Align vision, effort, and people to drive impact and growth
STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT & EXECUTION
The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.
Few organizations implement their strategy or their strategic plan efficiently. We facilitate a strategic alignment process that gets all critical stakeholders on the same page and ready to coherently implement a collectively owned strategic vision from a shared playbook.
We rarely find that all senior leaders or decision-makers are able to succinctly state what their strategy is, what it means, and which priorities and boundaries follow. Rather, small misalignments or ambiguities lead to miscommunication and make subsequent decision-making inefficient or unnecessarily tense.
While the nitty-gritty of managing a strategic planning process can be its own challenge, the trouble often starts when leadership teams can’t consistently communicate their strategy. Often, there is a general sense of key strategy elements or what the strategic plan says. But concrete narratives among stakeholders and their felt priorities differ in important ways. Consequently, subsequent decision-makers are left with ambiguities and cross-functional implementation that lacks coordination and coherence.
Why Strategic Execution Fails
Our series of strategic alignment workshops directly responds to what leaders describe as the key reasons for strategic execution failure in their organizations:
- Too many conflicting priorities
- Inability to coherently describe their strategic advantage
- No clear or differentiating strategy
- Doubt strategic choices will lead to success
- Day-to-day decisions are misaligned with strategy
- Decisions or efforts contradict each other
- Timely translation of strategic and operational choices into action
Source: Booz & Co, Strategic Coherence Profiler Survey
We offer a systematic process that ensures all key decision-makers:
- Use a shared mental model to define and communicate their organization's strategy
- Recognize critical strategy elements that need improved alignment
- Share conviction in strategic choices so leaders "put the money where the mouth is"
- Unearth and align different evaluations and preferences about trade-off decisions
- Select success measures that align with the strategic vision
- Agree upon capability-building activities critical to further drive strategic advantage
- Ensure cross-functional interdependencies are recognized and properly considered
How We Facilitate
A strategic planning / strategic alignment process is as much an intellectual exercise as it is a process of social coordination. To this end, we lead a series of workshops - conducted either in-person, via Mural, or as a hybrid process. Without a shared framework and a disciplined way to track the group's inputs, reasoning, and outputs, it's nearly impossible to come to a shared understanding and be able to consistently and convincingly communicate strategy to everyone else in the organization.