Improving strategy delivery

 - all together now!

Is your organisation not as good at strategy delivery as it needs to be? Do you want to improve your organisation's strategy delivery, and are wondering how to convince others and make a start?

Tuesday 22nd November 12 pm GMT (UK) David Dunning and David Booth presented this discussion.

The workshop covered:

• how we transition from collected pain points to conclusions, responses and solutions based on common sense concepts
• multiple board level perspectives show how conducting the strategy to delivery orchestra isn't about coping with a cats' chorus
• a step-by-step approach, to build strategy formulation and delivery into our thinking.
• the approach to what we will need to do to improve our Strategic Management and Strategy Information Models.

Specifically, our agenda was:

• Delivering strategy is a challenge! We referenced our previous work
• Understanding perspectives - we referenced the post we had made before the event introducing perspectives
• Shared views and common understanding - the importance of building trust and gaining consensus
• The improvement journey - the importance of a First Steps process before jumping to solutions
• Summary & next steps - please contact us for more information

We made the case that strategy delivery is not easy – and referenced our previous workshops where we gathered evidence to add onto our own experience. We suggested that before trying to engineer solutions in this space, we should listen to the perspectives of our key stakeholders – and perhaps help to bring them closer together (not just for the duration of meetings) and we outlined an engagement approach. 

The approach talked about establishing a common mental model of current and possible future states and suggested that there was a place for independent readiness assessment using principles and related maturity aspects. With shared views and common understanding (perhaps having dealt with our elephants!), we can confidently move forwards to address challenges with good understanding of the benefits of doing so. 

We know good lifecycles for this kind of change, we understand the themes we need to work in, and we can support organisations taking first steps and making sustainable improvements. We explained we understand every organisation is different, and that getting on the agenda is probably the hardest step – but we think we can help organisations getting over typical reservations / objections to initiate a change journey.

In essence, we discussed HOW to engage our organisations for change through a First Steps process that builds the will to make change before significant spending on detailed business case or design process. 

There were some interesting points raised in the session:

• “Alcoholism” – getting an organisation to recognise it has a problem is hard
• Absence of strategy and strategic plan – there was even discussion that some boards (one in particular) had not grasped that it needed a strategic plan
• Getting the organisation leads to buy into creating a response plan in their areas
• There was constant fighting between the strategic agenda and the comfort zone of the day job
• Strategy is not just top down – we have strategies to integrate / align (top down and bottom up)
• There is difficulty in cascading and tracking the strategic goals and their related actions through the organisation
  

PDF Event Summary

(Access the slides and we'll also send you a link to the recording.)

We believe this material is very useful to engage stakeholders on what needs to be done. Read our publication on how organisations can improve their ability to achieve their strategy:

Strategy delivery: meeting the challenge

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