The strategy execution gap. What are we missing?

This developing BIG Blog and related posts invite practitioners to help develop and challenge a perspective on strategy implementation.

An organisation agrees a strategy. It sets objectives, approves investment and fanfares initiatives. Its operations continue serving customers, its product and asset teams make their own choices, and its programmes and projects deliver change. Yet, months later, leaders cannot confidently explain whether the organisation is moving towards the outcomes it expected – or what should change if it is not.

We often call this the strategy execution gap. But what, exactly, is the gap – or – what are the gaps?

It is actually not just one thing. A design and delivery separation occurs when those forming strategic choices have too little dialogue with those who must make them real. A translation gap occurs when choices do not become clear objectives, expected results, accountabilities, decisions and priorities. A coordination gap occurs when finance, operations, products, assets and change continue to work to incompatible assumptions or capacity claims. An expectation and outcome gap occurs when results differ from those promised. A learning gap occurs when evidence changes neither the delivery arrangements nor the strategic choices.

Do these really exist? Evidence from our events and personal experiences shows that organisations are not universally great at communicating and cascading objectives, delegating and establishing accountability, prioritising workloads, establishing and managing metrics around objectives, or providing support this process. Indeed, and an APM PMO conference, when asked “who supports the connection of strategy to projects in your organisation” – not one person knew who that was. The typical practice seems to be

• define a strategy
• set up projects and programmes
• let projects and programmes “align to strategy”
• let them fight it out with the business for time and resources and let us know if there are problems

Caricature it may be – but many will recognise the situation we are positioning the “Strategy Implementation” capability to avoid.

BIG focuses on the organisational capability gap beneath many of these symptoms: the absence of a dependable way to connect purpose and strategic choice with objectives, authority, resources, operating work, uncertainty, decisions and learning across the whole organisation.

The BIG CIC Proposition is to use Business Integrated Governance as a means to adapt, adopt and implement good practice for Strategy Implementation – enabling balance across operations, product creation and change.

There is no shortage of good practice

The BIG CIC has not invented strategy implementation, nor discovered an empty space where professional knowledge ought to be.

Strategy professionals bring methods for understanding the environment, developing choices, engaging stakeholders and evaluating results. Operations specialists know how to run and improve the business. Product and asset managers develop and sustain value. Finance connects investment, cost and performance. Risk and assurance professions address uncertainty and confidence. Enterprise architects, technologists and data professionals shape the capabilities and information the organisation needs. Portfolio, programme, project and change practitioners help select, deliver and embed temporary interventions.

There are also established approaches that directly address aspects of the gap. Scorecards, OKRs and strategy maps can help translate objectives into measures and evidence. Hoshin Kanri helps negotiate and deploy priorities. Portfolio disciplines help align investments and change with strategic intent.

These contributions are valuable. The question is why organisations can have many of them – and still experience the gap.

Our proposition is that the missing work often falls between competent domains. One team formulates a choice; another funds it; another delivers a change; others must operate and sustain the resulting value. Each may do its own job well while accountability for the outcome, scarce capacity, dependencies, uncertainty and feedback remain disconnected. A collection of best practices does not automatically become a functioning organisational system.

Strategy implementation as a capability

In Business Integrated Governance (BIG), we use strategy implementation to describe the continuing organisational capability that connects purpose, vision and strategic choices with objectives, accountability, resources, priorities and coordinated delivery. Evidence from performance and uncertainty then enables leaders to adapt delivery and, when necessary, reconsider the strategy itself.

This is not another name for handing a strategy to a portfolio of projects. Strategy is delivered through three interacting logical domains:

• Operations perform and improve the organisation’s continuing work, meet obligations and generate evidence from real performance.
• Value creation develops and sustains products, services, assets and value streams through which benefits continue to be realised.
• Change creates or alters capabilities and ways of working through programmes, projects and other interventions.

Most important objectives need contributions from more than one domain. A project might create a capability, but operating teams must adopt it and product or asset owners must turn it into enduring value. Conversely, an organisation might improve a strategic outcome by changing an operating rule, reallocating capacity or stopping work—without launching a project.

Implementation also has to balance different kinds of objectives. Strategic objectives move the organisation towards its intended future. Performance objectives protect and improve its present operation. Mission-critical objectives safeguard conditions on which purpose, viability or essential obligations depend. Risk and uncertainty affect achievement of all three; they belong in the relevant decisions, not merely in a parallel register.

The capability is a means to better choices and outcomes. It is not a framework to install for its own sake. Creating or resetting a strategy may require developing the strategic content and adjusting the capability through which it can be implemented. Once established, that capability should become part of how the organisation normally manages itself, not be rebuilt at every strategy refresh.

How does this sit with the IASP Body of Knowledge 3.0?

The IASP Body of Knowledge 3.0 describes five interconnected strategy-management activities: formulate strategy, transform the organisation, engage stakeholders, execute strategy and govern strategy. This is already much richer than a simple sequence of drafting a plan and passing it to delivery. IASP’s own account of the BoK emphasises a connected strategy lifecycle and a common professional language.

BIG defers to IASP on the depth of strategy practice. Our interest is in the wider organisational interfaces around that practice. How does strategic information connect to accountable owners, finance, operating work, products, assets, programmes, projects, risk, assurance and real decisions?

BIG offers three related ideas for that discussion:

• A Strategy Information Model connects purpose, current reality, vision, choices and objectives with results, owners, resources, assumptions, risks, dependencies, delivery contributions and decisions. It need not be one software product or a fresh rewrite of everything the organisation already knows.
• A Strategy Operating Model describes how leaders and contributors create, maintain and use that information to formulate, translate, prioritise, review, learn and re-steer strategy.
• A wider BIG Operating Model connects strategy management with governance of mission-critical, strategic, performance and contributory objectives across the organisation, including decisions about capacity and the balance of operations, value creation and change.

These distinctions may help make implementation an explicit organisational concern rather than an unowned space between strategy and delivery.

An open series, not a finished answer

The BIG CIC has just completed a similar series on BIG Leadership – this would be good pre-read.

Over the coming weeks we will share deeper content under our thinking for people to use, question and improve:

1. Where does strategy implementation start? Growth, merger, investment underperformance, failed outcomes, new leadership or a strategy refresh can each reveal a different part of the problem.
2. When strategy is created or reset, what makes it implementable? We will look at purpose, current reality, vision, strategic choices, objectives and the information relationships needed before and after approval.
3. How does implementation become an enduring organisational capability? We will examine accountability, prioritisation, operating rhythms, risk, evidence, the three delivery domains and the roles of leadership and Business Support.

Each instalment will pose questions rather than assume that BIG has the last word. We want feedback from strategists, executives, PMO and portfolio practitioners, operations and product leaders, finance, risk, assurance, architecture and technology professionals—and people whose organisations have found a better way to join these contributions.

Our BIG Body of Knowledge session on 12 October will open a discussion forum for questions, examples and challenge. We intend to write up what the group learns about strategy implementation, including points that require us to change our own framing. That material can then support the proposed IASP UK discussion on 17 November, subject to confirmation, and David Dunning’s session “Strategy Delivery Does Not Happen by Magic: The PMO Opportunity in Business Integrated Governance” at the APM PMO Interest Network Conference on 24 November.

For now, the question is simple: Are you experiencing a strategy execution gap, and what are you doing about it?

Become a BIG CIC Member to be notified of the blog series, and be invited to the autumn events:

Register for our Strategy |Implementation Discussion, 12th October: