When A Plan Comes Together

Over recent weeks I have shared various perspectives on forming a new growth plan.  In this final blog on this topic, I want to share three success factors that can enhance what your plans achieve. In the end, ideas don’t count. What matters is what gets implemented and the impact you make on your consumers and customers. 

First, invest hard in communication.  Launching a new strategy is about bringing deep clarity, building conviction in future prospects and generating commitment to action and change.  Some of this will be difficult if your strategy is choiceful and ambitious.  PowerPoint cannot achieve this.  Real leadership can, but only with compelling content.  You need narrative to engage.  Specificity to create understanding.  Passion to convey your belief and make the new plan “infectious” for engagement. Finally, you need to be obviously invested, your personal energy and brand to show not just your belief but that you will stick to this plan and the priorities.  Create a stable strategy for others to sign up to knowing it won’t be replaced when the next idea comes along.  I can’t think of anything that matters more than doing this brilliantly well.  You will reap the rewards.  Get a great agency.  Invest beyond you telling the story.  Iconize the strategy and create mnemonics around the key ideas.  Create collateral for leaders throughout the organization to distil the messages and bring it to life for their departments and functions.  Find ways to get three-way engagement and listen to the dialog carefully.  This is a campaign not a single launch.  Look for questions, concerns and areas of misunderstanding and fix them over time. 

Second, you must do the hard bit and operationalize the strategy. You will only get lasting change if you convert ideas into specific projects and outcomes.  Activity based management is a philosophy warmly embraced by the supply chain and project management functions but in short supply throughout many c-suites.  It is key.  You need tangible goals, metrics and workplans to achieve the big inflections.  You must also learn the cadence of change.  What can happen quickly? What do your team, organization or operating model struggle with? How do you optimize this as time progresses?  Subtle tweaks can dramatically affect the productivity of the strategy, but only if you’re attuned to what’s happening.  Look for where there is sand in the gears and be prepared to intervene without abandoning the strategy.  Real change is hard, but that is where real rewards lie.  Despite all the hockey stick projections in superficial strategy you only get new results with new actions.  The capabilities of your team can be transformed but only with time, investment and consistency to generate learning curves and nurture confidence. 

Third, sustain the disciplines and leadership focus you applied in the strategy development.  The world around you will change constantly, but not always consequentially.  Some of the assumptions you made on speed and impact will be better than others.  Any successful business must be entrepreneurial, seizing big opportunities when they come along, even if unplanned.  Take proper time, with external help, to objectively revisit progress and shifting context.  Use a fact-based approach, with high external focus and a medium-term perspective on changes.  You don’t change strategy for tactical or topical dynamics.  You focus on underlying shifts in your opportunities, capabilities and progress on your priorities.  I often talk about the power of editing in strategy, you must be ready to refine and sharpen, but very rarely should you abandon or fundamentally change course.   Once or twice a year step away from the quarter and the P&L and look at what’s really working and not working. Commit to optimizing your strategy. Don’t ever get too busy “doing the doing” that you lose the perspective on what progress is really being made and what needs help to be better.

I always hate the cliché “strategy is execution”.  I think it’s a lazy idea and explains why many businesses don’t have a strategy and just try to string incremental annual results together.  However, looked at another way, it’s a very powerful idea.  How you execute your strategy can make an exponential difference to the success and impact of your best ideas and priority choices. Invest more in delivering your strategy than you did developing it. Make change happen.