Strategy or Execution? Why is obtaining strategic outcomes so difficult?


                                               


You've all read the articles on how execution eats strategy for lunch. But why is that so?   What's difficult about delivering on a sound strategy? Climbing the right wall is just critically important to your business.  But it also is important to climb the wall with tremendous, quality, lead-time and cost efficiency.  The basic premise here is that having a great strategy is useless if you have nor process to implement, monitor, and sustain your strategy work.  


I find in the majority of organizations I work with often execute poorly for two common reasons. First, most organizations take on way too much. I was recently in an organization that had 196 strategic improvement projects underway. By the time those improvements get to the front line, there will be over 400 discrete changes and many will likely conflict with one another. With so much activity, changes will likely need to be prioritized by line management. With no mechanism to accomplish this prioritization, the critical things might get bypassed.

To resolve the quantity versus quality issue, deselect the many good ideas from the critical few. This is done in world class organizations who typically only choose five key strategic dimensions; Quality, Lead-time, Cost, Staff Morale/Engagement, and Growth. These measures link to the strategic direction, but drive the prioritization of the projects. The projects that will directly move the key measures get the priority.

The second reason organizations fail to execute properly is they fail to select strategic outcome measures. This means that every project, large and small,  can fall under the broad strategic themes of customer focus, or operational effectiveness. Can you think of a project that won't fit under these themes? By selecting projects that link directly to the outcome measures, you can be assured that the execution is tied directly to the strategy.

World class organizations use a process know as Hoshin Kanri, loosely translated to Policy Deployment for their strategy execution. There is some good literature on this topic, but it takes an experienced coach to move leadership through this process effectively. Also, this is not an add-on process. You need to be prepared to unwind your current strategy execution process before taking this approach on.

When improvement is linked to the organizational strategy, several important things are accomplished. First, each improvement, no matter how small, contributes to meeting your strategic direction and measurable outcomes. Secondly, every employee now can tie their actions directly to advancing the strategy of the organization. This gives them organizational purpose for their daily work, and connects them to the company. It's not complicated, but it takes courage to deselect projects and it takes commitment to measure outcomes and drive improvement related to those outcomes.

Lean Blessings:

Ron

Ron Bercaw

President and Sensei

www.breakthroughhorizons.com 

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