2008 will be the year of ...

Happy new year! May 2008 bring the challenges you relish and the rewards you seek.

For Strategic Moves, 2008 marks the second year in business. Yeah!

Year 1 confirmed that I could translate the business transformation promise of Strategic Moves into reality.

The Audience Development work I led at the National Arts Centre Orchestra throughout the year has delivered breakthrough business results already.

I think there are two transformation drivers that secured this remarkable success. First, from the outset audience development was defined as a "whole of business" issue, not merely a marketing issue. Second, we created a dynamic diagnostic and strategy process involving cross-functional staff in new ways.

By taking a strategy development approach that was highly dynamic and ongoing (rather than static), and involved everyone in the Orchestra organization and many throughout the NAC at large, we effectively used the development process itself to demonstrate new ways of working to staff, and to immediately begin fostering institutional culture change.

Rather than "ivory tower" strategy formulation and then shopping it around and explaining it to the people, we took a different tack: Based on the insights from the comprehensive diagnostic phase, we evolved key strategic tenets, tested them through implementing and refining core ideas and progressively implemented the learning from marketing to programming to customer service. In that way, we were also able to create new central ideas not previously part of the Orchestra's activities. At the end of this living and fully engaged process is the strategy document. The benefit is clear: by involving everyone throughout the strategy development, as we had previously throughout the diagnostic phase, there is a great deal of ownership and understanding of the audience development strategy. It's a running start on all counts.

Significantly, it's also been an opportunity to deepen my marketing research expertise, from conducting more focus groups, to undertaking surveys to data analysis. My 17 years of being a practicing marketer, combined with my research experience and the capacity to facilitate transformation processes (call it "leading from behind" if you will) are shaping Strategic Moves as a credible player at the cross-roads of research, strategy, marketing and facilitating transformation.

In that sense, I anticipate that 2008 will be the year of "the next big project."