The Language of Strategy 2 Execution

Hard to Execute Your Strategy When You Lose Your Hard Drive1
ronald.lamb posted in Challenges, Life Lessons & Execution on June 7th, 2007

It’s hard to execute a strategy when all of a sudden your hard drive crashes. It’s happened to me a couple of times now. No matter how good you are at backing up, it leaves a sinking feeling. “Oh Oh, how much is gone forever, and how much time will it take me to recover anything?”

I came across a great article in Computer World for recovering lost files.

Surviving a home data disaster: How Shirley got her files back: Recovering 736 missing digital images can be arduous — and expensive. Here’s the right (and wrong) way to do it.

I thought I’d pass it along and hope that I save you some heartbreak. It’s enough to say, back up regularly, but when it does happen, here’s a good starting point. Challenges Life Lessons & Execution

Better Execution: Stick to Your Strategy? [Part 2]1
ronald.lamb posted in Execution of Strategy, Challenges, Performance Improvement, Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution), Guiding Principles, Life Lessons & Execution, Strategy, The Language of Strategy to Execution on September 21st, 2006

Part 2
Yesterday I started with Part 1 of a response to a posting by Rob May of BusinessPundit.com.

“Does Change Help Link Strategy and Execution?”

He’s curious about how companies can improve the link between the two.

Today I’m going to respond to Rob’s second question:

Here are my observations about firms that have a strategy that hasn’t been changed in a long time.

1. We don’t have a strategy: Companies that don’t refresh their strategy for long periods have employees who typically say that they don’t have a strategy. Things change that affect any strategy. Strategies are based on internal goals, external opportunities and constraints. A change to any of these requires an adjustment or re-confirmation of the legitimacy of the strategy. What more often occurs is that change occurs and the famous strategy binder that originally was seen as the holy-grail for the firm is hence forth seen as obsolete.
2. We go off-site once a year to develop our strategy: How wonderful it would be if we could organize all the internal and external changes that have a major impact on our firm to occur just before our annual off-site strategy exercise. We could deal with all of them at once at set our strategic course for the next year. We could then revise our strategy at some nice location each year about the same time.
   “Wait a minute now, that’s what we do now! But we haven’t sorted out how to ensure the only significant change happens before our strategy session.” Employees don’t become complacent with a stale strategy, they ignore it as irrelevant based on accumulated change since it was created and communicated.
3. You can’t master a strategy: As explained above, there is no such thing as “mastery of a strategy”. You can’t go on auto-pilot thinking that you’ve mastered your strategy. Think of how disruptive e-commerce was to the retail industry or personal financial services. Companies like Sears and Merrill Lynch who might have seemed to have ‘mastered’ their strategy had some very hard lessons to learn from Amazon and e-Trade.
4. Complacency comes from believing in your own hype: Yes employees can become complacent in execution. As Jim Collins suggests, it comes from a failure to face the brutal facts. Some organizations breed and work on sustaining an incredible story about their capabilities and success. They loose any real ability to tell when they’re dead wrong. When the imagined reality varies from the real situation, it seems to be the time to hold on to the myth even harder than before. Believing in the myth of being successful in execution allows you to ignore change around you. It allows you to avoid figuring out what you need to change to remain successful.
   
   The worst case of it I ever experienced was with DEC (Digital Equipment Corp). They were the most famous mini-computer vendor in the 1970’s and 80’s. In the early 1990’s as head of sales for a division of Westinghouse, I brought them in as a partner during a negotiation for a $100 million outsourcing deal. We were selected and were going through contract negotiation and a detailed examination of the deal. The client had a number of concerns that they wanted addressed by very senior DEC executives with DEC’s commitments put into the contract. The DEC executives were so insulted by the questioning of their capabilities, that they treated the client and their questions with unhidden contempt. To my shock, one senior DEC even resorted to calling one of the clients a @#@$&! idiot to their face for asking some questions about their ability to deliver their services. Needless to say the client ultimately broke off negotiations. The DEC executive point of view was that the clients were idiots for not taking the deal. Their own hype about their capabilities was much more real and important to them than examining the client’s sense of risk. Needless to say my experience wasn’t unique. DEC ended up breaking up their organization into parts and selling it off bit by bit until it was gone.

