“Bridging the gap: turning strategy into reality”
Organizations often fail to achieve their strategic objectives due to a lack of critical capabilities and work habits spanning strategy planning and implementation. Implementation failure can reach as high as 90% — overestimation of the benefits, highly dynamic operating environment and cultural resistance are some examples. With a total spend of $3.4 trillion dollars globally on digital transformation, the urge for a succesfull implementation is real.
The Economist surveyed 600 executives across seven countries and six industries. They indicated notable numbers: only 14% of the executives expressed confidence in their company’s decision making governance, 84% recognized the need for improvement of data-driven decision making, and only 20% of the executives are confident in resource allocation for strategy-implementation.
This article presents five key recommendations for improving strategy implementation:
Align key stakeholders during both strategy design and implementation. Early engagement in the strategic planning process grounds the strategy on business realities, encourages buy-in through transparent communication and creates a purposeful connection between stakeholders’ daily tasks and the overarching strategy. Ensure that you have a unified reporting system with a transparent communication framework.
Drive accountability through targeted outcome-based performance metrics, monitoring and holistic data management systems. These measures drive accountability by providing clear, measurable and objective criteria for success, with a continuous tracking system. Create a unified tracking system, with no data in silos and fragmented over different departments.
Prioritize strategic initiatives to improve resource allocation. Prioritization can surface necessary trade-offs and free up the resources required for success. Prioritize based on metrics to assess whether finances. skills, technology and time can be applied to the most valuable adding initiatives.
Embed agility in strategy design, planning and implementation. Companies should foster agility through responsive, customer-centric and data-driven approaches integrated into culture as well as governance, analytics and reporting practices.
Build a culture that reinforces strategic objectives. Leaders should think carefully about whether organizational values and governance structures align with strategic objectives. Create a bottom up — and a top down approach.
These five recommendations are interdependent building blocks for bridging the strategy–implementation gap. They form a blueprint for change in an age of agility, where executives need to be deeply involved in execution while remaining mindful that strategies must be dynamic.
Read the full report here!