The different approaches to strategy and how to win
Relying on senior leadership experience and belief without data
What we see
Strategies formulated by senior leadership teams, based solely on their knowledge, intuition and past experiences, and not challenged or supported by data.
How does it turn out
Strategies that are built over a lot of assumptions and beliefs of how things will turn out. Logical leaps are made from vision to initiatives that might be clear to the leadership team, but they don’t translate to what teams will do on the ground.
These kinds of strategies lend themselves to measurement of completion rather than progress towards a strategic goal or value/benefits. Teams and projects tend to be unclear about what good looks like beyond “on time and on budget.”
Strategy designed by a few and based on industry benchmarks
What we see
Strategies formulated by a few ‘strategy experts’ in the organisation, that deep dive into industry-specific research and benchmarks.
How does it turn out
These sort of strategies often result in a low likelihood of adoption and understanding across the organisation as leaders and team members were not taken through the journey of formulating it.
The resulting strategy often does not fit the maturity of the organisation as the process of calibrating intent with current capability hasn’t happened. When this is the case, the likelihood of successful execution is significantly impacted.
Relying overly on benchmarking and industry standard leaves little room for differentiation.
Strategies are a list of initiatives without metrics of success
What we see
Strategies are heavy on initiatives from the get go, there’s a multi-year roadmap of things to do, leaving little room for being adaptive and facing change as it comes.
How does it turn out
HP co-founder, David Packard, said: “more companies will die from indigestion than starvation”. There are plenty of initiatives ideated, and the execution phase then turns into completion of initiatives that may or may not achieve your intent. This leaves little room to be adaptive and reflective. The result is execution tends to become a completion game, rather than a value game.
Initiatives and ideas are also plentiful and forthcoming, he hard part is choosing the one that is going to have the most impact and being informed enough and brave enough to stop part way through if it’s not having any.
Metrics of success are only financial and focused on shareholders, rather than the organisation
What we see
When there are metrics (which is disappointingly low BTW), they’re focused on financial metrics relevant to shareholders, without a clear linkage to non-financial metrics that are actionable, meaningful and measurable by the teams doing the work. The focus is on outcomes for shareholders, rather than measures of success for the ones doing the work.
How does it turn out
Only focusing on financial metrics may be suitable for shareholders, but do not inform the people on the ground about what food looks like. From the book Three Signs of a Miserable Job; Anonymity, Irrelevance and Immeasurement cannot be mitigated when all you have to go on is the Return on Equity the organisation is aiming for.
The linkage between shareholder value, value drivers and metrics that matter (link to strategy) is not there and it’s impossible to know if what you’re doing is working or not till it is far too late…
Our approach
An inclusive co-design process that supports strategic alignment from senior leadership to functional level teams with a key focus on “what will it look like?” vs “what will we do?”
This enables a far cleaner process toward agreeing on how we will measure success, instead of how we’ll get there.
This leaves the process of what we will do and how we will prioritise, to the operational processes of the business. Objectives and Key Results, Quarterly Planning and Prioritisation, Hypothesis Ideation and Testing; these are all processes that ensure you will maximise impact on what you will do, based on its effect it’s having on Metrics That Matter.
