Chelsea Bates & David Yip | October 28, 2024
In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, having a brilliant strategy is only half the battle. The real challenge lies in turning that strategy into tangible results. This paper provides a roadmap for leaders to effectively operationalise their strategic vision, ensuring it translates into meaningful action and measurable outcomes.
The first crucial step in operationalising any strategy is ensuring alignment across your executive team. Without this foundational alignment, even the most innovative strategies can falter. Here's how to achieve it:
1) Conduct an Alignment Check. Ask each executive to independently answer two key questions:
- What is the purpose of our strategic initiative?
- What does success look like for this initiative?
If you receive varied answers, it's a clear sign that further work needs to be done to ensure the executive team are aligned and your strategic initiatives are successfully delivered. Once aligned, maintain it: Bring your executive team together on a regular basis for focused, facilitated sessions to hash out discrepancies and maintain a unified vision.
2) Define Clear, Quantifiable Business Outcomes. Your business outcomes should be defined in binary, evidence-based, quantifiable terms. Avoid vague goals; instead, opt for clear, measurable, tangible business outcomes that can be tracked incrementally.
3) Communicate, communicate, communicate. Ensure everyone in the team understands the “why” behind the strategic initiative to help start change management early. Having everyone involved understand what we are doing, why we are doing and what change we expect to see (e.g. how the initiative will improve the customer experience and/or the staff experience) ensures everyone is aligned and provides the team the guardrails needed to own and deliver the initiative.
Once alignment is achieved, the next challenge is translating your high-level strategy into actionable plans. Here's how to bridge this gap:
1) Develop a Comprehensive Roadmap. Create a clear, visually accessible roadmap that outlines key milestones, dependencies, and timelines. Ensure this roadmap is transparent and accessible to all relevant stakeholders and is kept up to date.
2) Identify Capability Gaps. Assess your current organisational capabilities against what's required to execute your strategy. This includes evaluating people, processes, and technology.
3) Make Strategic 'Build, Buy, or Borrow' Decisions. For identified capability gaps, determine whether to develop internally (build), acquire externally (buy), or partner temporarily (borrow). Use a framework that considers the strategic importance and longevity of each capability.
Effective measurement is crucial for successful strategy operationalisation. Consider these approaches:
1) Develop a Balanced Scorecard. Include both leading and lagging indicators that are data based, quantifiable and provide a holistic view of your strategy's progress and impact.
2) Focus on Value-Driven Metrics. Move beyond simple task completion metrics. Instead, measure business outcomes that demonstrate real value creation or progress towards strategic goals.
3) Ensure Cross-Functional Visibility. Make sure each team understands how their metrics contribute to the overall strategic objectives. This fosters accountability and collaboration across silos.
A major stadium faced declining attendance as home entertainment systems improved. By reframing their challenge from a technology problem to a fan experience issue, they developed a holistic strategy that blended digital and physical experiences.
Key takeaways:
- They brought together cross-functional teams, breaking down traditional operational silos.
- The strategy integrated new technology with redesigned processes and upskilled staff.
- The result was a new organisational capability that significantly enhanced the fan experience, driving attendance and engagement.
Operationalising strategy is not a one-time event but a continuous process of alignment, execution, measurement, and adaptation. It requires leaders to:
1) Maintain a unified unwavering focus on strategic outcomes
2) Foster a culture of adaptability and continuous improvement
3) Balance short-term operational needs with long-term strategic goals
4) Regularly communicate progress and challenges to all stakeholders
By following these principles, leaders can bridge the often-wide gap between strategic vision and operational reality, turning ambitious plans into tangible results that drive organisational success.
Remember, the most brilliant strategy is only as good as its execution. By mastering the art of operationalisation, you can ensure your organisation not only adapts to change but leads it.
