Contributors: Matthew De George
There is a missing business capability in our organisations. This capability is the ability to continuously – and during strategic pivots and changes in strategy- align strategy with execution.
At first glance it may appear you have the capability to align strategy to execution in your organisation but you don’t. Instead, you have two distinct concepts of “strategy” and “execution” and you know one must be aligned to the other. It’s the separation of these processes that creates the strategy / execution gap that then needs to be bridged:
You may also recognise that for particularly large and significant strategic pivots you can and must stand up “transformation” programs and / or a transformation office to manage the change. Similarly, new product categories, new acquisitions, new partnerships, and new regions, might be managed via integrated change programs that are themselves initiated directly from strategic decisions. But those programs only apply to some changes, and are often run as an exception to existing business practices – perhaps leaving remediation effort in their wake.
This doesn’t mean you don’t have people in your organisation genuinely attempting to align what they are doing to your organisation’s strategy. You likely have multiple, distinct groups and approaches – with each group genuinely trying to align strategy and execution for their particular business unit or business function.
You also have a number of groups within the organisation who are genuinely trying to think outside of their own business unit or business function to create an approach to aligning execution with strategy that will work across the organisation, not just for their business unit.
I contend that “strategy/execution” alignment is not the right way to think about this. I propose that your organisation has a missing capability called “Strategy Deployment”.
Rather than thinking of the organisation as having different parts that perform “strategy” and different parts that are involved in “execution” – and then trying to align them – I propose that this alignment needs a distinct set of people, processes, information, and technology support – i.e. it’s a “capability” – and that capability is missing.
Making the path you want to take the easiest path to take
The key to effective strategy deployment is to ensure it’s easier to do what is required than to do what isn’t required. This means strategy deployment is about ensuring there are clear mechanisms that reinforce the strategy and make it both actionable in all contexts, as well as removing disincentives to working towards the strategy.
It is relatively easier to define what has to be done to execute on a strategy (and this is a critical part of strategy deployment) but it takes a more systematic approach to ensure disincentives are removed. Strategy deployment must also be adaptive, and not create a single centralised authority – lest it become a bottleneck and hinder organisational agility.
This requires that the Strategy Deployment itself leverage existing organisational and professional disciplines that already have parts of the puzzle and that continue to make meaningful contributions that optimise the approach.
Addressing the typical excuses relating to strategy deployment
Excuse #1 – Strategy Breaks at Execution
If you seperate strategy from execution you will always be able to blame execution
Excuse #1 – Strategy Breaks at Execution
If you don’t have a strategy you will always be able to blame execution
Poor employee engagement is caused by the disconnect between strategy and execution
We all know that strategy and execution are different things. We also know that strategy can be emergent – that is, that you can adapt your strategy as you execute.
We are comfortable with this porous wall between strategy and execution and our confidence is enhanced each time we discover a new exception where one influences the other. While the world sees the wall it is the wise who discover the cracks.
But if anybody suggests the wall should be completely removed we feel a tension. Because the wall protects us. Being responsible for strategy protects you from the details of execution. Being excluded from strategy lets you downplay your role in what results.
We know strategy doesn’t break at execution. The organisation continues to execute through multiple changes in strategy. The organisation continues to execute while the senior management team works through annual strategic planning workshops.
Strategy doesn’t break at execution – your organisation has a missing Strategy Deployment capability, or multiple competing approaches to deploying strategy.
Excuse #2 – Nobody “gets” your discipline
Every functional business unit eventually thinks it needs a “Chief X Officer” in order to succeed
Excuse #2 – Nobody “Gets” Your DISCIPLINE
Every functional business unit needs to incorporate the strategy in order to execute
If you seperate strategy from execution every functional business unit will limit their target to their maturity and investment levels
If you want to dramatically change your organisation’s culture you know you need a Chief Culture Officer. Just like when you realised you were late to the adapt to digital trends you hired a Chief Digital Officer.
If you want to improve your organisation’s use of data you will be told you need a Chief Data Officer. When you accept that decisions you make today, when compounded over decades, will have impacts on the commercial sustainability of your business or the sustainability of our planet, you’ll establish a Chief Sustainability Officer.
The familiar executive roles of Chief Executive Officer, Chief Risk Officer, Chief Information Officer, and Chief Operating Officer aren’t as secure as they used to be and the politics of the executive team must now absorb these new roles – or explicitly adapt when they are absent but the need for them is growing apparent.
This process is nothing to do with organisational development. It simply reflects the fact that you need to give these sort of titles to people in your organisation in order for them to take on accountability for these aspects of the organisation.
It’s not enough to have a role you need to be able to fill it. But we can’t keep doing this. We need to be able to deploy our strategy with whatever suite of executive roles we have.
Excuse #3 – We need cultural change
If your strategy doesn’t cause the right actions, we will be tempted to assume our culture doesn’t support the strategy
EXCUSE #3 – We Need Cultural Change
But we can’t have a different culture to support ever business function, every strategy, and every tactic
Strategy and cultural change can quickly become excuses for not managing the details required for execution
There is an episode of The Simpsons where Ned Flanders’ parents are trying to cure their young son’s fits of rage. At some point they exclaim “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!”. We often do the same when we want an organisation to change.
