Successful implementation of digitally enabled strategies is challenging. Companies that blindly follow the latest “digital hype” often pay inadequate attention to important and long-standing fundamentals that are critical to get right.
Companies can all too easily become focused on delivering large-scale, three-year plans (e.g. major enterprise IT projects). Invariably, this involves detailed, upfront program specification and extensive “left-to-right” planning, leading to outcomes that directly undermine the ability to turn strategy into successful execution. The most successful companies use data analysis and insight from adjacent industries to continually assess and revisit the decision whether to invest further, pivot or stop.
Organizations also often put technology before design, which is effectively setting the “how” before the “why,” and fail to address underlying organizational and communication structures. This will simply widen the gap between strategy and execution, and between anticipated outcomes and reality. A “design first, technology second” approach is much more effective: consider the underlying purpose of the strategy and carefully design it, with the employee or customer in mind, to take into account the functional (i.e. technically required) and non-functional requirements (i.e. how people will use the technology) before defining how best to implement the solution.
Programs and projects are typically defined by language and nomenclature that aim to set goals and targets, define activities, and identify and manage risks. The shared language is an important factor in determining how the team perceives values and priorities, and how it behaves in relation to risks and outcomes. Language can also leave little room to move sideways or explore new ideas, which can lead to promising opportunities being discarded too early and failing ideas persisting.
Implementing successful change is hard because organizations are composed of people, who have different perspectives, incentives and motivations. Often referred to as the “soft” side of delivery, this is invariably the hardest part. In our experience, companies that do not consider employees before and during each stage of strategy execution are likely to fail.
Traditional “best-practice” approaches assume we can precisely predict the outcomes of strategies and projects through detailed “left-to-right” execution plans. Yet this rarely goes to plan, as “best practices” are almost exclusively designed for closed systems, where all the inputs can be controlled and managed. In reality, digitally enabled strategy implementation, especially in large companies, takes place in complex open systems. These open systems comprise interactions from a diverse range of individuals, acting with a degree of autonomy and unpredictability. Trying to oversimplify such a system to implement a rigid, deterministic strategy is destined for failure.
Instead, companies need to identify and acknowledge when a system is open, with strategic plans that assume emergence and uncertainty. Management should maintain a clear view of the desired outcome and goals, but focus on delivering the next part of the plan rather than adhering to the longer-term program, while providing “invest, pivot or stop” decision points when new evidence challenges the initial strategy.
