Three Traps that Slow Down Strategy

(MoneyWatch) 
What leader is satisfied with the speed of execution within his or her organisation or team? Research indicates that leaders are right to be dissatisfied: studies show that, on average, organisations abandon 50 to 70 percent of strategies because they fail to take hold or fail to achieve the desired results in the time expected.

In the course of our research, we discovered a surprising truth about how leaders in large organisations can accelerate execution-and a big mistake that some of those leaders are making:

The surprising truth is that you achieve strategic speed by focusing on people. Many executives recoil from dealing with people issues because they equate them with slowing down, with having to wade through a morass of human emotions, questions, quirks, and complaints.

But skilful mobilisation of people is actually a key differentiator between slower and faster organisations.

The big mistake is to pursue speed mainly by manipulating processes, systems, and technologies. Focusing on efficiency alone does not create speed.

Trap 1: Overattention to Pace When pressed to accelerate execution, a leader's first inclination is often one of three things:

To do everything faster (and exhort others to do the same)
To stoke the boiler by throwing more resources (money, people, or technology) at tasks and problems; or
To cut corners by eliminating steps in a process, pieces of a project, or people in the loop.
Trap 2: Overattention to Process At any university, you'll see paved walkways connecting the campus buildings to one another. You'll also see well-trodden footpaths cutting across the lawns -- especially from the dormitories to the dining halls. These paths tell a story that one could call 'people trump process.' . People will cut across the lawn if it suits them.

In business, it's common for leaders to focus on process and pay less attention to what motivates people.

Process-focused efforts to increase speed don't go far enough. Without equal or greater attention to people factors, leaders' efforts to improve processes and technologies are at best insufficient, at worst detrimental.

As the biologist Lewis Thomas once said, "If you want a bee to make honey, you do not issue protocols on solar navigation or carbohydrate chemistry; you put him together with other bees."

Trap 3: Measuring Speed There's one more mistake leaders make, and it may be the most fundamental one: they measure speed as if it were nothing more than a race. They think, 'how fast can we get from A to B?' This mindset puts pace and process at the forefront of their concerns and causes them to overlook an essential component of strategic speed: value.

Therefore, we'd like to offer a new way to size up speed: Time to Value and Value over Time
The [most successful change] leaders...measure strategic speed not in terms of races won, but in terms of two broader metrics: reduced time to value and increased value over time.

• Time to value is the time it takes for people or initiatives to climb above the line or point at which they start contributing net value to the system rather than being a net hindrance.
• Value over time is the value created as they stay above the line. Long time to value, little value over time is the worst-case scenario. Short time to value, substantial value over time is the best.

(Photo: millicentbystander, CC2.0)