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Themes of Confusion
“Oh man, they really don’t get it.”

The Balanced Scorecard champion’s face looked
pained as he reviewed the “candidate” strategic themes
written on the flip charts around the training room:
Partner with Microsoft, World Class Excellence, Improve
Cycle Time, 20% growth by the end of next year, to be a
Preeminent IT Powerhouse, IT Support Service Line,
Improve Financial Viability, and Improve Customer
Satisfaction.

The champion was sure he could facilitate his By David Wilsey
own team but to be safe had hired the Institute to send
me over to observe and advise him along the way. He Vice President of Education &
was currently training the entire team on the Nine Steps Technology
TM
to Success Balanced Scorecard strategic planning and Balanced Scorecard Institute
management system and was struggling to explain the
basic concept of a strategic theme to a group of people that were not familiar with strategy terminology. I had
been in another meeting and had just walked in to find him in an outright panic.

“So if they don’t get it, then what? Do I just tell them the right answer?” he asked.

“No, that’s not the solution,” I replied. I then turned to one of the employees standing near the Partner
with Microsoft candidate theme and asked, “What does the term strategic theme mean?”

“Our champion said that themes were our key focus areas,” the employee said, “the pillars of excellence.
He also said that another good analogy was that they are the thrusters which an organization wants to deploy to
achieve altitude. To me, focusing on a partnership with Microsoft would do that.”

“Does that look like the examples he showed you?” I asked.

“I don’t know. He went through those awfully fast,” she said.

“I see the problem,” I told the champion, “those are
good metaphors, but it sounds like you really didn’t teach Champions and consultants
them what the term means at all.” have to be good teachers.

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Themes of Confusion– pg. 2 of 4
– Page 2 of 4
The Gorilla Theme
My four-year-old daughter is currently on a Tarzan kick -
meaning she has gotten in the habit of watching the Disney animated
version of the story on a regular basis, which in turn means that the
music from the film, mostly a collection of Phil Collins songs, is
constantly running through all of our heads. One day I was in the car
with my daughter and I was humming one of the melodies and I asked
her, "is that (melody) the gorilla theme or the person theme?" She
thought about it for a moment and, realizing that they always seem to
play that melody during the parts of the story in which gorillas are on
the screen, she said, "that is the gorilla theme."

I am not sharing this because I think my daughter is a musical prodigy that has a natural genius for
understanding difficult abstractions like "musical theme." My point is that if I had tried to explain to her that a
"musical theme" is "a melody or set of musical phrases that composers repeat and build upon in order to give a
piece of music coherence and structure" and that "composers of music for opera, musicals, television, movies
and other visual art forms use themes to set a particular tone for a character or concept," she would have had
no idea what I was talking about. She certainly couldn’t take that definition and apply it by identifying one
correctly. But with one simple application example, I managed to demonstrate to a four-year-old a fairly abstract
concept that many adults struggle with. She might not be able to define the term theme, but she seems to get
the concept.

Balanced scorecard champions and consultants have to be good teachers if they want their audience to
understand what it means to implement a strategic planning and management system effectively. The concept
of strategic theme can be difficult for some to grasp and so if you, in the role of teacher, always explain the
definition and application in abstract technical terms or metaphors as the champion above did, you could end
up with a team that gets the concept only in the abstract and will hit a wall when it comes time to applying it.

Another important point here is that a good teacher will always clarify and build on the student's
current understanding of a term. A student that is new to this terminology wants you to clarify what the
difference is between a theme, an objective, an initiative and a target. Telling them that a theme is a focus area
does no good in this sense, as you could describe any of the above as a focus area, not to mention many other
similar concepts. Business lines, organizational units, core competencies, goals, and many other business or
strategy concepts could all be thought of as focus areas. The same goes for the metaphor "pillar of excellence",
as that still does not help a student understand the terminology, as many of the other terms could be thought of
as pillars. It is a nice metaphor to demonstrate the vertical nature of themes relative to the horizontal manner in
which perspectives are normally displayed, but if ask
your students to then go and create themes based only
Calling a theme a focus area
on that metaphor, they will come back with a variety of doesn’t clarify what the
answers similar to the examples above.
difference is between themes,
Building on the student’s current understanding objectives, initiatives and others.
means thinking about the terminology in another light


– Page 3 of 4
that they currently understand and then helping the students
shift from that understanding to this new application of the Students should NOT create
term. Most students learn the word theme in other walks of themes by looking for
life to mean a recurring element or pattern of some structured
and significant nature, or a unifying idea within a work of art.
patterns in all of the work
The love conquers all theme of a romance novel is never stated they are currently doing.
literally, it emerges in the form of repeated occurrences and
story lines that reinforce the same unspoken message. Mr. Collins very intentionally repeated the same angular
melody every time a gorilla appeared in the Tarzan movie so that that repetition could elicit an automatic
reaction in viewers. And this concept isn’t limited to the world of the arts. If I have a long conversation with
someone in which religion comes up repeatedly, I might make a comment that our conversation had a religious
theme. Teaching strategic themes should begin from this generic understanding of the words.

