Why we never have time to implement strategy
You go away with your senior management team, spend two days with an external facilitator and come back with what you think is a great strategy.
The only problem is that when you get back you are buried in operational issues, staff issues, customer issues and supplier issues, so the strategy is put on the back-burner until you have more time.
Guess what, your annual strategy retreat comes around again and you still haven’t implemented last year’s strategy. Sound familiar?
There are three possible reasons for this sort of situation:
1. Many strategic plans are swamped with situation analysis and end with long lists of what are really tactical and operational “to do” lists, and no real strategy.
2. Many of the executive team attending the retreat came away not believing the strategic plan, but were not willing to say so. It was all just wish lists.
3. The people responsible for implementing the plan were not part of its formulation, have no idea of why it was created, what it means and how to implement it.
People are happy to spit out all the reasons for the current planning issues, doing endless SWOTs, “forces driving change” analyses, financial analyses and more, then building list of things to do. The problem is that the list represents just more things to do when everyone feels they are already over-worked.
The retreat may have produced unrealistic initiatives and goals that not all attendees really agree with or consider realistic. The euphoria of the retreat wears off reality hit. As the saying goes, “no plan survives its clash with reality”.
Let me deal with each of these situations.
A full strategic review of the organisation, its markets, customers, competitors and environment is an essential prerequisite to successful strategic planning. This, however, is the part that is often overlooked or not done as thoroughly as it should be.
What you often see instead is a leap from the review (SWOTs etc.) into goals, objectives and actions without an actual strategy being developed.
Strategy as I define it is the way an organisation endeavours to differentiate itself positively from its competitors, using its relative strengths to better satisfy customer needs. It’s all about what you are going to do to make yourself different and better. Unfortunately, this is often hard to determine, so most just pass over this basic strategic requirement.
For some reason people often think that some bold sales target in three or five years is their strategy. The planning retreat gets everyone whipped into a frenzy around achieving this, but most are just paying lip service to the idea. Without an actual strategy they have no faith in the bold sales target.
I am often asked who should be involved in developing the strategy. Some leaders think it should be done is secret in case staff leave. How about that for a reason the strategy never happens.
I believe everyone in the organisation should be involved in the strategy discussions. Strategy usually involves change (or at least it should in a dynamic market), and if you have ever tried to bring about some change without the people concerned being involved from the start, you will know what I mean.
Throughout the year your staff will hear strategically significant information but unless they have been involved in strategy discussion and development, they won’t recognise the information as important.
If your strategic review indicates change is needed (and it always will if you are being realistic), then it’s not something that you have to find time to implement. You need to do it now and move your organisation to change what and how it does things.
I can never understand people saying they haven’t had time to implement their strategy. The mind boggles.
Finally and most importantly, strategy should not be a once a year event. In today’s fast moving world your strategy needs regular review and consideration. Much can change in a year and you need to be in front of it, not playing catch up.
Our prime focus in TEC groups is to help our members develop and constantly monitor their strategy so they are always out in front of their competitors.
I have to concur with Harvey’s observations above.
It seems to be stating the obvious, but everyone who needs to be involved in making the strategy happen must be fully aware of what the strategy is, how it will be measured, what the critical success factors are, and so on. If it’s a “secret strategy”, i.e. secret from the implementation team, then I’m afraid it’s all over.
Many organisations up and down the size spectrum develop strategy on the fly,in a cursory manner and without doing their homework properly.
The reasons are often due to:
1. Management laziness
2. Management mediocrity
3. Poor governance principles within the organisation
4. Internal focus
There is a lot of merit in the Kaplan-Norton argument for a Strategy-Focused Organisation. Strategy is or should be part of everything the organisation does – and what it decides not to do (i.e. what is the “Opposite of Strategic” (TM) – wherein lies a further problem: Following the annual executive retreat, there must be a long list of activities that need to be stopped, cancelled, stamped out or otherwise curtailed – activities that are no longer part of the core strategy.
Good comments. As an SME, how do we take the time away from business to get everyone involved? The phone rings, customers want us etc etc. But perhaps that is exactly the reason to get away from it all and think/discuss. There are rarely emergencies that require instant resolution. If there are, then that strategy time is even more necessary!
We shut the business for a day to have a christmas party last Friday, and the business was still here today. Perhaps the same mentaility can be adopted for strategy time. Customers and suppliers may even be happy to know we are trying to improve our business for their benefit too.
An excellent post by Harvey.
For many organisations it is a real challenge to develop and implement a sound business strategy. The outcome is marginal profitability or worse. Perhaps the biggest failing is the lack of willingness to establish a set of realistic measurable KPI’s from the business plan.
With a sporting team the captain and coach develop a game strategy and implement on the field. The rules of the game enable a reliable measure of the effectiveness of the strategy. Much comes down to the quality of the team that takes the strategy onto the field.
For most commercial organisations the rules of engagement are no different to the sporting team. However, failure to measure the business strategy will reflect poorly on the management team and is most likely to lead to underperformance and poor profitability. If the management team claims to be too busy working in the business this is simply an excuse not to willingly establish the necessary measures and quite possibly wishing to avoid accountability for the results.
I agree with gerry Hervey 100% As a small retailer for 16 years Business gets harder Loyality and customer service is a load of crap . Customers come in get all the information on an expensive product then go buy off internet this happens more and more each day
When questioning a customer his comment was He had to protect his dollar as well and cheaper prices would win him anyday
I believe that we are putting australian businesses out .
Isnt it time to take a good look at our country or whats left of it
Trish
As usualy Gerry Harvey has a good grip on the vital issues of this problem. As another person commented however we have a real problem with ineffective and lazy management in Australia. Most ‘managers’ aren’t really worthy of the term manager because they tend to use position power to scare people into performance – ‘motivation by intimidation’. They usually only get mediocre results and then go about firing people who they claim to be incompetent or not suiting the corporate requirements whereas all those targeted people are doing is refusing to become the boot-locking sychophants that these people need and want. Good management is a little harder to do but the rewards for good managers make it very worthwhile – really there is very little competition out there.