The Language of Strategy 2 Execution

7 Steps to Eliminate Your Organizations’ Sacred Cows0
ronald.lamb posted in Execution of Strategy, Business Transformation, Challenges, Organization Change, Getting Everyone on the Same Page, Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution), The Language of Strategy to Execution on September 12th, 2006

The University of Michigan, surveyed 308 executives during 2005 on the variables that were most likely to derail their strategy. The variable chosen most frequently, by 38% of the respondents was, was “their Company’s Past / Habits”. That seems to suggest either an unwillingness or lack of a capability to address these habits. In many organizations these are also called the sacred cows or “the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about’’.

Jim Collins has it right in his best seller “Good to Great”. One of the most important habits for a great company is to “Face the Brutal Facts”. One set of facts that few mature organizations face is the entrenched habits that hold them back from high achievement.

It is absolutely possible to change deeply entrenched organizational habits. I worked with a business unit of a large firm that needed to address this issue head-on. They were given five years to achieve a production target well above their historic ability, or risk being sold. They desperately needed to depart from their past, from the habits that had held them back.
They were going to need everyone’s maximum effort to achieve the target. That meant ensuring that everyone was on the same page, committed to the same objectives. We decided to identify to the whole management team what we believed were the problem habits and how they were directly linked to achieving the targeted outcomes. We then showed the actions we wanted people in the organization to take. In many cases this meant changes to deeply rooted leadership practices. The top leadership team had to lead by example. The process gave license to all of the team to ‘correct’ their peers when they were using behaviors that propped up the old habits.

They also embraced a reporting mechanism that would provide the full organization with visibility on progress. It showed that the leadership was serious about change.

The result was a great success. It was especially rewarding to hear the team formally declare when any of the ‘bad’ habits was sufficiently eliminated. It was then removed as a risk to success on the execution roadmap.

The method can work for any sized organization. To achieve the same result here are seven steps to follow;

1. Identify the habits you’d like to change (free flowing interviews using a trusted third-party works best),
2. Identify the root cause of the habits (to ensure you don’t just end up hiding the symptoms),
3. Put in place outcomes and associated initiatives to remove the cause of those habits.
4. Structure a logical diagram to communicate the links between the main program’s targeted outcomes, the habits you want to remove and the root causes.
5. Put in place a way to track change efforts on the root causes. A modified cause/effect diagram also known as a fishbone diagram works well.
6. Start by coloring the text for all the identified ‘bad’ habits and route-causes in red. When you start working on improving any of them, change the appropriate text colors to orange. When you agree that the cause / or symptom is sufficiently removed, color the text in green. It should also allow you to identify reduction in the visible symptoms that the organization has for so long associated with those habits.
7. This should provide a real sense of accomplishment. Celebrate successes. You should notice fewer grumblings about ‘we’ll never be able to get it done’. It shows the organization;
   • you understand what the barriers are,
   • that they are true impediments to success,
   • that actions are in place and
   • you recognize when there is real improvement.

Feel free to contact me if you’d like further information by using the comment link on this posting.

Business Transformation Challenges change execution Execution of Strategy failure Getting Everyone on the Same Page Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution) organization Organization Change performance performance improvement process project strategy success The Language of Strategy to Execution

Current Execution Methods Can’t Deal with Unpredictable Change: Hope is Not a Method0
ronald.lamb posted in Execution of Strategy, Business Transformation, Challenges, Organization Change, Resource Management, Getting Everyone on the Same Page, Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution), Strategy, The Language of Strategy to Execution on August 4th, 2006

Much of the change in organizations seems be unpredictable to those experiencing it. In those cases where you feel that you are the one instigating the change, it feels unpredictable to those experiencing it. The problem is that the methods and tools we use in the execution are just not up to dealing with unpredictable change.

This is what I believe to be true about organizations, processes and execution during times of unpredictable change and what we need to change.