• What is success, if you continuously change your strategy?
• What is successful execution when you don’t get to complete projects and achieve targeted outcomes?
• What is success when you don’t update your strategy?

My short definition of execution is: Leveraging the assets that you have available, to achieve targeted outcomes.
Successful execution is: meeting expectations in the execution of targeted outcomes. In order to execute a strategy you translate it into targeted outcomes.

Summary of Suggested Rules:

1. A strategy that changes too often puts initiatives and execution in disarray.
2. A strategy that changes too infrequently becomes irrelevant. The targeted outcomes and their associated initiatives are relevant by chance rather than by design.
3. Few organizations can change their strategy at the speed of change. Most strategies reside in binders and PowerPoint presentations. They are not easily altered, and rarely read.
4. Organizations can translate their strategy into targeted outcomes. It allows the organization to modify these targeted outcomes and their associated initiatives at the speed of change. Execution stays relevant.
5. Strategy as translated into targeted outcomes can exist at any level of an organization. Targeted outcomes are the object of successful execution. The above rules apply to execution at any level of an organization.
Challenges Execution of Strategy Guiding Principles Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution) Life Lessons & Execution performance improvement strategy The Language of Strategy to Execution

Better Execution: Change Your Strategy? [Part 1]0
ronald.lamb posted in Execution of Strategy, Challenges, Performance Improvement, Organization Change, Expectations, Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution), Life Lessons & Execution, Strategy on September 20th, 2006

Rob May of BusinessPundit.com, poses a really interesting question in a Blog posting.

““Does Change Help Link Strategy and Execution?”

He’s curious about how companies can improve the link between the two. The key question he poses is:
By consistently changing your strategy, do employees become more focused on the execution of it? Do changes in strategy lead to better execution?
I’m going to give my response to his interesting question in three parts.

Part 1:

• Too frequent change in strategy hurts execution success.

Part 2:

• Employees don’t become complacent about execution due to infrequent change in strategy.
• You can’t master a strategy.

Part 3:

• A famous Harvard University study, known as the Hawthorne Effect, may actually suggest that you can get better execution if you change strategy often.

Part 1

“By consistently changing your strategy, do employees become more focused on the execution of it? Do changes in strategy lead to better execution?”

This is a great question. It may seem like the answer is straight forward, but there is an interesting wrinkle based on a famous, Harvard University study. I’ll return to this study after reviewing the obvious response. I think most people would immediately answer that changing the strategy frequently will lead to poor execution. Here’s are some reasons why:

1. Uses up key Resources: Creating a coherent strategy is management intensive work. It eats up leadership time and focus. Refinement of a strategy is fine since it supports existing momentum. Changing strategy requires serious analysis, building of the end state and all the efforts necessary to gain agreement, communicate it, and build the plans to achieve it. Execution suffers due to management focus on the strategy rather than execution.
2. Wait and See: Critical work and decisions get delayed during strategy formulation work, as employees “wait and see which way the strategy goes”. “There is no reason to start some critical initiatives if they are associated with the new strategy, is there?” Execution gets delayed.
3. More Project Start-up Time: In many organizations a large majority is project oriented and doesn’t know what the strategy is. What they want is a good definition of the project they’re supposed to accomplish. Changing strategy means changing requirements. Execution suffers as projects associated with the former strategy have to get turned off and project resources released. New projects take time to get started as resources become available. Value isn’t achieved until the project team is providing deliverables that combine with other projects to create value. Execution suffers.
4. Feeling that You’re Delivering Value is Destroyed: Teams like to accomplish their project scope, on-time, on-budget. It’s what they get rewarded for. Changing people’s projects regularly doesn’t let them accomplish much. It is hard to be proud of being part of continuously partially completed projects. Execution suffers as team member’s sense of the value of accomplishment is destroyed.
5. This Too Shall Pass: When strategy changes frequently, it is tough to measure people and the value they are delivering. They start to understand that they’re not measurable. They realize that management has no ‘stick-to-it-ness’. People nod at all the right places when asked to change, but then do nothing. No one will check and they believe any change won’t be sustained anyway. It will go back to business as usual. “This too will pass” becomes the reaction to requests to change.

Part 2 Continues tomorrow.

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.

