What If Everything We Think We Know About Strategy Execution is Wrong?

The woman is making her strategy real. Image via Midjourney.

Mindsets and practices to turbocharge turning strategy into reality

The Strategy-Execution Gap

Ask any executive, they’ll tell you their number one problem is getting their organization to execute against their strategy.

HBR ran a survey of 400 executives that found “strategy execution” topped their list of 80 issues, ahead of growth, global instability, and lack of innovation, finding they failed to execute from 66–75% of the time.

Those same leaders frequently bemoan the inability of their subordinates to “focus” and “execute” against their strategies.

We’ll dig into a different way of thinking about strategy and execution, and learn a practice that takes advantage of the human side of strategy to offer a valid alternative.

Strategy IS Execution

Leading global strategy expert Roger L. Martin sees the root of the problem in the outdated and unhelpful model we use to think about strategy and execution.

In his breakthrough HBR article “Strategy and Execution Are the Same Thing,” and his Medium piece “Why ‘Execution’ is a Bankrupt Management Concept,” Martin looks into the background of the strategy-execution split, and how it creates the problems we have bringing strategy to life through our organizations.

For Martin, the metaphor of the CEO as the “brains,” and the rest of the organization as the “hands” is not only bad for us, it could get us killed. He argues there are never any “choiceless doers” at any level of any organization.

While there is a single, overarching strategy at the organizational level, the way that strategy comes to life is through a series of reinforcing layers of nested choice-making chartered from the top of the organization on down.

The “nested” owls of strategy levels. Image courtesy IDEO U.

Chartering Choices

Martin shares the example how leading luxury hotel chain Four Seasons uses strategic choice chartering from the CEO to room service in the Maldives to explain how each level makes “Where to Play” (“WTP”) and “How to Win” (“HTW”) choices.

Great organizations that operate this way get the most from empowering their people, allowing leaders to “charter” the “nested” strategy mental model, allowing the next level down to make the best choices appropriate to their level.

Turning Objectives and Key Results into reality

I’ve written extensively about my day-to-day work training and coaching OKRs in the Enterprise for several years now.

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) can be a great way to measure the effectiveness of a strategy.

Based on my experiences contributing to and learning from the Dreams with Deadlines “mastermind” global community, I’ve been able to exchange ideas with leading international practitioners.

But I’ve been stuck on how to best connect my work in OKRs to the Design Thinking-focused “Playing to Win” strategy framework.

When do we set these goals?

How do we know we can achieve them?

IDEO U — Human-Centered Strategy

I began building my strategy knowledge last year by completing the IDEO U “Designing Strategy” course taught by Roger L. Martin and Jennifer Riel, an experience I documented starting here.

After spending the past year applying and deepening these concepts, I signed up for the second part of IDEO U’s two-part “Human-Centered Strategy” certificate, “Activating Strategy,” taught by Jennifer Riel and Iain Roberts.

Skillfully building on the foundations of the “Playing to Win” strategy framework, “Activating Strategy” directly addresses the challenges of strategy and execution, and provides a clear set of practices that work together to radically improve our ability to turn strategy into reality.

As Roberts says:

“We’re keen to shift the conversation from strategy or execution to a richer consideration of how to get the very best of both. The way to do that is to think of activating strategy as a design process.”

IDEO U, Iain Roberts intro video

Activating Strategy: The Course Outline

The course is laid out in five sessions over five weeks:

Introduction: Activate Strategy
Lesson 1: Create Engagement
Lesson 2: Build Confidence
Lesson 3: Enable Action
Conclusion: Maintain Momentum

Each week builds on the previous lesson, mixing video lectures, readings, live discussions, and assignments that required some deep, Type 2 thinking.

Introduction: Activate Strategy

The Strategy Choice Cascade

The introduction recaps key material from the “Designing Strategy” course, focusing on the five choices of the Strategy Choice Cascade.

“Activating Strategy” assumes you have a specific strategy in mind coming out of the “Designing Strategy” course you want to “activate.” While it can be helpful to have an initial set of strategic choices in place, it’s not essential, as you can design and evolve those choices by doing some extra work over the five weeks of the course.

Two great options would be either reverse-engineering your organization’s current strategy, or even begin to build your own personal strategy.

The introduction completes with the first assignment submission, filling out all five boxes of the Strategy Choice Cascade with your choices to articulate your strategy.

Lesson 1: Create Engagement

“When you bring people along for the strategy journey, you build commitment to the strategy as you create it and confidence in the strategic choices made along the way.”

Jennifer Riel Activating Strategy Instructor & Global Director of Strategy, IDEO

Identify Strategy Stakeholders

After waiting a year to take this course, I was waiting for some “earth-shattering” big reveal here.

But the secret behind designing better strategy and making it real is deceptively simple:

It comes from the simple understanding that strategy is a team-based design process.

One great way to do that is to step through what IDEO U calls the “Strategy Process Map” collaboratively with a diverse, cross-functional core group, and building shared understanding from the beginning with the group who will be critical to your strategy’s success.

This lays the foundation for a simple exercise you can help you uncover which key people across your organization will be critical for your strategy’s success:

The Stakeholder Map.

Mapping people

I’d used Stakeholder Mapping in the past to navigate tricky consulting engagements, but had since dismissed it as unnecessary “project management overhead.”

I was surprised how much emphasis the “Activating Strategy” course put on this technique as a key success foundation.

Together with your core group, you map the full range of people who will either be impacted by your strategy, or could impact it.

A final note, which you’ll see as a recurring theme across each of these lessons, is we need to this work — in this case, the Stakeholder Map — and keep it front and center throughout the process.

