Embarking on a journey toward transformative success in today’s complex business landscape demands a comprehensive approach. The RoundMap® framework emerges as a beacon for organizations seeking to navigate the intricate pathways of modern business dynamics. RoundMap® advocates for a holistic strategy, integrating diverse elements of business operations into a unified, coherent system. This approach is rooted in the belief that true organizational excellence is achieved by viewing the company as an interconnected ecosystem where every function, every role, and every strategy is part of a greater whole.
At the heart of this framework is the conviction that the synergy between various disciplines—from customer engagement and employee empowerment to innovation and sustainable growth—fuels the engine of continuous evolution and adaptation. RoundMap® is a tool and a philosophy guiding businesses through systemic thinking, stakeholder collaboration, and adaptive leadership.
As you delve deeper into the essence of RoundMap®, you will encounter a vivid illustration that encapsulates our framework’s vision. This image is not merely a representation but a manifestation of our holistic approach, inviting you to explore the interconnectedness of business elements that drive success in an ever-changing world. It symbolizes the journey from fragmentation to integration, isolation to collaboration, and short-term gains to long-term, sustainable growth.
Welcome to the RoundMap® experience, where every piece of the puzzle finds its place, creating a tapestry of purpose-driven success that transcends conventional boundaries. Join us as we redefine business strategy, leadership, and organizational design, propelling your enterprise toward a future where wholeness and systemic thinking pave the way for unprecedented achievement.
The RoundMap® framework, represented by concentric circles divided into four segments, mirrors our Consentric Organizational Model. Each layer builds upon the previous one to form a comprehensive and cohesive system.
While the blue, green, and yellow components represent the building blocks of a traditional organization, the red elements are the heart and soul of an impact-driven, sustainable, and customer-focused enterprise.
For more information about the four types of innovation and their potential impact, please read this post.
Let’s have a closer look at the framework, taken from the inside out:
FLOT: Traversing the Pi Cycle's Transformative Quadrants
In the center, we’ve mapped four change components (+), representing the PI Cycle, to maneuver the organization through and past the Transformation Zone. We call it the first level of truth (FLOT):
- Change Inward: Change Inward signifies a profound introspection, an explorative journey into the tapestry of past successes, unraveling inherent strengths. Like mining gems from the depths, it’s a reconnection with foundational triumphs, illuminating the core attributes and moments that have defined and elevated the organization’s identity. Through this reflective process, Change Inward seeks to unearth, understand, and amplify those strengths, laying a fortified groundwork for future endeavors.
- Change Upward: Change Upward embodies the audacious ascent towards envisioned possibilities, a lofty ambition inspired by the collective dream. It sculpts a compelling future, paints vivid strokes of what could be, and transcends present realities. Rooted in the optimism harvested from past successes, Change Upward is a spirited elevation, inviting the organization to challenge limitations, stretch horizons, and imagine the zenith of its potential. It’s not just about setting targets; it’s about charting out the stars, finding alignment in aspirations, and committing to the journey towards that collective pinnacle.
- Change Outward: Change Outward is the meticulous crafting of a blueprint, a transformation from aspiration to actionable strategy. It involves designing a tangible pathway, intricately weaving the insights and aspirations from the earlier stages into a coherent, cohesive plan. By molding the dreams and strengths into a concrete structure, Change Outward ensures that a robust framework supports the organization’s ambition. Thus allowing the envisioned future to be seamlessly integrated with present dynamics. It’s a deliberate shift from the abstract to the tangible, ensuring every dream has a direction and every ambition an avenue.
- Change Onward: Change Onward is the spirited journey into the destined future, a purposeful march towards realizing the vision crafted from past strengths, dreams, and designs. It is the dynamic phase of actualizing the blueprint, living the dream, and relentlessly driving the organization forward. While rooted in the present, Change Onward is fueled by the future’s magnetic pull, ensuring consistent momentum, adaptation, and resilience. It encapsulates the dedication to the mission, the commitment to continual learning, and the passion for perpetual progress. In essence, Change Onward is the organization’s unwavering pursuit of its highest potential, constantly evolving and advancing.
The Pi Cycle is a transformative journey that starts with an introspective dive into past successes with Change Inward, laying a solid foundation. It then ascends Upward, where audacious dreams of the future are sculpted. This vision is crystallized into actionable strategies through Change Outward, meticulously bridging the present with the envisioned. Finally, the process culminates Onward, a relentless march toward realizing those aspirations. The Pi Cycle is a holistic metamorphosis, anchoring in the past, dreaming of the future, designing the roadmap, and driving forward with unwavering commitment.
