Strategic Selectivity: You can have it all, just not all at the same time

Traditional strategic planning is failing us.?But here’s a little secret:?it has always failed us.?It’s just been tough to admit.

Please don’t get me wrong.?A strategic planning workshop for management is a good team-building exercise.?However, the next time you need one, a golf outing or a dinner cruise might be a better bonding experience.

But chances are that you have already undertaken the creation of a strategic plan in the traditional sense (e.g., mission statement, vision statement, etc.), complete with strategic goals and objectives.?Heck, they might even be SMART or SMARTER?goals and objectives.?

But you are stuck.?What good are perfectly crafted goals if you can’t get them launched?

Today, I’m going to give you a tip that promises to realize 74% of the total value of a goal or initiative in the first year it is launched.

Out of Time

You have your strategic initiatives in hand.?You know your goals and objectives.?And you may even have a plan to launch some of them already.?

But wait a minute.?Before you get down this road too far, understand that you don’t have time to launch them all at once.?

Sounds counter-intuitive, doesn’t it??Expressed another way, if you tackle your initiatives one at a time, things will go much faster and save on costs.?

Having It All...

One of my heroes is American Kay Coles James.?Did you know that the U.S. has an HR Director??James had that job, serving as the director of the United States Office of Personnel Management, a presidential nominee, confirmed by the U.S. Senate.?In her illustrious career, she served as the assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, on local and state school boards, as Chief Operating Officer for a national umbrella organization for mentoring programs, and as SVP of a family lobbying group, to name a few.?James is also the mother of three.?

Upon hearing her credentials listed in an introduction to a speech she was making, she quipped:?

“I’m here to tell you that you can have it all...just not all at the same time.”

The Reality

Here’s the reality:?a traditional strategic plan launches all initiatives at the same time.?In a grand example of multi-tasking, the traditional strategic initiative launch muddles your goals, stretches already-stretched resources, and stresses the stressed-out.

It’s not a problem with the initiatives themselves; it’s that we launch them simultaneously.?And if we work everything at once, we may find ourselves stuck in an initiative that is less-than-optimal.?Why??It’s because we’ve invested resources (human, money, and time) into something and feel that we must see it through.

I know it feels like you must get on with all your initiatives today.?After all, you are short on time.?But trust me, a traditional strategic initiative roll-out will have serious repercussions on an already-strained organization.?

The Data

But back to the data that I mentioned earlier…

In their McKinsey Quarterly article, “The Numbers Behind Successful Transformations,” authors Kevin Laczkowski, Tao Tan, and Matthias Winter find that “successful transformations typically implemented initiatives that ultimately corresponded to 28 percent of fully ramped-up value in the first three months, 57 percent in the first six months, and 74 percent in the first 12 months.”

They refer to this practice as “moving fast and renewing often.” So, by taking each goal or initiative one at a time, you can achieve quick wins early in the strategy process then use the cost savings or increased revenue to fund longer-term opportunities – creating a virtuous cycle.

I would add that part of that savings may come in the form of abandoning an initiative that’s not working before you get in too deep.

Strategic Selectivity

Here’s the thing. What we call “multi-tasking” is actually something called “task switching.”?Task switching creates a distraction; a distraction causes a time waste—your brain needs time to adjust and then get back to the previous task.?

Multi-tasking is not a recipe for success.?Rather, as author and entrepreneur Gary W. Keller (the Keller of Keller Williams, the world’s largest real estate company) states in his book, The ONE Thing:

Success is built sequentially.

Besides the slower result, multi-tasking (actually, task switching) adds complexity that you don’t need.?In perhaps my favorite management book, The Power of Simplicity, Jack Trout states:?

Complexity is not to be admired.?It’s to be avoided.

Traditional strategic planning falls short because all your energy is spread around initiatives, making your efforts much more complex than they need to be.?

Something Better

Here’s some data for you: If you work your strategic initiatives one at a time, you will be better able to decide whether you need to move forward or not…and decide much quicker in the roll-out cycle.?This means a better return on the same initiatives for all the for-profit organizations and/or lower costs for both for-profits and non-profits.?

By doing so, you can turn the data you just acquired on those initiatives into money.

#businessintelligence #dataanalytics #diva

Sources:

“The Numbers Behind Successful Transformations” by Kevin Laczkowshi, Tao Tan, and Matthias Winter. McKinsey Quarterly (17 October 2019).

Trout, J., & Rivkin, S. (1999). The Power of Simplicity: a Management Guide to Cutting Through the Nonsense and Doing Things Right. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Keller, G., & Papasan, J. (2013). The ONE Thing: the Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results. Austin, Texas: Bard Press.

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If you have any questions or stories that bring out the value in data insights, visualization, and analytics, I'd love to hear them. Connect with me on LinkedIn: Tara Kenyon, PhD

I am passionate about helping executives use their data to not only compete on analytics but also to dominate their markets with analytics, turning data into profits. You can find me and the work I do on “DIVA” (Data Insights, Visualization, and Analytics) on my website: tarakenyon[dot]com. You can also schedule a call at a time suitable for both of us via my Calendly schedule: https://calendly.com/tara-kenyon . You'll receive an email with a calendar booking and a Zoom link for the call.