How to improve the design and execution of strategy
Making strategy a learning process
Back to strategy
diseases
Likely symptoms of problems
Meetings focus on understanding and analysing results and measures
and reviewing performance. The main question that gets asked is,
“Why are they not delivering?”.
The strategic and business planning process is a massive one
off event. Once completed, its a tablet of stone.
Preliminary diagnosis
85% of Senior managers spend less that 1-hour a month discussing
strategy. Most of that meeting time is spent discussing operational
aspects, analysing results and reviewing performance.
The questions tend to be: "Why are they under-performing?",
"What is the problem with this process/area/function?",
"What do they need to do to get on track?". The focus
tends to be operational (see diagram below).
Rarely does someone ask, “Are we communicating this strategy
correctly?", "Are we setting the right objectives?",
Are we measuring the right things?", "Are we executing
the right strategy?". "Is it possible we believed the
wrong things about what will drive performance?".
Case study
Within a major utility, the technology group consisted of a number
of separate companies. The new overall Managing Director wanted
to improve the way they were managed as a whole. We introduced
the new meeting approach where the Balanced Scorecard was the
driver of the conversation, the information was all available
before the meeting and analysis had already been done.
The focus of the meeting was quite different to normal and moved
much quicker. There was far more participation across the group,
with better prepared people. The debate was more incisive and
decisions were made that everyone was happy with.
Overall the approach provided them with a far more effective
and efficient way to run the business and their meetings
Underlying solutions
There are two aspects to this: How you run meetings and
the core of this approach, Strategic learning. The
latter requires a move to "double loop learning". This
means to ask why you are doing something, as well as what you
have to do. As the diagram below shows, the upper loop asks the
question, what are we learning about the strategy? Should we revise
it? Have we got it wrong?
The real importance of this move is that it creates continuous
strategy. Rather than being a one off event, the strategy is continuously
tested, assessed and revised as it progresses. This makes an organisation
far more sensitive to changes in the environment, competition
and the organisation.
Meetings also change. There is more emphasis on doing the analysis
outside of meetings so that the discussion in the meeting changes
from "What is the problem?", to "What shall we
do about it?"
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