SLOT: Visionary Leadership and Organizational Purpose
Around it, we’ve mapped four leading components corresponding to the four leadership roles (create a vision, execute strategy, inspire trust, and coach potential), constituting the second level of truth (SLOT):
- Purpose: The purpose of a company is its fundamental reason for existing, beyond just making profits. It encapsulates the company’s core motivations and the value it aims to bring to society, its customers, and other stakeholders. Purpose serves as a compass, guiding the organization’s decisions, behaviors, and culture. It provides context for the company’s vision and mission, giving meaning and direction to its activities. Essentially, a company’s purpose answers the foundational question: “Why do we exist?” It resonates with both the mind and the heart, inspiring employees, attracting customers, and differentiating the company in the market.
- Strategy: A company’s strategy refers to its planned and purposeful actions to achieve specific long-term goals and objectives. It outlines how a company intends to create and sustain a competitive advantage in its marketplace. The strategy encompasses decisions on where to compete (which markets, customer segments), how to compete (differentiation, cost leadership), and with what resources. It provides a framework for choosing which opportunities to pursue and which to forgo, ensuring alignment with the company’s vision and mission. In essence, a company’s strategy is its roadmap for navigating the complexities of the business environment to realize its desired future state.
- Vision: A company’s vision is a forward-looking statement outlining its long-term aspirations and purpose. It serves as a guiding star, providing direction and inspiration to stakeholders, indicating where the company aims to be. A vision captures the company’s highest ambitions and is often aspirational. While a mission statement typically focuses on a company’s current purpose and operations, the vision concentrates on the future and what the company hopes to achieve or become ultimately. Essentially, a vision is the company’s dream or future state.
- Mission: A company’s mission defines its primary objectives and the approach it intends to take to achieve them. It describes the company’s core functions, target audience, and the value it seeks to offer. The mission concisely represents the company’s activities and immediate impact on stakeholders. While the vision provides a long-term aspirational goal, the mission focuses on the present, detailing what the company does, for whom, and why. Essentially, a company’s mission answers the question: “What do we do?” “Who do we serve?” and “How do we deliver value?” It offers clarity and direction for daily operations and decision-making, aligning the organization’s efforts with its overarching purpose.
A company’s vision, strategy, purpose, and mission converge to form its essence, providing direction and meaning. This essence reflects a company’s future aspirations, a roadmap to navigate challenges, fundamental reason for existence, and daily commitment to creating value, weaving together the company’s dreams, actions, motivations, and immediate impact on society.
TLOT: Holistic Approaches to Value Creation and Delivery
Next, we’ve mapped four managing components around it corresponding to the four management functions (planning, organizing, leading, and controlling), representing the third level of truth:
- Business Model: A business model succinctly describes the core strategy used by a business to create, deliver, and capture value. It outlines how an organization sets up its operations, engages with customers, and generates revenues, ensuring that the value creation and delivery processes are sustainable and profitable.
- Revenue Model: A revenue model is a business’s income-generating strategy. It specifies the sources of revenue streams and how a business charges its customers for the value it provides. This could be through direct sales, subscription fees, licensing, advertising, or other means. Essentially, it’s the mechanism by which a company transforms its products or services into monetary value.
- Operating Model: An operating model defines how an organization delivers value to its customers and stakeholders. It encompasses the company’s processes, policies, organizational structures, and technologies. This model determines how a business functions on a day-to-day basis, detailing how resources are allocated and work is executed to achieve the objectives set out by its business model. Essentially, the operating model is the blueprint for how a company organizes and manages its resources to deliver its promise to customers.
- Impact Model: An impact model, inspired by the principles of RoundMap®, is a holistic framework that defines how an organization influences and interacts with its broader ecosystem to create positive, lasting change. It goes beyond the immediate transactional value of products or services to encompass the cumulative effects of an organization’s decisions, actions, and innovations on society, the environment, and stakeholders. Drawing from the interconnected nature of the RoundMap framework, the Impact Model promotes EQuitability, ensuring that every individual and element involved, from internal teams to external partners, collaborate cohesively, transcending traditional silos. This unity fosters an environment where people feel deeply valued, driving them to contribute constructively towards a shared vision. An Impact Model is not merely about financial returns or operational efficiency; it’s about weaving together the collective strengths of diverse stakeholders to build a symphony of positive influence and enduring value for society.
