Alan has over 25 years of experience helping leaders and organizations deliver on their purpose through agile transformations. ADAPTOVATE.
According to research from Bridges Business Consultancy, 48% of organizations fail to reach at least half of their strategic targets, and just 7% of business leaders believe their organizations are excellent at strategy implementation. Markets, technology and policies are pressuring organizations to change faster than ever before. Organizations undergo meticulous planning and innovative strategies to lay the foundation for future success. Often, they cannot make decisions and allocate resources to the most critical efforts fast enough to address these pressures; this contributes to the substantial gap between strategy formulation and execution.
Adopting a mindset that promotes continuous prioritization of resources against strategic targets can help deliver strategy better. There are three approaches that organizations can adopt to deliver strategy better.
1. Establish a North Star and related OKRs.
The first approach helps senior leaders create a long-term shared purpose. The senior leadership team must clearly understand the problem they are trying to solve and how the organization is best positioned to solve it. In his book Deep Purpose, Ranjay Gulati defines a good purpose statement as addressing both commercial success and social responsibility.
My company’s leading oil and gas supermajor client accelerated a post-merger integration by adopting a North Star and establishing objectives and key results (OKRs). With 20 teams looking after more than 360 exploration sites, the North Star set a shared vision of what good looks like in the next three years. The North Star narrative defined the company’s focus and provided insight into the organization’s aspirational vision. Leveraging a North Star helped drive meaningful conversations that help ensure day-to-day operations are directly tied to business priorities. The outcome of their North Star exercise was “Our goal is to establish an integrated global value chain that would enable the scaling of biodiesel production by 3x.”
While the North Star statement is an inspirational and motivational view of the future, it does not provide any value if it’s not connected to the aspirational and measurable goals across all the leaders and teams. How many of us have witnessed posters with vision statements, but how they relate to the work is unclear?
OKRs can help align leaders and teams across organizations toward the highest priorities. After aligning on the North Star, OKRs can help identify what your organization wants to achieve to meet the desired outcomes. Objectives need to be clear, inspiring, actionable and linked to the North Star. Each objective should be accompanied by measurable key results that quantify outcomes and indicate progress toward the objective.
With our client, these OKRs were cascaded from the enterprise level to specific programs and individual delivery teams. This connectivity helped ensure clarity and visibility on OKR progress and helped identify the most critical operational drivers within the organization.
At every level, OKRs present the desired outcomes for teams without telling the teams how to get the job done. Delivery teams must remain empowered to define how the OKRs will be achieved. Overall, instituting a North Star and OKRs helped complete the initial team integration in only five months.
2. Implement design sprints.
The second approach to delivering strategy better is to use design sprints to think differently and solve tactical problems. In a study done by the Project Management Institute, “61% of respondents acknowledge that their firms often struggle to bridge the gap between strategy formulation and its day-to-day implementation.” Often, organizations will spend designated time defining their long-term business strategy without laying the foundation for how to deliver on that strategy.
Another client, a Latin American business unit for an energy company, identified over 100 inefficiencies with mitigating solutions in the decision-making and project delivery process through a design sprint. A design sprint is a practice that organizations can utilize to align objectives, frame problems and prototype solutions quickly. This business unit leveraged a design sprint to help identify “how” they will look to deliver on their strategy and identify improvement opportunities. A clear understanding of critical objectives, problems and potential solutions helped ensure they drove toward the highest value work and created effective avenues to prioritize and reprioritize as circumstances changed. Addressing these inefficiencies resulted in a significant reduction in time spent on expense reporting and reimbursement processes, as well as a reduction in project delivery time.
3. Assess priorities in 90-day cycles.
The third approach to delivering strategy better is to assess your priorities in 90-day delivery cycles. As the Harvard Business Review described, “Leaders often understand that their job requires them to identify trade-offs, choosing what not to do as much as what to do.” One client, the leadership team of the finance department within a global mining company, was looking for an opportunity to improve planning, estimation and delivery of their strategic priorities. The department adopted a quarterly business review, helping to reprioritize, plan work delivery and make practical operational trade-offs, aligning over 25 members on top priorities and strategic outcomes.
The finance department established and embedded this quarterly business review as part of their 90-day delivery cycles and now uses this framework to deliver on their organizational goals consistently. Proactively implementing this frequent business review that prioritizes delivery helped leaders ensure that progress was aligned with the strategy. This business review created a discussion for leaders to drive conversation around the review of OKR progress, trade-off decisions and allocation of resources necessary to continue delivery. These delivery cycles helped teams go through their delivery cycles and satisfy a need to reevaluate their priorities consistently.
Delivering strategy better can improve organizational agility, helping to navigate industry shifts or adjust to global disruptions. It is essential that leaders clearly define their organizational purpose and priorities and provide teams with the autonomy needed to execute those outcomes successfully.
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