A strategy map tells you what you need to produce to achieve your mission. It distils strategy documents into a single slide, increasing the probability of its execution. Everyone is invited to suggest improvements to the map, which engages people with it.

It’s also a risk map because it shows the outcomes which would threaten that achievement if they weren’t delivered.
An outcome is the result and benefit of achieving an objective, a desired future state, what an organisation wants to achieve. Outcomes are persistent long-term and independent of organisational structure; objectives are temporary short-term and specific to a particular organisational structure.

Outcomes are used in strategy mapping rather than objectives because they focus people on the future rather than the present. They help people to imagine they’ve achieved what they want to achieve and to visual the steps they took to do so. This is psychologically more powerful than aiming forward into the unknown.

Another reason for using outcomes is that they are persistent, unlike objectives which tend to change annually.