Why some leaders are so addicted to Waterfall-style strategy execution

Chances are that if you don't know which approach to strategy execution your company is using, its Waterfall.

I wish I could show you the jolting look on some leaders' faces when I speak with them about all the issues that Waterfall-style strategy execution presents. Some leaders are very attached to the old-school practice of throwing people into the pool and seeing who figures out how to swim. Unfortunately, when it comes to strategy execution, a very small percentage of people can set multiple annual goals up front and actually deliver on them by the end of the year. I would estimate this number to be less than 10%. Perhaps you can look at throwing the other 90% into the pool and leaving them to drown as a professional humanitarian crisis.

A striking number of companies stay stuck in a dysfunctional cycle of setting annual strategic plans in week 1 of the year, then spending the next 51 weeks trying to execute the plan, albiet quite poorly. During the year, several unexpected disruptions derail and make the plan obsolete or impractical rather quickly. These companies usually decline to recalibrate and create a new annual plan on the fly, instead opting to wait until the next years planning cycle to make a course correction. This leaves an entire workforce of people to continue marching right off in the wrong direction. This may just be the greatest source of waste in business today, period! It's like jumping on a plane to London, landing in God knows where a year later, patting each other on the back and handing out bonuses, and jumping on the plane to do it all over again the next year.

If this process is so dysfunctional, why is it so prevalent? Well, here are a few things I've learned:

1) It's too convenient for a leader to spend a week working on strategy, then hand it off to managers and forget about it for the next 51 weeks

2) Leaders are used to it. It is a practice that was developed during times when there was a surplus of labor and leaders could sit back and let their employees self-eliminate. There was always some hungry kid who would gladly step in to replace

3) Leaders seek to optimize their own efficiency, even at the expense everyone else in the organization. Coaching and routine iteration is too much work and requires accountability

4) It allows the leader to show their board members and stakeholders that they are doing a great job by creating this detailed annual plan (which becomes obsolete and / or completely impractical almost immediately afterward)

5) The leader prioritizes planning over execution. They see planning as their job and execution as someone else's

Agile Strategy Execution challenges this paradigm by de-emphasizing annual planning and shifting focus to real-time execution. No one can predict what will happen throughout a year's time that will disrupt a plan. As Mike Tyson put it, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Well those punches are coming faster and faster - and Mike Tyson was quite agile back in his day. The alternative approach is not to create a plan but set a goal, then iterate your way there. Each iteration teaches you and produces results in weeks instead of years. It's like a football team's offense that is running a series of plays that will hopefully get them to a touchdown. After each play, there is a huddle, review, and then run the next play. Can you imagine what would happen if the coach was never at the game? They just sent a prescribed list of plays for the team to run, regardless of what the defense was doing. It would be a disaster. Unfortunately, this is exactly how many companies are run today.

Here's a free e-learning course that provides an Introduction to Agile Strategy Execution. The credits you receive in this course count toward your ASE Certification. Check it out: https://strategycircle.impruver.com/courses/introduction-to-agile-strategy-execution/