Without a Plan, Strategy is a Fairytale

Without a Strategic Plan to turn it into reality, Strategy is wishful thinking, it is a fairytale. It does not matter if our Strategy, which we have formulated through multiple logical steps, is written on a whiteboard, or described in a slide deck, or in a Strategy Statement. It does not matter if it could be a brilliant one. Without a plan for implementing it, in a detailed, sequential, coordinated, organizationally aligned, and adaptive manner, the Strategy we have formulated remains something that cannot actually meet the reality of the changes required to be performed onto our business. At least, not with the effects intended to be produced into our business environment.

We cannot formulate a Strategy and then simply "do the Strategy"!

There is no such thing as "doing Strategy". We need a plan for turning that Strategy into reality. It is a plan that we build through an aligned, integrated Strategic Planning process. Then, we execute that plan, in a self-correcting manner, but also in an adaptive manner, changing our Strategy along plan's execution path. That is something that we do based on what the contact with reality tells us, while attempting to implement the Strategy.

So, we are talking about processes that are either ...

(a) Formulating, designing, or building the Strategy, then ...

(b) Executing, implementing, or deploying that Strategy, with adaptive feedback.

Pick the terms you like. I prefer formulating and executing. So, two different processes, (a) and (b), each requiring different types of reasoning, ways of thinking, best practice methodologies to follow, steps to take, tools to employ, and timelines to perform them.

As part of these two processes, we produce two different constructs:

(a) A Strategy to implement

(b) A Strategic Plan about how to implement the Strategy.

Without (b), simply "doing Strategy" is a typical chaos, in which various uncoordinated initiatives, performed by people who understand the Strategy in their own way, whenever they feel to be appropriate, trying to do what Strategy mandates. But the result of such attempt is mostly haywire, randomly-sequenced, unsynchronized, often incomplete and overlapping changes that may successfully and accurately translate the Strategy into reality, only if we have a ton of luck.

Why do we need a Plan?

Making a plan to change something and then executing it, going adaptively through multiple such iterations, is what we perform within the realms of Deming's cycle, the famous PDCA loop of Planning, Doing, Checking, and Acting (Adapting). This is how we change and improve a certain context over time, again and again.

But what does this have to do with Strategy? It has to do with how we turn Strategy into reality, with how we apply into our organization the changes that it mandates, in a sequenced, coordinated manner, and make it encounter the realities of our business environment, in the way that it was intended. It has to do with how we measure the progress of implementing our Strategy and with how we apply corrections along the way. It has to do with how we adapt the Strategy. Building the Strategic Plan is mostly an Abductive Reasoning process, as we have to employ assumptions and hypotheses about future causal relationships, triggered by the changes that we do during plan's execution timeframe. To find out more, read The Game Inside Strategy, an article of this newsletter series, and Reasoning Strategy.

Without planning this wisely, through a Strategic Planning process, which takes Strategy's mandates as process inputs, the attempt of simply "doing Strategy", is academic nonsens. It is like a half-baked pizza, a half-performed (or wrongly-performed) movement of our hand, following the nervous impulse coming from the brain.

That is why, without a plan, Strategy is a Fairytale and nothing more than some wishful thinking that we are unable to consistently and accurately act upon, for bringing it to life.

The Strategy Loop

There are a lot of methodologies and workflows that describe how we should perform the process of building and implementing Strategy. A more generic one is Colonel John Boyd's famous OODA loop, which goes through four stages: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. A loop within which the Orient stage has a paramount importance because it uses a reference cognitive model that the contextual observations can be interpreted against, providing the input for a quick Decide stage.

For business applications, the Act stage uses the decisions made and implements them within the organization, with intended effects upon the business environment. However, this kind of change process typically happens within the realms of the Deming PDCA loop, and this justifies the integration of the two loops, with the Act stage of OODA being replaced by a full PDCA cycle.

This is the result, with Orient stage's reference cognitive model represented by a model of the two Where-to-Play and How-to-Win choice dimensions of the Strategy and the Decide stage focused on identifying the required capabilities to support those choices and their associated strategic gaps to be closed:

Read more about the reference cognitive model of Strategy's strategic choices in the article The Balance of Strategic Choices, part of this newsletter series.

This is how the Strategy Formulation + Strategy Execution processes should be regarded, as sequential and mutually-feeding loops, which take care that Strategy is executed based on a detailed, sequential, coordinated, organizationally aligned, and adaptive Strategic Plan built upon our Strategy.

For more details on how this is done in practice, read: The Execution Premium: Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage, Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, HBR Press, 2008.

Of course, a Strategic Plan built out of thin air, or based on an approximate, incomplete, or subjective interpretation of the Strategy, is a catastrophe waiting to happen. That is why the transition from the Strategy Formulation process to the Strategy Execution process is of paramount importance for a successful Strategy. Read The Deeply Integrated Strategy article of this newsletter series, for more details.

As always, your feedback, including questions, observations or bricks, is more than welcomed.

Other?Strategy Clockwork?newsletter?articles:

The Strategic Alignment

Strategy Skunk Works

Don't Rely on a Single Strategy!

Design Thinking inside Strategy

Beyond [static] Balanced Scorecard

The Deeply Integrated Strategy

The Game inside Strategy

The Balance of Strategic Choices

The Corporate Balanced Scorecard

The Strategy Clockwork Newsletter

Enjoy!