy implementation and deployment.