• Processes move strategies, goals, outcomes or projects toward success. Execution processes are unpredictably subject to change from improvement to organization wide business process re-engineering (BPR).
• People within organizational structures are what drive the processes. These organizational structures are subject to unpredictable change.
• Before execution is complete, anything important being executed will be unpredictably affected by unpredictable process and organization change.
• These changes will directly impact team members working on our projects. With no warning, team members will no longer be able to meet their commitments. They will empathize, but won’t be able to help because they have new commitments.
• It is impossible to eliminate the unpredictability of change. Important execution involves individuals from multiple parts of the organization. No one effectively controls all the resources necessary to achieve success.
• Let’s call each uniquely managed part of the organizational hierarchy a ‘silo’. Each part uniquely controlled by another manager is also a ‘silo’. Each silo can make well intentioned changes to their process, roles, or organizational design. The overall organization may also make change to the complete organization. These changes appear to be largely unpredictable to people trying to execute based on the old ways.
• In execution we rely on managers from other silos to meet their commitments to provide;
• Resources for our projects, and
• Completed projects/ deliverables that are part of our project.
• This reliance on others and the knowledge that unpredictable change is the norm means that in most cases, the common execution method is based on Hope. We don’t control other managers’ resources. We don’t know whether they will successfully deliver a completed project for us.

Cultural norms in most organizations don’t permit detailed questioning by peers on how they’re going to achieve their commitments. Hope remains our most common method of execution.

• Hope is not a Method. To move from Hope towards Certainty in execution requires a new method different than what is being used today. People would like to know in advance whether other managers or team members are at risk of being able to deliver on commitments.

Until organizations choose to find a new method to execute strategies that provides full and continuous transparency on how commitments are being met, Hope will continue to be the execution method for most organizations.

The first five requirements for a new strategy 2 execution method are:

1. A way to get everyone on the same page. There needs to be agreement on what is required to achieve the highest-level targeted outcome.
2. Organization-wide transparency on progress towards the achievement interim outcomes regardless which parts of the organization structure are involved.
3. A flexible linkage between execution processes and organization design that allows for continuous change. People in a changing organization may change reporting structure but not their alignment to targeted outcomes. People may change where they are in the organization, but it is the support of targeted outcomes that is their primary work responsibility.
4. Shift to funding of targeted outcomes rather than projects. This allows outcome owners to shift funds between outcomes and their initiatives to ensure the most important initiatives are funded and have the needed resources. Funding of initiatives over outcomes keeps initiatives that have become less important, funded much too long.
5. An on-going assessment of the health of the overall strategy to execution process. The organization needs to have a point of view on the areas of strength and weakness of the current strategy 2 execution process. Within their span of control, managers can create execution process improvements only when taking into consideration the impact on overall strategy 2 execution success.

Note:

1. Execution sometimes takes place where all the resources are controlled by one person. You can assume that success should be higher in such cases. For example, CEO’s tend to control all the resources. Yet, CEO’s report that well over 50% of strategic program fail to meet their expectations.
2. Some people would say that the method is based on Trust, not Hope. I would claim that it’s only Trust if you have worked with that person before and they have established a track record of meeting their commitments. Otherwise Hope is the method.
3. Organizations will change; sometimes to the better (for you) and sometime for the worse. I doubt that any organizational change is good for everyone at the same moment in time.
4. There are many strategies or projects in progress at any one time. It is impossible to plan process or organizational change to eliminate the impact of change for all strategic programs or projects that are ‘inflight’.

Business Transformation Challenges Execution of Strategy execution process execution processes failure Getting Everyone on the Same Page hierarchies hierarchy improvement Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution) organization Organization Change organizational hierarchy process project Resource Management silo silos strategy The Language of Strategy to Execution unpredictable change work

The Language of Strategy 2 Execution Blog Manifesto0
ronald.lamb posted in Execution of Strategy, Business Transformation, Challenges, Performance Improvement, Organization Change, Getting Everyone on the Same Page, Expectations, Qualities of Execution, Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution), Guiding Principles, Failure Statistics, Measures of Success, Strategy, The Language of Strategy to Execution on July 29th, 2006

“Strategy 2 Execution” is defined as the single most critical process of an organization. In this context it is not a series of processes that ultimately take you from strategy to execution. This is the overall process. I also use the acronym S2E for it.

I wanted to create a message for first time visitors. It will be kept as a permanent link on the list on the right side of the page. I wanted to set a high bar for what the content was for the Blog. In the following I set out the need for a break-through in successful execution of strategy. I also set out what tests, such a solution has to pass.

Thank you in advance for any way that you contribute to that ‘quest’, whether it is through comments to the postings or by taking advantage of any of the ideas introduced here.

We all have something that is keeping us awake at night. Current capabilities and resources don’t seem to be enough to ensure certainty of successful execution. We have to rely on resources outside our control for our success. Surveys would claim that strategic programs fail well over 50% of the time.

