Introducing Strategy Into Your Organisation

Competency in developing and executing a strong business strategy is a competitive advantage in any field. But traditional approaches to strategy, which focus on predictability and replicability, are no longer sufficient. Today, executing a business strategy requires navigating a great deal of uncertainty. As a result, business leaders need new techniques to navigate the challenges of rapidly changing environments, stakeholders, and organisational goals. Alan South, Guest Expert on the Oxford Executive Strategy Programme from Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, suggests how to introduce strategy into your company and shares useful tips on how to get involved in the strategy discussion. 

Transcript

The biggest failure, time after time, relating to strategy is failure to execute. The flip side of this is that if you are competent in the execution of strategy, you have a source of competitive advantage.

A common root cause I see is a general difficulty within organisations dealing with uncertainty. Organisations generally do very, very well by having things that are repeatable and predictable. Strategy, by definition, involves a great deal of uncertainty.

And that’s a bit of a difficult cultural fit, if you like. If you’re looking to execute on a strategy, you’ve got to figure out a way of creating actionable reality out of a situation that is, by definition, uncertain.

The whole thing with strategy is that it is something with a mid-term time horizon; I tend to think of five years. In terms of whose work is strategy, it belongs to the people within an organisation that are a good fit with that kind of time horizon. So some CEOs are highly operational and have a very short time horizon. And, in that case, they are better served by having a fellow executive look after, look after strategy.

Other CEOs are very comfortable with a five-year time horizon, and they probably need somebody to help them with the short-term operational work.

How do you get yourself into the strategy discussion as a mid-senior level leader within an organisation, in an organisation that has quite a short time horizon? A model that I use is to think of gravitational pull in such an organisation. The near term is a huge mass, a huge planet, and strategy is a little tiny asteroid and I think the first piece of advice that I would give to folk in that situation is just understand that you are in the minority. You may be an important minority, but you are in a minority. So it’s about understanding how to frame the challenge in a way that resonates with that larger, that larger part of the organisation.

And if I may also offer a couple of words of advice, which is what not to do – and I see this going wrong time after time, after time – is to start to shout louder. And when change doesn’t happen, start trying to shout even louder, still. Trust me, that great big body of the short time horizon organisation will eventually stamp out that shouting.