Did You Just Volunteer for Some Work?0
ronald.lamb posted in Execution of Strategy, Challenges, Resource Management, Relative Importance, Getting Everyone on the Same Page, Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution), Life Lessons & Execution, Strategy on September 7th, 2006

We don’t generally think of corporations and government organizations as volunteer organizations, but stop and think about it. How much of where you allocate your own time is influenced by what you choose to do. Probably more than you’d like to admit. We seek to get on projects that interest us. In that way we are volunteering our time.
As a leader, you’re much more likely to get people to voluntarily contribute their time, skills and money if they can sign up to help achieve a targeted outcome rather than sign up to execute a project.

I’ve recently had the opportunity to speak to, and in some cases work with, the leaders of organizations that rely on volunteers to achieve their strategic goals. They’ve ranged in size from a single leader and advisory board for a professional services community (PSVillage), to a large open source application development group (Wordpress), to the Department of Energy and a number of America’s largest energy firms. In each case we talked about what their goals were and how they were going about achieving them. In most cases they identified a series of projects that they wanted to get done. They also all had limited resources for the size of their targeted objectives. None of them had any way to ensure long-term commitment from participants. It would be huge value to them to be able to increase the level of volunteerism and sustained commitment to the targeted objectives.

Volunteers start with high energy and high estimates of the time and resources they commit to. Lack of progress, frustration and lack of control over their ability to achieve success cause their commitment to wither. As a result execution success is unpredictable. Leaders have to be ever optimistic and to some degree charismatic to continue to attract and retain volunteers. On the other hand, they also have to be realistic and level-headed to continuously deal with the logistics and disappointment of incomplete or missed commitments and execution failure.

What none of them had figured out was how to effectively connect willing contributors with what needs to be done. They had no effective way to connect resources to work, other than through identified projects. This isn’t very different than what occurs in any organization. The only difference is that in traditional organizations, managers direct their people to work. They too had been directed by higher-level managers and their performance objectives. The larger the organization, the more layers are involved. In volunteer or membership based organizations, the link between work and resources is mostly one to one. Each volunteer can decide for themselves where they’d like to participate.

The approaches taken by the organizations I spoke to were each project based. The leaders had defined the projects they felt were necessary. They identified them to their pool of potential volunteers in the hope that they would be taken up by a volunteer or member. I was able to work with the Department of Energy and the energy firms to shift their thinking first to outcomes and only then to projects. They were able to create a roadmap that all understood. There was a renewed commitment to a high-level targeted outcome. They developed a logical process for aligning volunteer activity to the most important interim outcomes. For the others, they will get great value if they can start to identify targeted outcomes and their linkage to higher level targeted outcomes.
This will provide volunteers and their organization with the ability to:

• Understand which are the most important outcomes.
• Choose or influence their participation in the outcomes that they are most attracted to and can achieve.
• Understand how that contribution supports the highest level outcome of the organization.
• Understand wider context through being aware of the surrounding targeted outcomes, and so cooperate on their achievement.
• Use their own skills to design the project / actions necessary to achieve a targeted outcome.
• Provide an opportunity for greater emotional investment and sense of achievement in reaching a targeted outcome.
• Provide sustained commitment, to achieve various projects necessary to achieve a targeted outcome.

For volunteer organizations, corporations, and governments you can increase the success level of execution by getting greater commitment to the most important outcomes and attract sustained participation. These are invaluable in all of these ‘volunteer’ organizations, just like the one you’re in.

How Many Strategy Binders Do You Have? Get Strategy Out of the Binders0
ronald.lamb posted in Execution of Strategy, Challenges, Getting Everyone on the Same Page, Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution), Strategy on August 31st, 2006

One of the first things that I do with a new client is to ask to see any documents regarding their last strategy. What I get is usually a thick binder or three and some PowerPoint presentations. After studying the binders, my experience has been that if the client had just executed what was in the binders, they’d be way ahead of where they were.

In a recent meeting with the president of a large cable/ telecommunications firm, they voiced the problem in this way. The president had a variety of strategy binders. “We know what to do; we just can’t get it out of the binders”.

When I’ve asked clients what happened with the execution, they have a variety of explanations.

• Something big came along that diverted our CEO’s attention.
• Before we were able to execute the strategy something happened that changed the basic assumptions / context for the strategy.
• The key sponsor left the firm or changed positions.
• We didn’t have sufficient funding to continue.
• We couldn’t get everyone to agree. We were never all on the same page.