Important Note: Stakeholders aren’t Clients!

Some organizations lump end-user clients and internal company stakeholders together interchangeably.

The “Playing to Win” strategy framework hinges on making strategic choices to solve client-centric problems that positively influence customer behavior in ways that mean success for them, as well as for our business.

The internal stakeholders you’ve just mapped are no less important.

They just figure differently in strategy design and determining the success of the outcome.

Plan Engagement Moments

Another standout part of the course is the considerable effort you need to put into planning the timing and content of the touch points with the stakeholders you’ve mapped.

What are you asking of them, and what do you want them to take away?

Plan the appropriately-tailored touch points for each stakehholder group intentionally at the appropriate intervals.

Now that we know whom we need to bring along on the journey, we need to improve our strategy, and bring it to life for our stakeholders.

Lesson 2: Build Confidence

Make Strategy Tangible

Our next step is to take our strategy from words to “tangibility” through the technique of prototyping.

The 3 Ways to Use Prototyping

This, to me, was one of the most brilliant parts of the course, and made use of IDEO’s deep expertise in Design Thinking and prototyping.

Now that we’ve made our initial choices and brought our stakeholders along for the journey, we continue to evolve and share our strategy by using prototyping in three different ways:

Build to Think — Use the concreteness of prototypes to clarify our thinking and iterate our strategy.
Build to Learn — A key component of the Strategy Choice Structuring Process, Building to Learn uses prototypes to test our thinking, improve, and iterate our choices.
Build to Align — Prototyping to communicate our strategy

We have the right people onboard, and our strategy is becoming clearer through prototyping.

How do we now take it from a set of ideas and models into the real world?

Lesson 3: Enable Action

In this step, we Identify and assess our ability to make our strategy come to life by focusing on the two final boxes of the “Playing to Win” Strategy Choice Cascade:

Must-Have Capabilities
Enabling Management Systems

These fall under what we would normally consider the “execution” area of strategy. The brilliance of the Strategic Choice Cascade is we can’t consider our strategy complete until we’ve put the necessary thought into these choices.

They will be crucial to make our strategic choices real, so we can bridge the gap from “hoping” to making sure we can act to achieve our strategy.

This lesson digs deep into Capabilities and Systems, including:

What they are
How to identify which ones we’ll need to support our Where to Play and How to Win choices
The five common elements to consider in building an action plan

The assignment for this lesson involves assessing our current Capabilities and Management Systems, and how ready they are to bring our strategy to life.

From my experience, this is the area most teams gloss over.

They fall in love with the core of a potentially great strategy, but never take the time to consider whether they have the necessary Capabilities and Management Systems to bring it to life.

Analyzing Capabilities and Management Systems

Like the Stakeholder Map above, while this step seems pretty obvious, the lessons and exercises brought a new level of rigor to this frequently forgotten area.

At the end of this lesson, you can assess not only whether you have the right Capabilities and Management Systems, but whether they’re strong enough, and whether the people we expect to fulfill those functions have the bandwidth to handle them.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen teams start with OKRs and never consider whether the people who need to do the work are able to do so, and how they’ll measure success.

Conclusion: Maintain Momentum

One reason many organizations’ strategies fail to find success is they get into a “set it and forget it” mode, revisiting their strategy only once every five years.

But neither our industries, clients, nor markets ever stand still.

Regrouping and reviewing how the strategy is progressing towards its goals is essential.

Define Success Measures

People used to planning with OKRs may be surprised that only now, at this late stage in the practice, are we ready to set success metrics.

This is also a good time to formalize where and how to maintain visibility into our “What Would Have to Be True?” conditions.

A form of “What Would Have to Be True?” can also take the form of “Health Metrics,” the KPIs we agree to protect as we push to achieve our success metrics.

Strategy as a Core Competency

We can also plan for group touch points to review with the right stakeholders with built-in time dedicated to review and reflection.

Another part of this practice is teaching and coaching strategy as a core leadership skill. This was one of A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin’s biggest areas of lasting impact at P&G.

The key in these touch points is to go beyond progress check-ins and having meaningful conversations around how strategy choices are playing out, and making any potentially necessary adjustments.

Reviewing the engines of “execution”

As part of these cycles, taking time to review your Capabilities and Management Systems are in place, and distinctive.

Evaluating them on a regular basis, and regularly looking for opportunities where they can be improved.

Takeaways & Next Steps

This “Playing to Win” Design Thinking and human-centered strategy framework has been successfully applied across countless industries and verticals.

And I’ve found it equally appropriate to both my day-to-day work, as well as applied to my own Personal Strategy.

Only after we’ve made our choices, brought the right people along on the journey, and identified the right capabilities are we ready to set OKRs and metrics — dead last, as part of our management systems,

Keep toggling back & forth

Just like the Strategy Choice Cascade itself, we don’t simply follow the steps in rigid order.

Our core strategy design group must keep watch and toggle back and forth to:

Review the five choices across the Strategy Choice Cascade
Deepen & broaden engagement with Stakeholders
Build confidence by prototyping to build to learn, to build to test, and to communicate
Enable Action through a focus on your Capabilities and Management Systems
Maintaining Momentum through regular touch points

Tempered by watching for the daily status of your “What would have to be true?” conditions.

When those conditions no longer hold true, it’s time to bring our group together and iterate our strategy.

Note: Communicate Execution, Live Activation

While we now know better, remember when discussing this topic with people, you’ll generate more understanding and interest through using the accepted “execution” term.

But at least now we know the difference, and have a better set of models and a richer practice for going from strategy to reality.

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References

Michael Goitein