Generally speaking, not much. Certainly not strategic execution.
We've seen, for many years, the "big wigs" in the company take a week aside to create their strategic plan for the next twelve months, followed by the announcement the big strategic projects along with their KPIs and metrics for the business to work towards.
This IS NOT a strategy. This IS NOT strategic execution. This IS NOT leadership.
What this is, is project management. In bigger companies, where the strategic projects have smaller department projects, this is portfolio management. Some will call this strategic project management, and yet the exercise is the same. This is part of your strategy, and certainly part of execution, but it is not all there is.
As we outline in our article Strategic Projects ARE NOT your strategy, strategy is far more than just what you are doing over the next twelve months. This is why strategy execution is not project or portfolio management. Strategic execution includes making decisions at every point along the way, that take into consideration why this objective, initiative or outcome is strategic. It's taking into consideration those other three aspects of the plan.
If you're a leader, I'm sure you've heard the saying "don't put your strategic plan away in the drawer". And yet this is what many leaders will unknowingly do when you only following your strategic projects. You're only focusing on one aspect of your strategy and not the most important aspects... why you are doing these projects. We've all heard that to overcome this, your strategy should be visible and easily accessible, and yet they're still not readily accessible when and where they're needed. Two years ago, when we were all in the office, having your strategy on the wall made some sense... even if you had to leave a meeting room to refer to it during a meeting, but in these remote working times, that's not working. PDF copies of your strategy, buried on the corporate network, in a OneDrive/Dropbox folder or in a wiki page, is neither visible nor accessible.
For your strategy to be fully visible and accessible, when and where it's needed, it literally needs to be inside the tools you are using, when you need it the most... when you're making a decision. This is when you want your plan to be on full display.
Strategy-AI does exactly this, distributing your full strategy into the tools you use everyday when you're making decisions, helping you consider your why at every step. As your teams break-down big work into smaller tasks, you can quickly and easily verify this task still aligns to all the aspects of your strategy we outlined in our article... your original why.
Talk to us today about a demo or how Strategy-AI can help you reach success.