The business, revenue, operating, and impact models collectively shape an organization’s holistic value creation and delivery approach. Together, they define how a company strategically designs its offerings, monetizes its value, operates daily, and influences the broader ecosystem for positive change, crafting a harmonious blend of purpose, profitability, functionality, and societal impact.
ULOT: The Heartbeat of Customer Engagement and Success
Lastly, we’ve mapped four customer-facing components on the outer skirts. This fourth level of the framework is what we refer to as the Ultimate Level of Truth™ (ULOT):
- Marketing Operation: The essence of a marketing operation lies in its strategic orchestration of insights, tools, and tactics to effectively communicate a brand’s value, foster meaningful engagements with target audiences, and drive desired outcomes, all while continuously adapting to the ever-evolving consumer landscape.
- Sales Operation: The essence of a sales operation is its systematic coordination of strategies, processes, and resources to engage prospects, understand their needs, and convert them into loyal customers while optimizing efficiency and fostering relationships built on trust and value.
- Service Operation: The essence of a service operation revolves around the proactive and responsive delivery of solutions that meet or exceed customer expectations, ensuring satisfaction, loyalty, and trust through consistent quality, empathetic engagement, and timely resolution.
- Success Operation: The essence of a customer success operation is its dedicated commitment to empowering customers to realize the value of a product or service entirely. And by fostering long-term relationships built on mutual growth, guidance, and proactive support. Elevating their engagement from mere relevance to true significance ensures that customers achieve and thrive with their desired outcomes.
The frontline components of marketing, sales, service, and customer success seamlessly intertwine to form the heartbeat of an organization. This is where strategic communication, relationship-building, and unwavering commitment converge to guide, engage, and empower customers. Moving from relevance in their initial interactions to significance in sustained partnerships ensures their journey is marked by trust, value, and mutual growth.
PACE Formula: The Rhythm of Strategic Excellence
And finally, you’ll notice the components of the PACE formula, which paints the overall picture:
- Positioning: Positioning embodies the deliberate crafting and communication of a brand’s unique value and identity within the marketplace. This is to set it apart in the minds of consumers by anchoring it to distinct perceptions, emotions, and experiences.
- Activating: Customer activation is the catalytic process of motivating and guiding customers from initial awareness to enthusiastic engagement. To ignite their journey with the brand by unlocking meaningful experiences and tangible value.
- Committing: Committing is the unwavering dedication to upholding and embodying the brand’s promises, the company’s values, and its overarching purpose. This is to ensure that every action and interaction resonates authentically with the foundational beliefs and aspirations that define its essence.
- Elevating: Elevating signifies the continuous ascent towards excellence, where insights fuel evolution, engagement drives refinement, and relentless innovation amplifies value. Together, they foster an ever-rising trajectory of impact and growth.
PACE represents a brand’s journey of strategic distinction, active engagement, unwavering dedication, and continuous ascent. Positioning shapes its unique stance in the market. Activation ignites the customer’s relationship with the brand. Commitment ensures authentic alignment with core beliefs and promises. Elevating harnesses insights and innovation to amplify impact. All these need to be in a harmonious rhythm to drive enduring value and growth.
To understand the use of the acronym ‘pace,’ we ask you to consider a car’s standard cruise control versus an adaptive one. There is much we can learn from how we cruise through traffic to set the right business pace.
Standard Cruise Control:
- Fixed Speed: Just like standard cruise control in a car, setting the pace of business growth with a fixed speed means maintaining a consistent and predetermined growth rate over time.
- Limited Flexibility: Normal cruise control cannot adjust speed in response to external factors or changing market conditions. It operates on a predefined trajectory without considering real-time feedback or emerging opportunities.
- Potential Rigidity: The fixed speed of standard cruise control may lead to rigidity, inhibiting the ability to adapt quickly to market changes or capitalize on new trends. It can hinder agility and responsiveness in a dynamic business environment.
- Risk of Stagnation: By maintaining a constant growth rate, standard cruise control may limit the potential for accelerated growth or exploration of new opportunities. It may result in a stagnant or predictable trajectory for the business.
- Variable Speed: Adaptive cruise control adjusts the speed based on real-time feedback, traffic conditions, and the surrounding environment. Similarly, setting the pace of business growth with adaptability means being able to adjust the speed of growth in response to market dynamics.
- Agility and Responsiveness: Adaptive cruise control enables businesses to respond promptly to changes, seize opportunities, and navigate challenges efficiently. It allows for resource allocation, strategic decision-making, and market positioning flexibility.