Organizations treat strategy as if it were divorced from execution. I just had a long discussion with a partner at one of largest strategy consulting firms about execution improvement approaches. He suggested that a number of the partners in his firm wouldn’t be overly interested in improved execution approaches. They would their focus on anything but the actual formulation of strategy, as ‘below their pay-grade’. They look to others to execute the strategy they’ve created with their clients. What they would likely leave for these other consultants are the famous strategy binders.

Many organizations have one group that develops their organization’s strategy and another group expected to implement it as if the strategy were some sort of static thing that could live in a binder like fish in an aquarium.

When a consulting firm is involved in strategy formulation you’re pretty much guaranteed that a binder is coming. Very few have instructions on how to get the strategy out of the binders. The assumption is that a business case and project plan will do it.
Within the big four consulting firm, where I spent six year doing strategy work, it was the rule that a different group of specialists would be brought in to execute the strategy that was described in the binders. The original strategy team would be off to new client strategy assignments. There is that nagging question of how many people actually read the binder, how many understand it and how what percent of the key execution participants understand it. Anecdotal information would say that very few people understand their organization’s strategy.

There doesn’t seem to be much energy or focus around the despair of “How do we get the strategy out of the binders?” Here are some links to organizations with something to say about getting strategy out of the binders.
Strategy 101: Ten Simple Planning Mistakes to Avoid by Dan R. Dick

I intend to keep this as an ongoing topic and encourage readers to comment with links to material that has something to say about the problem and solutions.

It’s Hard to Get on the Same Page When Everyone Speaks a Different Language2
ronald.lamb posted in Execution of Strategy, Challenges, Relative Importance, Getting Everyone on the Same Page, Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution), Country Experiences, Tower of Babel, Glossary on August 7th, 2006

It is exceptionally difficult getting everyone on the same page to execute a strategy or high-level targeted outcome. It’s especially hard to do when the participants don’t even seem to speak the same language.

I’m Canadian and speak English as a first language. The first time I went to Scotland, I could hardly understand a thing they said, even though we both spoke English. My father’s side of the family originally comes from Scotland, so I somehow thought that it wouldn’t be that difficult. It was.

While I was living in Amsterdam we had a receptionist, Rhona, from Glasgow Scotland. Clients from countries all over the world would call and she was the first person they would speak to. She had the most beautiful voice you’ve ever heard [What I wouldn’t do to figure out how to find Rhona and put a clip of her voice in here for you]. Anyone who didn’t speak English as a first language had a hard time understanding her. We thought of giving her a different job, but never did. Whenever she was away, clients said they hoped she would return soon. They looked forward to her laughter and the lilt of her voice as she tried to figure out who they were and wanted to speak to.

Few of us have such beautiful voices that other people, whose first language is not the same as our own, will take the time to try to understand us. The same is true in organizations.

Businesses slot people into units that have areas of market focus or skills like finance, sales, engineering etc. It is the same for Universities, Governments and other organizations. Each organizational unit speaks its own language. Their language includes their acronyms, processes and even the personal incentives that shape their behaviors.

Each organizational unit emphasizes their differences to demonstrate their area of expertise. We often use the term ‘silos’ when we talk about groups within the same organizational. They are the vertical hierarchies that have a high level of separation and uniqueness of skill and language. These differences make communications between silos very difficult.

How did this all come about? There actually is an origin with the problem and it goes back before Henry Ford started the automated factory. In fact, according to the Bible it goes back to the Story of the Tower of Babel. It seems it was all the fault of the Babylonians.

At the time we were all descended from Noah and spoke the same language. The people of Babylon started constructing a building that would reach all the way up to heaven. Talk about being upset. God was so put out that he came up with a really inspired punishment for mankind. He made everyone start speaking different languages. You can imagine that it became impossible for anyone to work together. They could no longer finish building the tower. This is the origin of the word ‘babbling’. Now you know why you can never understand engineers. There are wonderful paintings of artists’ ideas about of all the crazy building problems that occurred.

I’m an engineer and apologize on behalf of all other engineers for speaking in ways that most people can’t understand. Who is going to speak up and apologize on behalf of doctors, accountants or lawyers?

