6 steps to win at your free trial

Right, so you’ve signed up for your free trial with Lucidity strategy software. Let us start by applauding you for that 👏.

Honestly, this system will revolutionise how focused and organised you are as a business. You’ll get where you want to be so much faster this way.

But then, we would say that wouldn’t we? Let us just suggest a few things to do during your trial, then you can decide for yourself. How does that sound?

1. Choose your industry and ambitions and automatically generate your strategy

This is job one when you first get started in Lucidity. So, skip ahead if you’ve already done it. If not, you’re a few simple steps away from having a tailored strategy plan automatically generated and ready to use!

Simply select your industry from the extensive list and pick the target that best matches your ambitions – Growth, Diversification or Turnaround.

Next, answer a few fundamental questions about what you want to achieve – all specific and relevant to your industry – and just hit go!

You’ll now have a strategy plan built out and ready to use. You’ll find some core Strategic Objectives that articulate your overall ambitions, then specific Goals under each with tracking set-up and ready to use.

2. Get to know your strategy tree 🌳

Luckily, we’ve taken a lot of the hard work out of building your own strategy plan. Instead of starting with a blank canvas you now have a plan built out as a Strategy Tree. This is the beating heart of your Lucidity world – your strategy, well structured, clearly laid out, with progress visible, end-to-end.

You can adapt and expand your Strategy Tree as much as you like. If you have an existing Strategic Plan you can edit and modify everything you see here to ensure you’re tracking exactly what you want to be tracking.

Take a look at your Strategic Objectives. These are the fundamental things you want to achieve – the big picture. Do they accurately reflect your vision for the company?

Remember, you can always come back and edit these after you’ve completed a couple of the Tools. You’ll hear more about the Tools in step 3. They are made up of commercial and academic business frameworks and models that’ll help you get real insight and refine your strategic thinking. So, carry on editing your tree now, but it’s a good idea to do some of those exercises and come back and refine your Objectives accordingly.

Now you want to start really getting down to it, with proper targets and clear measures. So, let’s look at the Goals under each Objective. What are the specific targets you’ll need to hit to achieve your Strategic Objectives?

We’ve pre-built Goals for you, based on the answers you gave to those initial questions and you’ll find the tracking all set-up and ready to use. But you can adapt and expand on these by adding elements like milestones. Again, you can edit the existing Goals or add completely new ones. Remember Goals need to be measurable (you can create Initiatives within your tree for anything that’s less measurable and more of an ongoing project).

Goals should be stuff like ‘Reduce customer churn’ with a percentage measure, or ‘Increase revenue’ with an exact value by a certain date. For each goal you can pick a measurement type, add milestones and timelines.

3. Boost your strategic thinking and complete a Tool

Over in the Tools area you’ll find a bunch of our super cool, interactive strategic planning frameworks and models. Depending on what your chosen target was at the start, you’ll find different tools here – from SWOT to Cost Reduction Tools. Have a browse through, maybe watch the short video tutorials for each and choose the one you want to start with. If you’re on our Get Further plan or higher, you’ll be able to add new Tools to your list from the complete range in our full Tool Library 🛠.

Block out half an hour in your diary, make yourself a coffee and settle down!
Do this alone without distractions, or, better still, get the team together and run a little workshop around it. Why not take it to this week’s management meeting?

No matter what tool you’ve chosen, all of these exercises are designed to really make you think about your business – how it’s operating now, and what opportunities there are for improvements. So in most cases, the more of the team you have involved, the more ideas, observations and experience you’ll have to inform your thinking.

Getting the team together to complete these interactive exercises will benefit everyone. We know how it is – there’s always so much going on that breaking away from the day-to-day and the ever-increasing to-do list is hard, if not near-impossible. But without actively doing something to force a break, your leadership team will always be working IN the business and not ON the business. It’s crucial to get everyone to take a step back every so often and evaluate and assess what the business is doing, where it’s going and what needs to change.

This is your chance to do just that. Have a go during your 14-day free trial. Pick a tool, share your screen and work through it together. You won’t need any pre-existing knowledge of any of these models – Lucidity guides you through everything. With short video tutorials and simple steps, all you’ll need is knowledge of your business and a healthy thirst for progress 😉.

Once you’ve answered the questions, added in your information, made a few decisions, you’ll have completed a really useful exercise in strategic planning. Well done you!

Finally, you can download an auto-generated, great-looking graphic, capturing your output. And that’s yours to keep now, regardless of whether you choose to stay with us or not! You’re welcome.

4. Invite your team

Remember, success loves company. Is that the phrase? It feels like it should be a phrase. Regardless, it’s always good to collaborate. That’s the whole point of Lucidity after all.

This is about working together to nail your strategy, and then singing it from the rooftops so everyone is in the loop and on-board. And certainly no one can single-handedly execute a strategic plan. So you’ll need to get the team involved.

Take a look in the bottom left corner of the screen – there it is! ‘Invite your team’. Just add their details, hit invite and they’ll get an email.

You can set other users up as System admins if you so desire, so they have control over all the Company Settings (you know the stuff, billing details, user access etc). And you can control which strategies users can view and edit (assuming you have multiple strategies).

5. Create some tasks and dish them out

Now this is where the magic happens. Get this right and you’ll never suffer from the dreaded execution gap – where good strategy plans fall to their death.

Thanks to this task management system, uniquely structured around your strategic plan, you have all the tools you need to nail the execution and achieve your vision.

Either add a task directly from the Strategy Tree or hop into the Tasks area and do it there. Pick which Goal it relates to, give it a description, a deadline and assign an owner.

6. Have your task owners add notes, drill down to checklists and get busy

Now it’s time to really play around with the task functionality. There’s lots you can do as a task owner.

The more detail task owners add, the more informed the whole team is, and the easier it is to keep your strategy alive and front-of-mind.

Remember, when someone completes a task, everyone will get a notification in their Feed. Progress encourages more progress – little wins are motivating. Who doesn’t enjoy a virtual high-five over a completed task or a milestone hit 🙌

So have a go at updating a task and get other task owners to do the same. Break a task down into its components by adding a checklist. Do a couple of things on that list and have the satisfaction of ticking the boxes! Set a confidence level, move the status along, even change the deadline if you want.

Then hop into someone else’s task. Add yourself as a follower and get email notifications whenever there’s an update. Maybe add a question or comment in the Update feed.

Let’s talk

You should be getting a feel for how this all works now. Good huh?

If you feel like you’d like to have a chat with a real human about all this, we offer a free onboarding session with one of our Onboarding Strategists which you can take up at any point during your Lucidity journey. Just email help@getlucidity.com and we’ll book you in!