Combining focus, speed and flexibility
Bringing your strategy to action and realising your strategic goals asks for the ‘right combination’ of focus, speed and flexibility. Gone are the days we could make 3-year plans and ditto budgets and expect a Project Management Office and finance team to break it down to a sequential series of projects and KPIs that we ask business teams to finish, one after the other.
The classical ‘strategy to action’ paradigm runs short of the accountability and ownership crucial for your people to drive actions without ‘instructions’, misses the connection with the daily field reality, has no eye for the learning and adaptability that is key in making things happen, and is slow in picking up emerging developments and new insights.
How to create a focused, fearless and engaging movement that understands and believes in the future direction, that specifies the right series of deliverables that will make you reach your goal? And overcomes the pitfalls of ‘assumed usefulness’, ‘ongoing firefighting’, ‘finger pointing’ or ‘upwards delegation of problems’?
How do you ensure:
- Focus: from strategy, to must-win-battles, to concrete actions for coming 30 and 90 days, lined up in a critical path.
- Alignment: coalition ready to take joint ownership of the common roadmap.
- Flexibility: a rhythm to review, with short feedback cycles, fast learning and corrective measures.
- Speed: clear and timely decision making, leading to concrete deliverables and tangible results, and ensuring not only starting but properly completing. actions and embedding ways of working into the organisation.
- Climate of ownership and empowerment, transparency, speaking up, engaging in constructive conflict and trust?
How do you get your strategy and ambitions done?