Things start to happen when:

• There is a need (real or perceived). The person who invented the phrase ‘no pain, no gain’ (pun intended) had a lot of foresight! A ‘need’ is foundational. If an investment is made without inventing or discovering a need, nothing is going to happen, or something bad is going to happen (think ‘failed projects’ and ‘wasted resources’ and ‘frustration’).
• Resources are applied to fulfill the need. Sometimes even a little bit is enough. At other times, even a lot is not enough.
• The timing is right. This is intangible but often crucial element. Finding the right timing is part science, seems mostly art. It requires the right mixture of intuitiveness and experience and risk taking ability to spot ‘timing’.

Does having all three ensure success? A lot could go wrong in execution, nothing can be taken for granted. Needs or priorities may change, leaving assumption about timing in shambles.

The point being, after identifying critical success factors (3 examples are given above) and evaluating them individually, try ‘triangulation’ as an additional step to assess the readiness for change and success.

Many complex problems seem that way. If the stakeholder base is large and the culture is collaborative, there is churn. Discussions seem to be endless and at times, pointless.

If the destination is unclear or not agreed upon, efforts will not be coordinated. Everyone will assume a different destination and pull resources in different directions.

A productive way to proceed is to agree upon the next 3-5 steps. Reconvene to ask if the destination is clear. If not, agree upon the another 3-5 steps.

Speed is not critical when the destination is unclear. Safety is essential.

By creating a definition and taxonomy for the activities in strategy execution, it makes it possible to identify what is broken or, if everything is working , what needs to be tweaked to go to the next level.

One of the first things that need to be clarified is the difference between ‘strategy’ and ‘strategy execution’. Setting overall strategy (low-cost, differentiation, market focus) is the first step. The strategic objectives are specific statements of intent, aligned to the overall strategy.

‘Strategy execution’ is needed to convert these intentions into reality. In the course of execution or implementation, there is a feedback loop, where lessons learnt are then applied to improving strategy. This feedback loop is in place for all organizations that look to learn from their successes and failures.?

Strategy definition and execution are ‘always on’ and consist of a set of clearly identifiable activities. These activities are performed every day, by all organizations. If these activities are performed without understanding what they are and how they are interconnected, the opportunities to systematically eliminate roadblocks in converting strategy to reality are harder to discover.

This will cover all the steps from discovering/inventing value to actually delivering it to customers. In explaining this, concepts such as ‘in the business’ (create value using existing processes), ‘on the business’ (improve processes) and ‘transform the business’ (move the business to an entirely new ground) need to be explained.

I am looking forward to comments and learning from other perspectives.

• A grand sit down dinner, with real cloth napkins, silverware and possibly, candle lights! The company around the table is polite and well mannered. All in all, its a wonderful, relaxing experience. You don’t have to do anything other than be present and enjoy yourself (and pay the bill). Someone cooks the food, serves it and cleans up after.
• A meal you cook yourself allows you both flexibility in preparation and the experience of a creative joy. You decide what to cook, when to cook, how to cook and how to serve and eat it. You also have the choice of who to eat it with. You have to make the effort to get the ingredients to make the meal.
• A frozen dinner. You take it out of the freezer, heat it and eat it. It is the ultimate in convenience and speed. Very, very handy when you are tired and not in the mood to cook and don’t want the expense of eating out. A variation of this is the ‘take out’, ‘order in’ or ‘to go’.

Information is consumed in one of the three ways listed above. When executing your strategy, getting the right information to the right person at the right time can mean the difference between moving things forward or getting stuck and spinning your wheels. Communication gaps are like serving the wrong type of meal to the wrong audience.

At the heart of it, strategy execution is all about creating a ‘dialtone’. I.e., creating value in a consistent and predictable manner.

Whatever your profession, calling, initiative or project, you are working to create a dialtone. I.e. you start with a situation that is not understood, issues are possibly clouded by fallacies and urban legends. You work thru the issues one by one till you can evolve a repeatable process to deliver value in a consistent and predictable manner.

Your every effort builds upon experience and existing capabilities. Even new capabilities are created using existing capabilities. It follows that none of your efforts are truly one off (I am trying to think of examples of truly one off projects and failing). At the physical level, you can never create ‘something out of nothing’, though it reads very well in marketing literature and performance reviews.

What is needed is the ability to solving problems effortlessly and consistently, handling unexpected situations, and aligned to org strategy, vision and mission. Use friction and conflict to discover missing capabilities.

This can range from the mild tension that enhances performance, to debilitating anxiety and paranoia.

If this is happening to you, the first thing to acknowledge that unless some unlawful or illegal act is being committed, this is your problem. No one is “doing it to you.” You can choose to be a victim or relish the challenge of looking for the positive while working to turn things around.

The world is not perfect, it never was and never will be. Sometimes it is unclear how words like ‘control’ and ‘predictability’ even made it to the dictionary. Maybe these words describe a desire, not a fact.

Paradoxically, if you buy into the previous statement, the anxiety begins to fall away. The feeling and the need to ‘cling’ on to a safety net will disappear. It may not help solve the problem at hand, but you will feel happier. Not to mention, you will no longer be a pain-in-the-rear to your co-workers by reacting to your inner anxieties.

It is not a matter of skill. Though planning skills are not hard to acquire, its important to learn the planning process in advance and not struggle with the process in the course of planning. Fed up with the ad hoc nature of doing business, organizations institute an annual planning process. However, the need to plan is not a once-a-year effort. It is required at the start of every initiative, program and project.

What is the sense of urgency that will get teams to plan? It often comes down to strong leadership. If the boss asks for a plan, the wheels begin to move.

Planning is the starting point to building a playbook for executing strategy. If planning does not occur, then the playbook is build tacitly, this will work for only the smallest endeavors, if at all. Organizational learning will remain ‘tribal knowledge’. This means the organization will not scale as communication requires close human contact to teach and learn.

The planning process is not a game changer, getting the team to start planning is.