- Dynamic Decision-Making: With adaptive growth, businesses can dynamically assess market conditions, customer needs, and emerging trends to make informed decisions and adapt their growth strategies accordingly. This fosters innovation, agility, and the ability to pivot when necessary.
- Optimal Resource Utilization: Adaptive growth enables businesses to allocate resources optimally based on changing demands, avoiding overinvestment or underutilization. It allows for the efficient allocation of capital, talent, and other resources to drive growth where it matters most.
- Risk Mitigation: Adaptive cruise control minimizes the risk of overstretching resources or missing out on opportunities by monitoring and adjusting growth in response to external factors. It helps balance growth aspirations with operational realities and sustainability.
In summary, standard cruise control represents a fixed and inflexible approach to setting the pace of business growth. In contrast, adaptive cruise control offers flexibility, responsiveness, and the ability to adapt growth strategies to changing market dynamics. By adopting an adaptive approach, businesses can enhance agility, capitalize on opportunities, mitigate risks, and drive sustainable growth in an ever-changing business landscape.
Distinguishing Features of RoundMap
In the evolving tapestry of organizational methodologies, RoundMap® stands distinct, presenting a fresh paradigm of holistic business operations. Infusing equity, purpose, and sustainable value creation into its very fabric, RoundMap® challenges and enriches traditional frameworks. Herein lie its distinguishing features:
- Purpose Beyond the Present: While most frameworks conflate purpose and mission, RoundMap™ discerns them, magnifying the significance of purpose. It’s the soul of an organization, providing the profound “why” behind its existence and offering substance beyond mere profit. In contrast, mission details the present-day “what.” This distinction becomes pivotal in an era where purpose drives choices for many, especially the younger generation.
- Crafting Customer Triumphs: The emphasis isn’t just on acquiring or serving the customer; RoundMap® argues that achieving the customer’s goals is vital. An organization’s duty isn’t fulfilled with a transaction; it’s about championing the customer to achieve their goals. This proactive strategy boosts loyalty, spawns referrals, and slashes customer attrition.
- Blueprint for Broader Impact: In RoundMap®, there’s a clear onus on the broader societal canvas. The Impact Model isn’t an afterthought but a strategic compass directing how an organization wishes to shape its societal, environmental, and fiscal footprint. As businesses are increasingly viewed through the lens of social responsibility, this model offers a distinguishing edge.
- Consentric Collaboration and Leadership: Central to RoundMap® is Consentricity, a multi-dimensional organizational model. It promotes equitable distribution of created value to all stakeholders, from team members to society at large, and emphasizes improved collaboration and distributed leadership. It seeks to break down silos, empower individuals, and foster a more cohesive, agile, and responsive organizational structure. It advocates for consent-based decision-making and prioritizes roles over traditional functions. This holistic ethos is deeply embedded into the framework, reshaping how organizations operate and interact internally and externally.
- The Confluence of Unity: The Circle of Confluence, core to the Consentric Organizational Model, isn’t merely another non-executive board; it’s a philosophy. It signifies the harmonious confluence of diverse forces and stakeholders. More than that, it underscores the fair dispersal of the wealth or profit sculpted by the organization.
- Orchestrating Value Distribution: At the core of RoundMap’s Business Navigator lies a commitment to value creation and its judicious distribution. This framework, structured around five pivotal stages, culminates in the ‘Distribution Stage.’ This stage ensures that value doesn’t remain concentrated or siloed but is equitably disseminated among stakeholders. It’s not a mere allocation process; it’s a conscious effort to ensure that the fruits of discovery, design, development, and direction are justly shared. It echos the overarching ethos of building impactful, equitable, and sustainable enterprises in today’s multifaceted business environment.
- The Positive Core – Anchoring Strengths: RoundMap® identifies and celebrates the Positive Core, a nucleus of organizational strengths and assets that range from embedded knowledge to positive emotions. Recognizing and harnessing these positive elements can act as a catalyst for transformative growth.
- Navigating Beyond Conventional Routes: While RoundMap® is undoubtedly holistic, it pioneers filling gaps in contemporary frameworks. Its forward-leaning, equitable approach sets a novel paradigm, shaping the future of sustainable business success in an intricate landscape.
RoundMap®, in essence, isn’t just a tool but a transformative philosophy, sculpting a future where businesses are not solely profit-driven but are bound by purpose, responsibility, and equity. Its unique features bridge contemporary gaps and envision an enterprise that thrives on sustainable practices, equitable value distribution, and unwavering societal responsibility. In RoundMap®, the modern business finds its compass, guiding it toward success and significance.