To this day we are still trying to construct towers of Babel for our organization. It appears that we’re still suffering for the Babylonian’s mistake. Attempts by countless managers over the past hundred years haven’t helped much us get on the same page, to understand each other. Many organizations seem to have given up entirely trying to get their people on the same page.

A level of commitment is required for those organizations that truly want to get everyone on the same page. If there is commitment, then there are a few ideas that do seem to significantly improve the ability for different groups to work together on execution. Most surveys would put place getting everyone on the same page at the top of the list for enabling successful execution. Let’s start there.

You have to start being more precise in your language about what common execution words actually mean. It isn’t that difficult if you start with this small set of words and phrases. Just try be very consistent in their use. Here are the most important three words to use with a consistent meaning:

1. Outcome
2. Relative Importance
3. Initiative or Project

Three Quick Ideas for How to Get People on the Same Page with these Words:

1. Draft up an Outcomes Roadmap before or During Discussions

Draft a picture that on the right side of the page shows the highest-level common outcome. Working from right to left, draw the interim outcomes necessary to achieve the outcome above it. Use a sufficient level of detail to make who you’re talking to comfortable that the outcomes they are interested are also included.

Creating it together increases shared ownership of the outcome roadmap. The outcome descriptions should be in language that everyone understands. Use it again and again as the basis of ongoing conversation as things change.

2. Talk about Relative Importance instead of Priorities

No one has enough resources to plan and execute every initiative that is likely to be identified. Use the roadmap to gain agreement on the relative importance of the outcomes. For example, there may be three interim outcomes necessary to achieve the next highest outcome. Decide together what the relative importance is of each of the interim outcomes. Which are relatively more important to achieving the next highest-level outcome? This way you don’t have three outcomes all high priority. Each one is relatively more or less important than the others.

3. Talk about Outcomes before Initiatives or Projects

Talk about targeted outcomes before diving into the projects designed to achieve them. Outcomes tend to have descriptions that everyone can understand rather than unit specific jargon that initiatives tend to be described with. The previously shared understanding of outcomes increases shared understanding of initiatives.

Just using these three ideas will move you much further toward getting everyone on the same page. This is a great step forward in achieving increased success in 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 Context Changes Faster Than You Can Execute Anything Important.0
ronald.lamb posted in Execution of Strategy, Challenges, Performance Improvement, Resource Management, Relative Importance, Getting Everyone on the Same Page, Expectations, Qualities of Execution, Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution), Guiding Principles, Strategy, The Language of Strategy to Execution on August 1st, 2006

One of the primary guidelines I share with clients is;

Business context changes faster than you can execute anything important.

How relevant is that?

I just had a long term colleague depart from a senior corporate position. I asked him if he saw any warning signs. Apart from the reorganization that was the triggering factor, he saw a recurring theme.

The CEO would set out a new initiative for his department. They would work on it, and as they were nearing completion provide some initial feedback to the CEO. The CEO would let him know that it was no longer that important, and set out a new task. After enough of these episodes, he lost a sense of accomplishment and contribution.

This scenario is not unique to my colleague. Many organizations have similar issues.

Here are five lessons to be learned by any organization for dealing with the speed of change.

1. You can’t successfully operate a business with executives focused on initiatives. They need to be focused on targeted outcomes, which is a translation of how the strategy can be achieved. A strategy doesn’t change nearly as often as initiatives.

   With a defined, narrow, set of high-level targeted outcomes, it is possible to define the additional necessary interim outcomes. An executive can then determine the initiatives necessary to achieve that outcome. As conditions inevitably change, the executive can shift to more appropriate initiatives. This makes better use of key resources.

2. Use a shared method to communicate the agreed upon relative importance of the top-level targeted outcomes. No organization has enough resources to achieve all the outcomes necessary to carry out a strategy. There must be agreement on the starting point for the relative importance of outcomes. This is what in turn points you towards the initial set of approved initiatives. The problem is that business context changes faster than you can execute anything important. Midstream you’ll to have to shift resources to the initiatives that support the now more important outcomes.
3. Changed business context forces a change in execution behavior. For example, after some business change, you might be required to achieve the original targeted outcome:
1. With an even higher level of performance
2. sooner,
3. at a lower cost, or with reduced management attention,
4. with greater certainty of success,
5. with a wider reach to increase the area of impact
6. with greater buy-in,
7. with increased sustainability or
8. with greater measurability and transparency of progress.