No country or functional group has cornered the market on successful execution. Over the past 30 years I have worked or lived in over 45 countries. I have provided services in management consulting, strategy formulation, business and IT transformations, large program delivery, sales and engineering management. Failure is high everywhere.

A break-through solution that provides a step improvement is needed. Improvement efforts that include book and magazine articles by experts, methodologies, and standards seem to be providing only incremental improvement. They are largely providing high-level leadership ideas or focus on narrowly defined functional areas. We must work on Strategy 2 Execution as a single critical process. There has not been a significant improvement in overall Strategy 2 Execution success in years.

Successful execution is defined as “having met expectations”. We need to be clear about what success is. The bar for what defines success must be set higher than ever. Anything less is an illusion of success.

Here are five tests for a Strategy 2 Execution break-through solution;

1. Improvement is Both Measurable and Intuitively Felt: The definition of success varies widely. What is success for one participant is a failure to another. Measurability is a must but execution is often stopped because sponsors don’t feel that expectations are being met. The solution must address leaders’ intuition as to whether success is being achieved and whether their expectations are being met.
2. It Provides Overall Improvement: Execution improvements in specific functional or process areas sometime occurs at the cost of overall Strategy 2 Execution success. Overall Strategy 2 Execution improvement is what is needed. This will only be achieved by providing a solution that integrates strategy to execution processes with the way people are organized and deployed to work. It must hold overall improvement at a higher value than improvement in a specific area.
3. It is Scalable, for All Types of Execution: We exist in a global, connected world. Any solution must enhance execution across different hierarchies, functional areas, companies, industries, governments and cultures. Major performance improvement will only occur if the solution is scalable starting from individual to multi-party to large scale execution. To be widely adopted, it must be able to be incrementally deployed and serve all types of execution.
4. It Survives Unpredictable Change: Nothing important can be completed anymore before its starting conditions and assumptions change in some significant way. Level of importance, organization design and available resource/ finances will change before execution is complete. Inevitable change is the norm. Strategy 2 Execution must survive this.
5. It Serves Everyone Equally: The solution must be practical, simple to understand and easy to adopt. To be sustainable it must be shared by choice, by all roles, at all levels of the organization. It must serve to get everyone on the same page using a common language that all participants share.

This is the opportunity for leaders of all types to share our passion, curiosity, experience, and simple-to-radical ideas for improving overall Strategy 2 Execution success. Welcome.

Business Transformation Challenges execution Execution of Strategy execution process execution processes expectation Expectations failure Failure Statistics Getting Everyone on the Same Page Guiding Principles hierarchy Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution) language Measures of Success Organization Change organizational change organizational hierarchy performance performance improvement Qualities of Execution silo silos strategy success successful The Language of Strategy to Execution unpredictable change

Failure to Meet Expectations Has a Major Impact on Success During and From Execution0
ronald.lamb posted in Business Transformation, Challenges, Performance Improvement, Organization Change, Expectations, Qualities of Execution on July 27th, 2006

Skip Reardon at Six Disciplines brings to light a McKinsey survey that sheds new light on what drives a successful transformation in organizational performance.  Respondents  reckoned  that their companies were conspicuously more effective than others at raising expectations about future performance, addressing short-term performance, engaging people at all levels of the organization, including a clear and coordinated program design, and making change visible –through, say, new IT tools or physical surroundings.  McKinsey also claims survey results show that emotions play a leading role in a performance transformation.

There is a strong link between expectations and emotions. (See research below carried out at the University of Colorado). 

I would claim that the right measure for execution success is having met expectations. If you agree with that, then you can see how important emotions are to success. The dark side of this equation is that missed expectations can lead to negative emotions that lead to poor execution. Sounds too theoretical, too academic? If you can’t find a way to improve management of expectations then execution will continue to be perceived as failure on a regular basis.

There are limitless types of performance expectations. Participants in a major change program might all agree on a high-level outcome for organization change /transformation. Even with that agreement performance expectations will vary widely in two unique areas.

• How transformation execution should be optimized during execution and
• What to optimize around for the transformation results achieved from execution

These two areas yield very different types of expectations. Expectations of how execution will be carried out during execution and what the result will be from execution lead transformation team members to very different types of behaviors.

When behaviors are conflicting between team members engaged in achieving the same transformation outcome, sparks fly, failure is the norm and careers can be lost.