In this vein, a strategic theme is a recurring pattern that appears throughout all of the elements of your
strategy. A process improvement initiative, a cost measurement, a low price strategy, a new partnership with a
supplier and a cycle time measurement could be all aligned together strategically under the same coherent
strategic theme. We could call that theme Operational Excellence. Similarly, a new branding campaign, a market
share measurement & target, a website redesign initiative, and a new market research project could all be part
of a different, but just as coherent Build the Business strategic theme. The strategies for most organizations are
made up of three or four themes of this nature.

It is also important to understand what themes are not. Themes are not single projects, like the Partner
with Microsoft idea. Establishing a partnership is most likely a single initiative that only applies to a single
business unit or even a small team, not a recurring element that will appear throughout the organization.
Themes are not Objectives like the Increase Customer Satisfaction example, again because a theme must have a
more multidimensional nature that implies an entire chain of Objectives from building certain organizational
capacities to selecting which processes should be improved to the specific reasons those customers are happy.
In the same way, themes are also not single measures or targets. The most common examples are, in fact,
common because they are universally understood to imply more than a narrow focus. Operational Excellence
has implications throughout the organization. Growth themes (of many possible names) will lead to recurring
patterns from Human Resources (what types of people do we need to hire) to Finance (what types of dollars are
we targeting).

This explanation should not lead your students to
come away from this lesson with the idea that you should
create themes by looking for patterns in all of the work
that they are currently doing. That would be like a movie
soundtrack composer writing and recording random music
for a movie or a novelist generating random content and
then trying to make sense of it all after the fact. It is always
better to start at a high strategic altitude and then work
down. This means that you should establish and articulate
who you are as an organization and what you want to


– Page 4 of 4
accomplish first in terms of mission and vision. Then you should do
an analysis of your customers’ needs and your organization’s
strengths and weaknesses and other assessment exercises to
determine what your organization’s customer value proposition is.
From there, the most appropriate and effective themes for your
organization can be established and defined. Once the students
understand the basic concept of theme, the metaphors the
champion above used are great for guiding this strategic discussion.
Which themes should we chose to move our organization to the
next level of performance – i.e. are the thrusters the organization
must deploy to achieve altitude?

Conclusion
The champion solved his problem. First, he clarified what
the phrase theme meant by comparing this new use of the term to
the way his group might use the term in their software
development process, thereby building on current understanding.
Then he helped clarify the term by demonstrating how their
suggestions better matched the definitions of the terminology
initiative, objective or others. Finally, the champion thoroughly
demonstrated a series of application examples that properly fit the
theme definition. After the employees understood what the term
really meant, the champion found there was an almost immediate
improvement in the candidate themes: Operational Excellence,
Strategic Partnering, Strategic Growth, Product Leadership, etc.
Beyond that basic improvement in candidate ideas, there was also a
significant reduction in the level of anxiety in the room, as
understanding breeds confidence. And most of all, instead of one
champion trying to build an entire system on his own, there was
now an entire room full of people that could all intelligently discuss
which of the candidate themes would best move the organization
forward towards strategic success.

©2011 Balanced Scorecard Institute, a Strategy Management Group company.
All rights reserved. Do not copy without permission.

David Wilsey is the Vice President of Education and Technology at the Balanced Scorecard
Institute. He has served as lead consultant and project manager on numerous client strategic
planning and performance management efforts. He has also taught balanced scorecard public
and client-site workshops, managed internal marketing and business development functions,
designed and managed the Institute’s website and spearheaded the Institute’s e-learning
services. David has over 17 years of experience in a wide range of fields, including consulting,
engineering, marketing, manufacturing, design, programming, research, education, and
multimedia production. He has a Bachelor's degree in Music Education and an MBA from
North Carolina State University. He is available at dwilsey@balancedscorecard.org.


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Themes Of Confusion

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Themes Of Confusion