We forget that changing behaviours is a negotiation between all of the incentives in place to continue to act the same and the new behaviour. We can try to change peoples’ behaviour despite the incentives to stay the same, or we can change the incentives themselves.
Because we value our people we think changing people directly solves problems. It also seems easier because the incentives are likely a complex structure of systems, processes, legacy behaviours, and relationships between people that make us behave how we do.
Changing all of these is hard, so we want to change people directly instead. But if we talk to a single individual person and how they wont change they might answer back – and explain all of that complexity. So cultural change allows us to “focus on the people” without being too specific about individual people.
But if we only apply cultural change as the solution to specific problems all we are going to do is create an in-cohesive culture, and we wont solve those specific problems.
Excuse #4 – We need more leadership
Thinking of yourself as a leader is personally fulfilling
Excuse #4 – We Need More Leadership
Leadership skills are highly transferable – increasing career mobility, and employability
If your employees are questioning your leadership skills many things need to be corrected – not just one
Leadership got us to where we are today. We have to give it credit for that. If you want to be the sort of person who makes change happen you need to develop your leadership skills.
We all need to develop our leadership skills. Like the distinction between strategy and execution the distinction between leaders and non-leaders isn’t real. It also isn’t based on position or seniority it’s based on personal attributes – it’s universal, and it’s contextual.
But because leadership is based on personal attributes, because it’s universal, and because it’s contextual, it’s not much use to an organisation trying to change to wish for more of it.
You have enough leadership. You can always use more leadership.
If you put all of your eggs in the leadership basket when something goes wrong it will be because there wasn’t enough strong leadership.
But strong leadership isn’t a personal attribute, it isn’t universal, and it isn’t contextual. It just another way of saying the person accountable didn’t do enough. So if you want strong leadership you need some sense of who is accountable for what.
Leadership is necessary but not sufficient. If you believe strong leadership is all that is required for success expect your leadership skills to be judged harshly during times of change and stress.
What is Strategy Deployment?
Strategy Deployment is an approach that combines strategy and execution. It removes the distinction between strategy and execution by ensuring those accountable for strategy and also accountable for the deployment of that strategy.
It is a collaborative approach that enhances accountability at each step. Our approach to Strategy Deployment is not new or arbitrary. Many professions and disciplines already have concepts and techniques to help them align what they do with strategy.
Learning from other change and transformation disciplines
Strategy Deployment is based on the premise that many existing disciplines already contain mechanisms to ensure alignment with strategy.
Where these approaches aren’t applied they become that discipline’s excuse for not aligning to strategy.
By instead embracing these approaches, and integrating them, we create an approach that both improves how we enable better execution, as well as enhances employee experience.
Our approach both embraces both front-line workers and uses the specialist skills of existing program managers, architects, change leaders, agile teams, financial controllers, human-centred design teams, and plenty of others who will find our approach familiar and aligned to their preferred ways of working.
Ensuring strategy can be deployed – good strategy is deployed strategy
Our approach goes beyond typical strategic planning approaches. You will be able to set goals and targets with the confidence that you can retain focus on these goals over the time-frames required to achieve them.
But you will also have the right organisational listening capabilities in the place to know when you are off-track, or if you need to change your goals.
What are the components of a strategy deployment capability?
You must design the strategy deployment capability that is right for your organisation. But there are some fundamental building blocks and starting points.
Capability-based organisational design, planning, and governance
From the discipline of business architecture we take a capability-based approach to organisational design. But unlike IT-lead approaches to business architecture we establish accountability for business outcomes as we design the impacts of your strategic on your operating model.
Contextual Innovation and Capability Maturity Models
Maturity models that focus on functional excellence only improve the individual function they relate to – often at the detriment of the organisation as a whole.
The maturity of a capability is managed in the context of its contribution to the organisation not to an external measure of best practice.
But we still need to innovate. So we need to ensure we are not simplify re-inventing the wheel, or building non-differentiating capabilities that could be acquired more cheaply from the market.
Our contextual innovation approach ensures innovations a genuinely differentiating – not just following fads.
Lean transformation, Agile, and Competency Centre Maturity
If you are attempting a once-in-a-generation strategic change you might need a large, centralised, transformation office and an associated program of work (particularly if you are missing a strategy deployment capability).
But if you are trying to continuously align strategy to execution you will need to ensure change is implemented in place. Each business unit must be able to adapt and respond – and to be able to do this without permission, based on direct, meaningful feedback.
This must happen directly in response to a change in strategic direction or as the voices of customers and other stakeholders are incorporated into workflow.
Beyond Agile
While the agile development approaches popular for the management of software changes create efficient workflows between business teams and IT, to deploy strategy a more comprehensive approach is required.
Focusing on business outcomes, the key performance indicators that indicate progress towards our goals, and how these are impacted at each employee and customer touch point completes the approach.
Part of an overall approach
