Strategy into action

"66-75% of large organisations struggle to implement their strategies", HBR March 2015

Background: A key aspect of leadership development is the ability to lean into uncertainty. And nowhere is this more critical than when leading people to execute on strategy.

Approach: As part of leadership development programmes, I run experiential workshops that introduce Agile ways of working using key strategic initiatives from the organisation. This engages the cohort with the mindset and toolset in their own context, so they don't have the barrier of transitioning from the classroom to their day-job.

Within a day, teams will work their way around my Challenge Canvas. This includes customer discovery interviewing, metrics design, reframing challenges, ideating with the Doblin Innovation Tactics and designing a safe-to-fail experiment that they can run following the workshop. The experiments are designed to prove out their riskiest assumptions and uncover insights into what it will take to be successful in the initiative.

Outcomes: People tend to rise up through organisations because they 'come with solutions, not problems'. The flip as you enter leadership roles (that come with increasing levels of uncertainty and ambiguity), is that you need the ability to focus on the problems and loosely hold the solutions. If you are clear about the problem you are solving, you can navigate the ambiguity and complexity of strategic initiatives - testing and learning about the right fit solution. Often people get frustrated and demotivated at not having a clear way ahead, but I have seen time and again that the Challenge Canvas enables people to see both the big picture opportunity and a way to find focus and get momentum now.

Just a great way to tackle complex issues. As a company, we have always really struggled with a lot of these sorts of problems.

It makes you think hard about how we can work together more differently and ultimately be more innovative.

Comments from participants at a CVL leadership workshop - Executing on strategy with experiments