Outcome: STELLAR Agile Strategy Canvas workshop

Takeaways from my experience with my second free Reinvent workshop on March 5-6, 2024

Mar 07, 2024

I promised y’all I’d write about the STELLAR Agile Strategy Canvas workshop I joined this week. Here are my takeaways!

TL;DR The STELLAR Agile Strategy Canvas is a very practical, action-oriented tool for defining goals and setting up implementation actions for success. Highest value gain for me was in the Lessons and Limits part of the framework. My main action: choosing a tool for tracking my writing time vs. my targets.

STELLAR in brief

The workshop materials are proprietary to the Reinvention Academy, so under the licensing terms I can’t share them or go into great detail here. However, I’ve confirmed that it’s ok for me to say what STELLAR stands for, and to summarize my own ‘homework’ for using the canvas:

ST = Starting state or position (quality score 0-10)
E = Ending state or position (quality score 0-10)
LL = Lessons and Limits
A = Actions
R = Review cadence

Our ‘homework’ challenge after the first day of the workshop was to apply it to an improvement we want to make in our own lives or businesses. I selected my goal of writing online more. Here’s a high-level view of my STELLAR plan for achieving it:

ST=writing online irregularly (I have sub-metrics)
E=publishing new content 3-5x/week (allocated to the sub-metrics)
LL=write drafts on my phone to 80-90% completeness, and then move to the desktop site (Substack or LinkedIn) for publishing.
A=set up my Substack presence and build a post log in Google Docs
R=review monthly to see if I hit my target of 12-20 new posts for the month

I’d already committed publicly to this monthly target last week in my post, and taken advantage of advice Dr. Nadya shares to set goals in ranges before committing. And I already had formed a decent action plan which I’m executing. So you might be wondering, what’s new or changed in my plan based on taking the workshop?

Benefits of the ST and E scales and prompts

Dr. Nadya’s guidance on ST and E drove clarity on how I should measure my writing progress over the long term, not just for the first month.

The framework prompted me to think about how my chosen sub-metrics (posts/week here on Substack or on LinkedIn) fit into my bigger picture, longer term goal.

Thinking about the 0-10 quality scale for ST and E triggered me to reflect on:

what a 10 would look like to me, and
how far I think my current 3-5x/week goal gets me towards it.

After consideration, I mapped my E target to a quality score of “7”, and ST to “2”.

Benefits of the LL prompts

As of Monday, I hadn’t given a lot of thought to the Lesson prompt, other than realizing (and being motivated to write about it on Monday!) that I really need a way to do some of my writing from a mobile device to meet my writing goals.

I hadn’t really thought about Limits. One striking example that came up during the Tuesday workshop was “how many hours a day am I willing to put into achieving this?”

All my life I’ve tended to “do whatever it takes” once I set my mind to something. I’ve gradually learned that I’m better off to think up front about what a sustainable pace and realistic commitment would be, and try to make myself stick to it. Yet in my eagerness to get started on my exciting new writing goal, I hadn’t included this in my plan!

💡Using STELLAR helped me realize this additional Lesson: that I ought to explicitly set an effort Limit target for myself and monitor it, not just “do whatever it takes” this time!

Hearing from a workshop guest speaker on day 2 about the difference between Limits and Limitations also resonated with me and many of the other workshop participants. My brain is still chewing on that, and will likely continue to do so for a while.

Benefits of the AR prompts

I already had a pretty good handle on Actions and Reviews - I’ll credit that to my years of experience as an agile coach and in various management roles. I didn’t make any changes in this part of my STELLAR plan as a result of the workshop.

Next Steps

Bottom line: thumbs-up 👍! I really liked the exercise of using the STELLAR framework for my planning, and I can definitely see how the canvas can be useful in much larger enterprise strategic planning activities. If this has piqued your interest, do check out the course at the Reinvention Academy.

I’m definitely going to extend my plan to include an effort Limit. This means:

deciding what level of effort (range!) is sustainable, given my other commitments and considering my health and wellness goals
figuring out how to measure and monitor my actual effort vs. my planned range
evaluating in my monthly Review(s) whether my E target is achievable within my effort range Limits, and adjusting my plan if not

In addition to measuring my Limits, I obviously need to measure my progress towards E, too. My sub-metrics are pretty easy though (e.g. counting posts published), no tool needed. At some point, e.g. if I get deeply into book writing, I may want to count pages or words, and then I’ll look into a simple tool for that too. For now, YAGNI reigns.

MY NEXT TASK: Finding a tool for tracking my writing time! (to be continued)

Comments and restack notes are welcome and appreciated!