Justid | Strategy Building

Introduction

Justid—a delivery organization of the Ministry of Justice and Security—provides accurate and relevant information within the justice chain, ranging from youth, care, and safety to migration and criminal justice. In several sessions, we worked together to unravel the mandate of the two teams within the Chain Strategy Directorate and translate it into the concrete actions needed to implement it.

Process

For each of the teams, we started with an introduction to visual business sketching: what is the added value of visual thinking in a business context, and how can employees use it effectively in their daily work? Just dare to draw! After several exercises, the participants’ inhibitions disappeared and they developed a visual library for the most common terms in the organization. This creative mindset helps break loose from the usual, results‑driven way of thinking and working.

In the second part of the team session, we focused on gathering the teams’ dreams and translating them into concrete actions along a timeline. Thanks to the working methods we developed together with the client during preparation, by the end of the day we not only had the ingredients for a visual overview (praatplaat), but also clear handles for the teams to translate those actions into their team plan.

The follow‑up request

“We want to map the relevant topics together with the teams in order to jointly set the focus for our annual plan. Can you guide us through that process?” This was an interesting question, because together with the individual teams of the Chain Strategy Directorate at the Justitiële Informatiedienst we had already developed a visual overview. It proved to be a fascinating challenge, since in all plans, notes, and working documents, many ambitions, priorities, objectives, actions, and core values had already been named—and we wanted to turn these into one coherent whole.

Approach

We began by making the assignment of the Chain Strategy Directorate SMART: the participants translated each of the five tasks into specific, measurable, acceptable, realistic, and time‑bound descriptions. This allowed the teams to make the abstract “how” much more concrete, starting from the overall context of the entire organization. We then, in several rounds, categorized, trimmed, and supplemented the large number of existing actions, which created focus. These actions were then tested against the (SMART) tasks and plotted on a timeline.

Result

The result is a “sundial” that we combined with the “Five Bold Steps” model from The Grove, in which the attractive perspective on the horizon is visible, the tasks are given time‑bound content, and context factors are also included. In the process, both teams lived through their shared priorities. This forms a valuable, carried foundation for the annual plan, with a clear line of sight to 2030.