Expectations of Performance During Execution
During transformation execution, participants and those funding it can differ wildly on how to optimize. That is, whether the execution of the transformation is proceeding;

• too quickly or slowly (optimized for speed),
• with enough concern for risk factors (optimized for certainty of success),
• in a way that provides visible, measurable progress (optimized to provide clarity and measurability),
• to reduce expenditure of  financial and fixed resources, and management time) (optimized for best use of resources/ low cost)

Conflict During Execution
A number of these from the list above are types of conflicting expectations. One group might be expecting to see the transformation occur as quickly as possible and another group expects it to occurs with as much organizational buy-in as possible. These two “Qualities of Execution” are usually conflicting. Change teams will execute in a way that optimizes one or more of these Qualities of Execution. Someone optimizing execution for speed will execute the same project quite differently than someone who is optimizing for certainty. There are very different behaviors involved in executing for speed versus for certainty. Which is the right behavior for the transformation manager? Someone who crosses all the t’s and dot’s all the i’s (e.g. a process/ details oriented behavior), or a Captain Kirk, a transformation manager who cuts corners, makes bold moves, “goes where no man has gone before”. Such variations in behavior during execution of a major change program lead to conflict and dysfunctional behavior among team members.

Expectations of Performance From Execution:
These same participants in the transformation have their own expectations from execution. Sure, they may all absolutely sign-on for the highest level change outcome, but during transformation, participants and those funding it can differ wildly on what to optimize around. That is, whether the transformation will result in;

• the greatest size of change possible (optimize for the greatest amount of transformation change)
• the change / transformation be long lasting (optimized for sustainability)
• an exceptionally high level of commitment to the change / transformation (optimized for buy-in)
• the change /transformation having the broadest impact (optimized for reach)

Conflict From Execution
A number of these from the list above lead to different and sometimes conflicting expectations.  For example, while working on initiatives to achieve an outcome, you might have team members working to maximize the amount of performance change.  At the same time you might have other team members working on the same outcome but in a way that would achieve it at the lowest cost.  The team behaviors by both groups would be quite different. You can imagine the type of conflict that can occur when there are different expectations for what to optimize on from execution.

Emotions and Performance are Impacted When Expectations Are Not Being Met
When expectations aren’t being met, emotions start to erupt.  The higher a team member’s expectations (e.g. Gee, I really thought we were on the same page here!) the bigger the emotional impact.  According to McKinsey, while respondents reported negative and positive moods in roughly equal proportions, more of the top performers reported experiencing the positive emotions - especially focus and enthusiasm.  It doesn’t take much to figure out that those two emotions can have a major impact on successful execution of any organizational change and transformation.

Here is some research on the connection between emotions and expectations. It is somewhat obvious, but nonetheless supports the research by McKinsey and my contention that you have to manage expectations for successful execution.
Management of Expectation can be accomplished using the “Qualities of Execution” approach.

Olympians’ Emotions Greatly Affected By Prior Expectations Says CU Professor from PhysOrg.com Olympians’ expectations going into the games often affect how thrilling their victories or agonizing their defeats will be, according to a University of Colorado at Boulder professor.

[…]

Business Transformation Challenges Expectations Organization Change performance improvement Qualities of Execution

CIO Round Table Handout on Business Transformation1
ronald.lamb posted in Execution of Strategy, Business Transformation, Challenges, CIO's on July 14th, 2006

I wanted to avoid rehashing for them the typical CIO topics around business alignment. There are gaps in what CIO’s focus on. I still find it hard to locate organizations that look at strategy to execution as an end-to-end process. CIO’s have the opportunity to provide the rigor methods and tools to allow an organization to integrate everything that goes on between strategy and execution. At the moment the process is fragmented and optimized to improve certain areas. Since business transformation is about tough, business-wide execution, the organization needs better methods and tools that work on a business-wide transformation scale.

Here is what I provided. The following is the text without the formatting. There is a link to the formatted handout at the bottom of this posting

Business Transformation (BT) is about:
• Creating a business vision for higher performance.
• Transforming when incremental change processes are not sufficient.
• Sustaining a step change in performance where value vastly outweighs execution costs

Unfortunately BT fails to meet CEO expectations more than 50% of the time.
Where does the problem lie?
• Vision and strategy are the primary domain of business leaders. BT strategies are usually well thought out but change over time.
• Execution is the domain of all, under project management. Project management and business alignment are mature sciences. Incremental improvements are the likely result here.
• Translation of strategy to execution Whose domain is this? Who has the capability to hold together end-to-end strategy to execution? Who can manage continuously changing requirements? CIO’s can step into the breach here.
BT is Not Business as Usual
• Skills and processes for transformation sized change are not often exercised.
• BT experience is usually unevenly distributed across the business. Failures will be unpredictably uneven, even in areas where success is most critical.
• Performance measures for BT don’t exist. Success may ultimately be measured by the sponsor’s expectations having being met.
• BT and business-as-usual commitments and performance targets must be met.
The CIO can directly improve failure rates.
The CIO can provide a business-wide approach, skills and tools that may make the difference in the continuous translation of strategy into execution.

