The Lost Art of Enrollment

Why do strategies fail? A popular business question with an abundance of educated hypotheses and theories. This article does not dive into frameworks, business models, value creation, competitive positioning, or other strategic mechanics often cited when discussing this question. I'll leave that to HBR. Instead, I posit that companies have minimized the need to enroll employees and stakeholders during the strategic process, and thus implementation falls short. The art of enrollment is to facilitate the behavioral, cultural, and human elements that need to be in place to foster decision-making and action to pursue desired outcomes.

To start, let's visualize a successful result and work backward. In my experience, this is an accountable team that has had the autonomy to experiment and make choices to achieve an outcome. For the team to feel accountable, the team needs to be enrolled. To be enrolled, the team has participated in the strategic planning or communication of the plan. For the team to participate, there should be executive commitment and a thoughtful strategic process design. To summarize,

Executive Commitment > Participation/Communication > Enrollment > Accountability

Taking a step back, I believe the best strategies are narratives. Narratives take stakeholders on a journey across historical perspective, present environment, and a future state in which humans execute choreographed tactics to achieve specific outcomes. The operative word is human. There are management consultancies that are incredibly competent at building strategic narratives. The challenge is turning the story into reality.

I advocate embedding an internal cross-functional, high-performance team with internal strategic leaders or 3rd party consultancies throughout the strategic process. Short term, this adds complexity, slows things down, and fosters suffering. But I believe suffering during the planning process is when the magic happens and is critical for enrollment. Suffering forces problem solving cross-functionally among the practitioners within the organization. Without doers involved, strategy can become academic.?

I mentioned earlier the notion of a thoughtful design to the planning process. Here is my checklist that I try to incorporate into any planning project.

1. Find and build a balanced internal team to work on the plan - I attempt to find this team during my early rounds of stakeholder interviews—probe who are the high potential employees and individuals everyone goes to for questions. Planning processes are a great opportunity for individuals in search of stretch assignments.
2. Keep everything visually in one place - Ideally, this is a conference room (war room) or virtual whiteboard (Miro); I believe seeing the work develop enables strategic themes to emerge.
3. Divide up the workstreams - Create mini teams to investigate and execute questions or issues derived from the planning group. Have them own and present it.
4. Facilitate and provide tools, knowledge, and coaching - I like to embed myself on these teams and act as a player coach to help the team discover and provide ideas on executing various workstreams. For example, if a team had a customer segmentation workstream, I might offer methodologies and resources if the team struggled to get started.
5. Overly communicate, especially with leadership - Invite in leaders virtually or in the war room and regularly walk through completed workstreams and learnings. Be open to feedback and adjustments.
6. Create a written narrative - Before any decks are created, have the team write the narrative using only words that walk through the analyses, learnings, themes, initiatives, financials, and desired outcomes. Iterate and have the entire team sign off on the story. Then build the deck.
7. Let the team be your advocates within the company - I love it when members of the planning team go back to their functional groups and present the strategy. Having one of your own enrolled and excited helps to engender commitment.
8. Road Show - Reviewing the strategy individually with the BOD, C-Suite, senior leaders, and small intimate groups across the organization. The idea is to get maximum feedback and to make adjustments as necessary. Road Shows grease the wheel for final plan approval and capital/resource requests.

By adding some of these elements to your strategic planning process, a company catalyzes participation, enabling enrollment that allows for greater accountability. When the team is enrolled and accountable, I believe execution is more successful.?

If you are struggling with strategy in your organization or implementing it, I'd love to help. Let's find some time to discuss.