- The rapid pace of change is banging on your door
demanding strategic agility.
And that means the end of the perfect strategy.
How is a new strategy traditionally created?
You know the drill.
The top management team goes to an offsite retreat,
usually in some sumptuous location
that line employees could never afford.
Throughout the weekend, a strategy consultant walks
them through a magical process to define
the ultimate strategic direction for the organization.
After highfiving all around, management returns
from the mountain top with the answer,
the perfect strategy that defines a shining path of success.
Back at work, things seem to go well for a while.
Everyone in mid management in the organization nods
at all the right places agreeing it's
the most beautiful strategy they've ever seen.
Each division and department recalibrates
around the new strategy and the results start flowing in.
Life is good.
And then something happens.
Maybe it's a slow decay after three
or four quarters, the shiny new strategy
starts to look a little tarnished.
And it turns out it's harder and harder
to actually implement the strategy
within organizational ranks.
Or maybe the wheels fall off almost immediately
with some market event or catastrophe
that calls the entire strategy into question.
This strategic meltdown happens all too often
for a number of very good reasons.
And given the rapid pace of change in so many arenas,
it's very likely it's happening to
your organization right now.
It's because the traditional approach,
the strategy, essentially pours strategic concrete
all over the organization.
Even if a particular strategy is right
for a specific point in time, conditions can change
so dramatically, so quickly, it's highly likely
it won't be right before long.
And even if a strategy might work effectively
for some time, gaining alignment
throughout the organization can take so long,
it's guaranteed it won't be the right strategy
by the time it's fully implemented.
So what are some signs that your strategy
process isn't working effectively?
To start, you miss major opportunities you didn't see.
Or you miss major opportunities you did see
but you couldn't execute fast enough.
You also have a hard time attracting
and retaining talented workers you need
to make your strategy work.
Or you might stop workers in the hallway
to ask them if they know the organization's strategy
and they just give you a blank stare.
Perhaps you have strong evidence
that the organization has wasted a lot
of time and money on failing initiatives.
Or worst of all, a competitor comes along
and eats your lunch in one of your core areas of focus.
Now any or all of these problems could occur
at any organization even in relatively stable times.
Organizational strategy is hard.
None of us can see the future so we're limited
to developing strategies that are guaranteed
to be imperfect.
And the larger the organization,
the more moving parts there are,
the more challenging it can be to create
a strategy to encompass all of that scale and complexity.
And because people are people, even if you think
you have the perfect strategy, you're still reliant
on imperfect humans to execute it, even normal times.
But these aren't normal times.
These are times of tremendous change, exponential change.
That's why we need the ability to continually adapt
organizational strategy on an ongoing basis.
We need a set of practices that enables
the organization to rapidly adjust
to changing customer needs, to market shifts,
enabling technology and economic conditions.
And we need a mentality that treats strategy as a flow
rather than as a point that's frozen in time.
Now if all this sounds hard or impossible, it's neither.
It's actually a far more effective
and empowering state of being for the organization.
And you can make it happen.