The CIO can provide new capabilities to:
1. Keep Everyone on the Same Page
• Use IT logic and rigor to translate the BT strategy into a roadmap of targeted outcomes and initiatives.
• Make the BT vision understandable by all by distributing an easy to understand graphical representation of how success will be achieved.
• Show accountability for outcomes. Link outcomes to the initiatives and the hierarchy that support them.
• The occurrence and impact of change must be understood synchronously by all in the same way at the same time.
• Link status and operational documents to the outcomes they support.
2. Non-Politically Prioritize & Optimize
• Prioritize around highest value outcomes and resource constraints.
• Minimize execution conflicts. Optimize around targeted outcomes and the continuous trade-offs tied to perceived stakeholder expectations, management styles, and resource availability.
• Manage complexity in business budgets. They are pushed down to operating units. Provide transparency around the resources that span operating units. BT initiatives will be financially starved or overfed not necessarily according to importance.
3. Manage Changing Expectations
• Manage conflicting expectations where standard escalation processes are not designed for these non-standard operating procedure type of decisions.
• As execution time progresses, managers who hold the needed resources will change their perception on the relative value of the transformation. Project managers will continuously struggle to obtain necessary resources as opinions shift.

CIO’s can provide a Language for Business Transformation Execution.

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Business Transformation Challenges CIOs Execution of Strategy

Business Transformation - Execution Challenges2
ronald.lamb posted in Business Transformation, Challenges on July 10th, 2006

A colleague of mine owns a consulting firm and holds a regular round table for area CIO’s. They come from medium and large firms in the San Francisco Bay area. This month’s session is being held with a focus on Business Transformation.

Meeting execution expectations during and resulting from a Business Transformation program is exceedingly difficult. I’m going to provide them with new options on how to increase their likelihood of success. My six years with Accenture’s strategy organization and many years of leading large scale change programs has shown me how difficult ’success’ is to achieve.

With normal projects, being on-time, on-scope, and on-budget may be sufficient. In large scale Business Transformation programs, normal operating procedures hardly apply. I’ll share some of those challenges below.

Business transformation is about achieving a new vision for the business. It is about acting on the knowledge that incremental change is no longer sufficient. It is about creating a sustainable step change where costs are vastly outweighed by the anticipated value.

Sounds good, let’s do it!
(uuhmmm, excuse me, but there are a few things you might want to consider first.)

• Business transformation tends to affect all parts of the business directly or indirectly, and in some important way.
• Since business transformation starts being vision based and not a regular part of day to day business, there are few agreed upon benchmarks or performance measures for people to work towards. Therefore “expectations being met” is a most realistic reflection of how success and failure will be measured. Unfortunately expectations as a measure of performance are notoriously hard to manage to.
• Business-as-usual commitments and performance targets still have to be met while the transformation is occurring
• To be sustainable, the transformation cannot be associated with one strong personality. It must have wide enough support that the departure or shift in attention by the top leadership won’t doom the transformation.
• Businesses don’t transform on a regular basis. The skills and processes to transform are not regularly exercised and transformation experience is usually unevenly distributed across the business.
• Business transformation is also about trade-offs on what to optimize. In the methodology that I’ve developed, I call these areas of optimization, “The Qualities of Execution™”. I’ll share more about this over time in this blog.
• 45- 75 % of strategic programs fail to meet CEO expectations.

Is it possible to meet expectations in large Business Transformation program?

I would claim that it is. I would also claim that current methods and tools will almost always leave you short. I think the studies that show 45 - 75 % of strategy programs fail is a a great indicator. That is why I’m dedicated to sharing my solution to provide new options in execution. I call my solution, my methodology and tools, the Language of Execution™.

Tomorrow I’ll be posting what needs to be in place to start moving a business from Hope to Certainty as they execute a major Business Transformation program.

Business Transformation Challenges