Foundational Four™

Questions to create clarity and focus. 

Foundational Four™ is a key component of LynchPyn™ that helps you create alignment and clarity within your leadership team and organization through strategic business development and advisory services. 

You can create your Foundational Four™ in two ways: 

• Self directed: Use the guided course offered through the LynchPyn™ Academy to do it yourself along with your leadership team. The self-guided course includes worksheets and exercises that help you synthesize key business data to create more effective strategy and roadmap for the future of your business. 
• Facilitated Consulting: Let our LynchPyn™ Catalysts walk you through the exercises and guide you through the framework to create the most effective version of your Foundational Four™.

The Foundational Four™ will help you in your entrepreneurial journey be it at the start up stage or the scaling up. Foundational Four™ will give your team clarity through even the most complex organizational design and help nurture a high-performing culture through positive psychology. 

Organizations using LynchPyn™ will be able to leverage their Foundational Four™ across the app to consistently refocus their teams and members of the company’s core strategy. The Foundational Four™ is used as a basis to evaluate employee performance and engagement through surveys and check-ins. It is also used at the beginning of each guided meeting wizard to set the right context. Similarly, Foundational Four™ is also revisited in personal weekly/daily planning wizards and the routine chatbot journal modules. 

There are four questions that we have adapted from Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage, which are universal and have been discussed in one way or another in other great business books. These four foundational questions will help you get clarity around your company and get on the same page:

1. Why do we exist?

This is your company’s underlying reason for being, and it is entirely idealistic. Everyone within your company needs to know that something grand and aspirational lies at the heart of what they do, beyond just making money. Someone in the world, your customer, the environment, the community, would be less if you didn’t exist.

2. How do we behave?

The set of core values that guide your behaviours and decisions over time, preserving the company’s essence. These are the few (just two or three) behavioural traits that are inherent in an organization. Core values help people know how they should behave when no one is looking. They lie at the heart of the company’s identity, do not change over time, and must already exist. A company’s core values will attract the right people to an organization or repel who should never be on the team.

3. What do we do?

The simplest question. The answer is not idealistic whatsoever and is nothing more than a description of what the company does.

4. How will we succeed?

What sets you apart from others. What are the key strategic pillars that put you in a unique position to win. This is very much the core of your company’s strategy.

This may seem obvious, but to actually align your team and company, you have to communicate (and perhaps overcommunicate) your Foundational Four™ and LynchPyn™ Goal in a continuous, consistent manner.

The key to effective communication and creating alignment is shifting your perspective of strategy communication from an event that happens once every year or quarter to an ongoing practice that happens all the time and in many different ways. Having a PDF attached to your “All Staff” email once a year is not quite sufficient.

Here are a few communications approaches that will help you effectively communicate your strategy with your employees, create alignment around the organizational strategy, and deliver results.

1. Make it public and top of mind

Your business strategy should be publicly communicated and readily accessible to everyone in the company. It often helps to have a primary way of sharing your strategy. Still, everyone consumes information in different ways, and it’s useful to communicate strategy through a few different mediums to make sure your messages reach everyone.

Using a centralized source of truth that communicates your strategy in an easy-to-understand, visual manner will help your people internalize the business strategy. LynchPyn™ offers a home for your strategy that is always visible to your employees and makes it easy for them to understand it.

2. Repeat, repeat, repeat

It can’t be stressed enough, but repetition is key. Repetition is often the difference between knowing and being left in the dark. The reality is that you need to communicate your strategy consistently, repeatedly, and with clarity to create alignment. That’s why we recommend to our clients to review their Foundational Four™ before every team meeting. It helps reiterate the message and, at the same time, ground everyone in the right context before any decision is made.

3. Promote using it as a decision-making anchor

One of the key benefits of having a clearly defined strategy is that it will act as a filter and a decision-making anchor when an issue arises. You and your executive team are already leveraging this because you know your strategy by heart, but do your employees? Promoting your strategy as a tool and an anchor that everyone can leverage to prioritize better and make better decisions daily will improve alignment and reinforce cohesive company culture.

Articulating your strategy and communicating it is hard. You already know how important your people are to your business’s success and aligning them on company strategy and priorities is the first step in setting them up for success.

We built LynchPyn™ to help you communicate your plan to your team, get updates from them, and see how you’re progressing.