Strategy Pains

- Where are we failing?

Strategy implementation is difficult: we know this from personal experience as well as the many published articles that highlight how often this is where strategies fail. Over the last 6 months we have explored the status and perception of strategy delivery within organisations in workshops and discussions with senior managers from a wide range of organisations – and it’s clearly an area of great concern!

Our Evidence - At our participative event in March, Your strategic wish is my delivery command, we uncovered a whole range of topics that people were concerned about. Using the categorisation framework below there were over 100 issues raised

Exploring these further in an extensive discussion identified the following key concerns:

Do we have the right strategy? Are we on top of the opportunities, threats, imperatives and goals our business faces, and are the objectives targets and challenges we are working on still valid?
Can we improve the connection between strategy formulation and making it happen? How can we improve the process?
Are we communicating, and continuing to communicate expectations?
Are we taking into account ability to lead and deliver change in the business context? Do we have the right balance between business as usual, value generation and change activity?
Do we have the operating model, support and information ecosystem to control and balance workloads? Or are we treating strategy as a short-term programme?

At another of our webinar events hosted by PMI Ireland we asked senior project and programme management specialists, “What reasons have you encountered for why strategies have not been delivered?" The responses were revealing:

Unresponsive or uncommunicated strategy formulation
Multiple strategies difficult to integrate
Inability to set up and manage accountability
Absence of framework for prioritising Business as Usual (BAU), Change and Value generation
Lack of assurance capability to check the right things are being done the right way
Limited business support resources to orchestrate decision making
Information infrastructure just not prepared for integrated governance

Specific concerns that were mentioned ranged across several areas.

Our Viewpoints - What is very clear from all our discussions is that whilst many of the issues affecting strategy implementation are shared widely there is no single area that defines the ability of an organisation to implement strategy successfully.

It is also obvious that any ‘strategy solution’ will be driven from multiple perspectives and will consist of many components which will need to be integrated – so there is therefore no magic wand or universally applicable ‘solution’ (or framework, or model) that will achieve this.

There are some very clear messages about how organisations should approach strategy and strategy implementation that have come out of our work over the past few months, which have resonated with those who have participated in our workshops and webinars:

With respect to strategy itself

Thinking of strategy as a one-off exercise rather than an ongoing task is not conducive to keeping strategy planning current or building core capability to deliver it.
Need a strategy destination for the organisation, but with the flexibility and adaptability to change it
It’s a learning journey for the organisation. People and the organisation can grow and strengthen from this
How an organisation views and treats its people is key: investment vs cost, values and culture
Boards need to focus on the value vs just the progress of delivery, changing the roadmap when necessary (and understanding the implications)
This is a collective endeavour across the organisation: it’s not strategy vs delivery, projects vs business as usual

With respect to the performance and strategy delivery ecosystem

Need an organisation-wide approach – strategy implementation is cross-functional
Understanding the organisation’s context and having a clear picture of this is important – and having an operational model to hold this together, understanding how all the parts fit
Commitment of CEO/Board to embark on this journey is vital (and to show this by their actions). It takes time, sustained effort, and support
Need to be clear about the business benefits before starting the delivery

The challenge is to change from having each business unit define its own answer that it offers up for integration to a scenario that defines the overall integration and sets guidelines for how business units need to fit. Indeed, each organisation is different (as is its situation at various times): it is the ability of an organisation to accept, understand and commit to improving how it develops and implements strategy that is the key.

Taking the first steps on such a journey can be challenging. The Improving Strategy Implementation Workshop illustrates how we transition from collected pain points and expectations to conclusions, responses and solutions based on common sense concepts and a step-by-step approach, build in strategy formulation and delivery to our thinking and help us start to form the approach to what we will need to do to improve our Strategic Management and Strategy Information Models. Ultimately – we discuss 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.

© David Dunning and David Booth 2022