Equipping leadership teams for change
SYSTEMS7
IKEA Poland – aligning on enablers of strategic change
In the summer and autumn of 2023, S7 was thrilled to support the management team of IKEA Poland in creating a shared view of the organisation’s strategic context and what direction the team should take in light of this context.
"A few months after the release of our 'winning aspiration', I am so excited to see not only that these words have sunk into our everyday conversations, but more importantly that the commitment to our commonly defined future has become a foundation for our decision-making."
Marina Dubakina, CEO, IKEA Poland
The need
Using the Immunity to Change framework, S7 supported the Ikea Poland management team in surfacing three needs:
Strategic direction. With overall strategic direction being set by the global organisation, the Poland team wanted to provide more granular strategic guidance to its organisation, specific to the Polish market.
Prioritisation. Like most businesses, the organisation's culture featured a bias for short-term execution which made it difficult to distinguish the urgent from the strategically necessary.
Organisational empowerment. The management team wanted also to mobilise the wider organisation in strategic decision-making, ensuring that they were ready to run in a new direction of travel.
The approach
We started with a workshop for both the management team and an extended group of leaders in the organisation. The purpose of this session was to help the team take a big step back and up, to explore drivers in the Polish market. To stimulate fresh thinking, we brought in a few external speakers – sociologist Dr Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer of Kozminski University; Maciej Bukowski, an expert in the geopolitics of climate change; and AI pioneer Jaroslaw Królewski.
Leveraging these provocative views the IKEA Poland team worked in break-outs to draft 'strategic beliefs' that attempt to answer this question: what do we believe about the future, in 3-5 years’ time, that is relevant to IKEA Poland?
S7 then worked with the management team virtually to synthesise this input into ten strategic beliefs that could be used in the organisation to guide decision-making and prioritisation.
The final strategic beliefs were then shared back to the team at a second workshop, where we then also harvested input to a 'winning aspiration' which articulated what kind of company Ikea Poland wanted and needed to become in light of the strategic beliefs.
Again, S7 worked with the management team virtually to convert the input from the wider team into the final product. We aligned on a compelling winning aspiration as well as a set of strategic enablers – key 'leaps' IKEA Poland must make if it is to make a reality of the winning aspiration.
The IKEA Poland management team then integrated these priorities into core business-planning and began using the winning aspiration as its 'rallying cry' for change.