I call these “Qualities of Execution”. Any change between behaviors you used when you started execution to one of the new Qualities of Execution™ requires potential shifts. These shifts can be in many areas e.g. behavior, process, technologies, partnerships etc.

4. Keep everyone on the same page. People learn about change at different times, in different ways. Their managers interpret the impact of change for their team members, and they interpret what their manager has told them. The organization must have a method to identify and communicate how a changed business context impacts the high-level outcomes and Qualities of Execution. Otherwise targeted outcomes will not be achieved. That’s what seems to have happened with my colleague. Failure statistics for strategic programs are well over 50%.
5. Manage down conflicting execution behaviors. Based on continuous interpretations of new business context, managers and team members change their expectations on how execution will occur and what the final results should be. Hopefully this means team members will change their execution behaviors. We all have met those people who don’t or won’t change their behavior regardless of the situation. They’re not reading this anyway and will randomly disrupt execution when their behavior is at odds with the desired Qualities of Execution.
   

   You must keep everyone on the same page as per the point above. You can then identify the desired Qualities of Execution for everyone at the same time, in the same way. You now stand a chance of having complementary behaviors and increase the chance of successful execution.

   Seeing conflicting behaviors is more often the case. You can imagine team members or a sponsor working differently to achieve an outcome;

   • as fast as possible, and another
   • at as low cost as possible, and another
   • with as much buy-in as possible.

These conflicting behaviors lead to dysfunctional inter-actions and increase the likelihood of failed execution.

Here are six steps you can follow to deal with the speed of change.

1. Start with everyone on the same page. Create an Outcomes Roadmap. Translate strategy into targeted and interim outcomes. They’re more executable than a thick strategy binder or PowerPoint presentation.
2. Assign outcome coordinators to ensure accountability. Outcomes use resources from all over the organization. One person needs to coordinate achievement of each outcome on behalf of the whole organization.
3. Focus on the most important things. Identify the relative importance of outcomes and the initiatives that support them. Attach resources to the most important outcomes. Manage how importance changes over time and shift resources as needed.
4. Keep everyone on the same page. Use multiple types of media to communicate the updated Outcomes Roadmap. Use gaps in achievement of targeted outcomes rather than initiatives as the focus of status reports and meetings.
5. Manage changing expectations and desired behaviors for success. Change occurs and is communicated through the Outcomes Roadmap. Use it to identify the Qualities of Execution that drive desired behaviors for execution success. Talk about the desired execution behaviors in your teams as they are required to change.
6. Translate wins into normal operations. Deal with diminishing returns when nearing completion of an outcome. Be prepared to capture value and shift resources. Make management status meeting more effective by reduced reporting on historic important outcomes as outcomes of higher importance eclipse the old.

I’ve introduced these steps to many clients. They can be adopted by individuals for their own targeted outcomes, by project teams on a targeted outcome, or for an organization trying to manage multiple competing critical outcomes.

All of the above is required. The days of completing a project before the business context changes are long gone.

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.

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.

[…]

The Language of Strategy to Execution0
ronald.lamb posted in Execution of Strategy, Challenges, Getting Everyone on the Same Page, Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution), The Language of Strategy to Execution on July 24th, 2006

The Language of Strategy to Execution is an execution improvement methodology that I’ve created. It is continuing to evolve and mature.

It provides value:

• to anyone who is responsible for the execution of some critical targeted outcome.
• when currently available resources and capabilities aren’t enough to give confidence in success.

I frequently get asked for a short document to describe it. Click the following link to download a one page .pdf introduction.

The Meaning of Words is Critical in Execution - The Glossary is now added1
ronald.lamb posted in Challenges, Getting Everyone on the Same Page, Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution), Tower of Babel, Glossary on July 23rd, 2006

People tell me that I’m much more precise with words than most people. They’re right especially in the world of execution. This weekend’s contribution to the Blog is a glossary. I guarantee that you’ll find some words and definitions that you’ve never seen before. A common set of words for everything from Strategy to Execution has been missing. Everyone from CEO’s and Government leaders to Project Managers and Team Members need to have a common language when working on anything from Strategy to Execution.

