Six principles for implementing strategy

As business leaders and consultants, we’ve worked at the technical end of strategy development over many years. Frequently we’ve worked with ‘household name’ strategy consultants whose intellect and analysis are formidable. Yet, almost every business leader we work with has had the experience of commissioning multi-million pound strategic analyses and found implementation fraught with difficulties: the so-called ‘report in the drawer’ phenomenon. Our view is that this is enormously wasteful of financial resource and executive time.

Strategy cannot be ‘done-to’ an organisation, complex and challenging strategy implementation requires high levels of commitment, resolve, and engagement. Below, we set out some of the principles which establish our approach to strategy implementation.

The six principles

1. The way strategy is formulated predicts how easy it will be to implement.

Traditional approaches put the cart before the horse. A technical strategic analysis is performed, and then plans are made to get the top-team and the whole organisation to engage. This often makes for a long and hard journey – which is why strategy boutiques’ expensive recommendations are often found in drawers. Much better is to uncover what the top-team are passionately, authentically, and jointly up for. Then strategic analyses can be ‘pulled-in’ to determine the detailed ‘how to’ rather than ‘pushed-at’ an uninspired team.

2. Strategy is always personal.

That is to say the success of implementation will be connected to the passion, resolve and purpose of the top-team. A strategy that succeeds in today’s markets will often require tough choices and considerable resolve. Unless the ‘strategy-leaders’, usually the top-team, have a) sufficient skin in the game, and b) the leadership skills, it will probably prove too tough to implement. All our strategy implementation work starts with top-team engagement and is supported by top-team leadership development.

3. Strategy is holistic.

We have found that an organisation can only travel as far as their weakest link will permit them, be that reward, culture, management skills, organizational structure and processes, leadership resolve, technology systems, etc. We draw upon multiple disciplines to help organizations think through practical barriers to implementation.

4. Talk about the elephant in the room.

Frequently, a client has said, ‘that is just too difficult’’, or ‘lets not go there’, or worse the team talks and talks avoiding the undiscussable. When this happens, it is probably a valuable clue to the point of highest leverage. What we do is provide a safe environment for people to discuss the undiscussable, without ‘blood on the floor’. By clearing this undergrowth the path becomes clearer.

5. Culture determines strategy.

'Culture change' is much talked about, but little achieved. However, culture establishes all the communication ground rules: how decisions are made, who is consulted, how accountability is managed, the feedback structures that determine how setbacks are managed, how projects are managed, etc. If it feels like 'Groundhog Day', with the same conversations year after year, your organisation is probably 'stuck'. Releasing 'stuckness', while non-trivial, requires dealing with complexity (cultural, political, systemic and dynamic), and recognising the patterns in the complexity that recur and limit performance. >

6. Engagement is everything.

Everybody ‘knows’ this, but few organizations know how to operationalise that knowledge. How does one engage an entire organisation emotionally and cognitively with a new direction (and some perhaps difficult internal changes)? Email? Posters? Such ‘low-touch’ methods work for information but are wholly inadequate for generating emotional commitment. Communication technology has changed considerably and there are now methodologies which can provide information to, and unlock the energy of, hundreds or thousands of managers and staff.

See our case studies for examples of client successes.