Strategy Implementation Tips for Launching New Ideas Effectively

Is your next strategic initiative doomed to fail?

Consider these numbers: according to a Brightline™ Initiative survey, conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit with 500 senior executive leaders across the globe, only one in ten organizations successfully reaches all of their strategic goals.

On average, organizations fail to deliver 20 percent of their strategic projects. Clearly, at an organizational level, this is deeply worrying. Between 2016 and 2040, the world requires $94 trillion of investment in infrastructure projects—in areas such as energy, telecoms, airports, ports, railroads, roads, and water. With a 20 percent failure rate, we are poised to waste resources worth $18.8 trillion. This is almost equivalent to the GDP of the United States for 2017.

Even worse, we know from conversations and interviews with executive leaders that the 20 percent failure rate is almost certainly underestimated and affects not only the private sector, but governments and not-for-profit organizations.

Understanding more about what we call the “strategy design and delivery gap,” and figuring out practical solutions to it, lies at the heart of the work of the Brightline™ Initiative, a coalition of leading global organizations. We cannot afford to waste this amount of resources. So, what can—and must—we do to ensure that strategic projects and programs are effectively implemented?

Why Most Projects Aren’t Successful

In reality, multiple factors contribute to the strategy implementation challenges faced by organizations. Consider Tesla Inc., the electric car company. Its visionary CEO and co-founder, Elon Musk, shared Tesla’s (not so) Secret Master Plan in a blog post. The plan can be summarized in a couple of sentences:

• First, build a high-performance electric sports car.
• Use that money to build an affordable car.
• Use that money to build an even more affordable car.
• While doing the above, also provide zero-emission electric power generation options.

Of course, this is Tesla’s pared-down core strategy rather than the full and detailed version. It is neat and alluring, but is proving particularly challenging and complex to turn into reality. Late in 2017, Tesla was in the media headlines once again but this time because its shares had been predicted to fall 40 percent in the next 12 months.

“Tesla is doomed,” concluded former General Motors executive Bob Lutz, going on to explain, “Tesla does not have meaningful technological advantages compared to the overall auto industry. . . . Tesla is cash-compromised when compared to its competitors who sit on strong balance sheets.”

However persuasive a strategy, however charismatic a company founder, and however laggardly the competition, execution is always challenging. We certainly believe that Tesla is going to overcome some of these challenges, but they remain real and substantial. The 2017 EIU research report identified the leading challenges in strategy implementation as:

• Cultural attitudes
• Insufficient or poorly managed resources
• Insufficient agility
• External developments
• Strategy not understood or poorly communicated
• Poor coordination across the organization

And the challenges change over time. The Keys to Strategy Execution, a global study published by the American Management Association, identified the current factors with a score that shows how much they affect strategy implementation today and are likely to in ten years.

Principle 4. Leverage Insight on Customers and Competitors

Don’t forget to look outside! Continue to monitor customer needs, collect competitor insight, and monitor the market landscape for major risks, unknowns, and dependencies. Advantage in the market flows to those who excel at gaining new insights from an ever-changing business environment and quickly respond with the right decisions and adjustments to both strategy design and delivery.

Principle 5. Be Bold, Stay Focused, and Keep It as Simple as Possible

Encourage smart simplicity. Initiating or rapidly reacting to dramatic changes in the business environment is an increasingly important capability for success. Many of the delivery challenges you will face will be complex and interdependent. In the face of this, the best way to remain nimble is to surround yourself with simplifiers rather than complicators. You need people who can get to the core of an opportunity or threat, understand the drivers, deliver the information, and take the action you need in the way you need it. That way, you minimize bureaucracy, explore ideas, take appropriate risks, prioritize work, ensure accountability, and focus on delivering value through your strategic initiatives.

Principle 6. Promote Team Engagement and Effective Cross-Business Cooperation

Beware of the “frozen middle.” Gain genuine buy-in from middle and line managers by engaging and activating them as strategy champions rather than just as managers and supervisors. Don’t just assume your people will “get it”—leadership must firmly establish a shared commitment to strategy-delivery priorities and regularly reinforce it. This isn’t the time or place for subtlety. Govern through transparency to engender trust and enhance cross-business cooperation in delivery.

Principle 7. Demonstrate Bias Toward Decision-making and Own the Decisions You Make 

Follow your decisions through to delivery. Commit to making strategic decisions rapidly. Move quickly to correct course, reprioritize, and remove roadblocks. Accept that you likely won’t have all the information you want, and rely on those you can trust to deliver sufficient reliable input to allow thoughtful decisions. Consider and address risks and interdependencies explicitly—both up front and regularly throughout delivery. Build a lean and powerful governance structure to reinforce accountability, ownership, and a bias toward action, based on agreed metrics and milestones.

Principle 8. Check Ongoing Initiatives Before Committing to New Ones

Resist the temptation to declare victory too soon. With the right governance, leadership, rigor, and reporting capabilities in place, you can regularly evaluate your portfolio of strategic initiatives. Add new initiatives in response to new opportunities, but first be sure you understand both the existing portfolio and your organization’s capacity to deliver change. Actively address any issues you discover. In the long term, strategic initiative management discipline—critical for effective orchestration of a dynamic initiative portfolio—will work only if robust assessment, support, and course-correction are in place.

Principle 9. Develop Robust Plans but Allow for Missteps: Fail Fast to Learn Fast

Proper planning and preparation prevent poor performance. The old axiom is as true as it ever was, but in today’s business environment, strategy planning cycles must be more rapid, dynamic, and agile than in the past. Empower program delivery teams to experiment and learn in an environment where it is safe to fail fast. Discuss challenges openly, and adjust the plan as needed for success. Learn to reward failure, or at least accept it as valuable input.

Principle 10. Celebrate Success and Recognize Those Who Have Done Good Work

Inspiring people is part of your job. Yes, you have to drive accountability and focus on delivery, but you also need to motivate those who do the work. Actively shape a winning culture by engaging and exciting the people responsible for delivering strategic change programs. Celebrate successes and quick wins. Generously and publicly acknowledge those who demonstrate the leadership behaviors and program delivery capabilities that make strategy succeed, and ask them to share their experiences. Effectively reducing or eliminating the expensive and unproductive gap between strategy design and strategy delivery is a complex task, but it is possible. Its complexity is the result of too many moving parts. Organizations can design very thoughtful and innovative strategies that will support sustainable growth and competitive advantage. But, the benefits and outcomes of a well-thought-out and effectively designed strategy will come only if there is the same level of dedication and commitment to develop and sustain strategy delivery capabilities. Both strategy development and implementation are essential.

Excerpted with permission from The AMA Handbook of Project Management by Paul Dinsmore and Jeannette Cabinis-Brewin, copyright Paul Dinsmore and Jeannette Cabinis-Brewin.

What is the perception about the importance of strategy implementation capabilities in your organization when compared to strategy development/definition capabilities? Does your organization have a process to identify and discuss the strategy implementation gap and implementation challenges and how to properly address them? Continue the conversation in the comments. ~ HarperCollins Leadership Essentials