To give an example, many organizations I work with use the following words completely interchangeably. They are not the same. I’ll share more in future posting how the confusion or willingness to interchange these words have a direct connection to why execution fails to meet expectations more than 50% of the time.

• Action
• Task
• Project
• Outcome
• Work
• Objective
• Goal
• Result
• Initiative
• Program

You can see the impact if a team was committed to achieving a particular outcome as compared to if they were committed to achieving a particular initiative. They might be quite successful in achieving the initiative, but not achieve the outcome that the initiative was put in place to achieve. On the other hand, if the team was committed to achieving a particular outcome, and the initiatives that they started with weren’t achieving the expected outcome, you can imagine that they’d change initiatives. That would be part of what they’d committed to. The difference in success or failure is immense.

The STRATEGY List: Reasons for Execution Failure0
ronald.lamb posted in Execution of Strategy, Challenges, Failure Statistics, Strategy, Top x-Lists on July 19th, 2006

Time to have some fun and start looking at reasons for success and failure. Here are some of comments I’ve had about strategy and the realationship to success and failure. I’ve seen some crazy reactions to “Our strategy …..”

Please help out and fill-in the blank to “Our strategy ……” on a comment. You can also comment or add your personal experiences with any of them.

I think we’ll add a “Twighlight Zone” category for great strategy to execution failure anecdotes.

If I can figure out how to do it, I’ll add a way to vote on which ones remind you of your organization.

1. We don’t have a strategy.
2. The strategy isn’t communicated.
3. The strategy isn’t understood.
4. Our strategy is so secret; no one knows what it is.
5. The strategy keeps changing.
6. Strategy is a bad word at our organization.
7. We do the strategy thing once a year.
8. I don’t know what strategy is and am afraid to say so.
9. Strategy is for those people in the ivory tower. We do the real work.
10. Our strategy is what those consultants made up. I hope they leave soon so we can go back to real work.
11. Our strategy seems to claim we’re going to conquer the world. We have trouble tying our shoes.
12. Our strategy is what the boss says it is.
13. You can find our strategy in those three inch thick binders over in the boss’ office. In fact you can find our last three strategies from various consulting firms, in the various binders that you’ll find there.

Only improve a Strategy-to-Execution sub-process if it will improve end-to-end strategy to execution1
ronald.lamb posted in Challenges, Organization Change, Improving S2E (Strategy to Execution), Guiding Principles on July 15th, 2006

We’re all experts at something. If we get hired or promoted to a new role, one of the first things that we do is to look around for what’s broken. We assume that’s our job to fix what’s broken.

The whole concept of accountability is that we’re given an area of control and asked to optimize it for success for the organization. We make the changes to fix or maximize the success in our own area of responsibility. There’s one problem though; very rarely does anyone have responsibility for the success of end-to-end strategy to execution. Did the change any individual made, actually improve the whole process? An expression that I hear is, “Did all boats rise”?

What I find (consulting for many organizations and my own direct experience), is that ‘improving’ a sub-process or the area that we have total control over, breaks the historic links to other parts of the overall strategy to execution process. The change may actually set back the total strategy to execution (S2E) process of the organization. Think of the old game of telephone. You sit in a circle and whisper a message from one person to the next. The person at the end of the circle, the last one to hear the message, says what they heard out loud. It’s usually pretty funny to hear the difference between the final word and the initially whispered word. Think of a strategy being conveyed and executed across an organization and how it gets corrupted as it goes along. Now add the ideas in the game of telephone that one person has decided that they hear better, when they hum at the same time as listening. Now add that another person, decides they whisper better when they’re hopping up and down. Let everyone keep adding their own improvements for listening and whispering and you get my idea. There’s no one saying hold on now, let’s take a look at whether each of these ‘improvements’ are helping us get the right message at the end of the circle.

What is missing is the need to have someone or a group take ownership of a continuously updated point of view of the health of the end to end strategy to execution (S2E) process. If someone wants to ‘improve’ their area, there should be some higher-level understanding and decision as to whether that change will ‘help all boats rise”. Does the change take into consideration the way other parts of the organization interact with the area that wants to create change?

This will be a subject area that I’ll be posting more about over time. I don’t think many organizations have any formal continuous assessment of the quality of their S2E process. If I were a CEO or head of a large organization, I’d want to have an objective understanding of the weakess points in the S2E process and allow improvements to occur there first.