When it comes to growing businesses we've written before about the importance of prioritisation and converting ideas into action. Without that you could focus on the wrong things or even worse conduct the deadly sin of having that strategic plan sitting on a shelf without driving its implementation. So why do so many businesses stall at the doing phase of strategy and how could we overcome this?
Growth is generally hard, if it was easy to push up revenues there wouldn't be so many failed businesses or lay-offs in the world. To grow requires a good idea, enough resources to make it happen and perhaps most importantly the desire of those responsible to push through hurdles and make it happen. A lack of clarity, focus, leadership, poor teamwork and a host of other reasons can scupper those plans. It's the responsibility of those that devise a strategy to do their best to set it up growth initiatives for the best chance of success. Based on GrowThink's experience here are a few strategy implentation problems and some potential solutions for them.
Having a strategic plan for the sake of the plan only – Surprising how many companies are asked for a plan but just go through the motions
Make the time and commit to doing your planning properly
If you don’t have the skills in-house consider using a facilitator
Don’t do your plan and let it sit on a shelf, ensure your strategy has an action plan behind it with clear, measurable objectives and accountable people assigned
Doing strategy in a vacuum – Your strategy is destined to failure if you haven’t considered market drivers, competitor reaction and other external factors
Tools such as Porter’s 5 Forces, SWOT analysis and the PESTEL framework are tried and trusted here
A process like Quadrangulation™ does all this and more – it’s one of the most comprehensive best ways of capturing external factors vital to informing strategy
Even though strategy shouldn’t be changed every 5 mins we need to be pragmatic and if circumstances change the strategy should flex
Getting lost in the forest of ideas – Coming up with lots of growth ideas and either picking the wrong focus areas or diluting yourself across too many
Use a prioritisation process to select your best ideas (a matrix of benefit against ease of implementation is the easiest way to do this). Fewer and focused in always better
Screen these based on what’s possible with resource available
Again an external facilitator can help take the heat out of this process
Not achieving buy-in to strategy – As opposed to just plain unwillingness (see below), this problem area is more involved with someone not believing in the strategy itself
Get the right people involved early
Over communicate your ideas across the organisation – many people find a strategy storyboard a useful way to achieve this
Sharing your prioritisation will help people see their growth idea hasn’t necessarily been dropped, it's because something else will provide a quicker or better return
Where possible make sure your strategy has fit with your company culture
Unwillingness to embrace change – This is a biggie, whole books are written on this, but a few ideas are provided below. A short article at HBR is also worth reading
Demonstrate why the status quo will lead to problems
Communicate strategy effectively focusing on one or two areas to keep it simple and paint a vivid picture that everyone can get emotionally involved in
Carrot and stick – reward good behaviours in line with change, penalise bad
Communicate successes – sometimes called the flywheel effect, i.e. you gain momentum as you demonstrate changes bringing improvement
Ensure alignment and consistency on the strategy from the most senior levels down
Under resourcing your growth ideas – Without the right people, funding and infrastructure to make strategy happen it will slow down or stall completely
A simple gap analysis to assess where your organisation is now compared to end state can summarise the new resources that need to be added
Ensure when allocating resources you’ve accounted for business as usual and/or created dedicated teams to the new strategic initiatives
Loss of momentum – Drive to make a change dies out due to lack of tenacity, lack of support or a whole host of other reasons. Some companies have a culture that’s not conducive to getting new things done and I can recommend this INSEAD article
Not all growth goes smoothly. Have risks and mitigations been thought through as part of your strategy? Scenario planning, ie. “If this happens we’ll adjust to this” can be a useful tool
A third party or internal resource should track progress, measurement against plan and help keep everyone on track
Driving growth is hard so it has to be rewarded – incentives (monetary or otherwise) are often helpful
The above list isn't exhaustive but covers some of the most common issues we've seen. We'd be happy to learn from your experience in the comments section below. What you will see are recurring themes like communication, prioritisation etc. - these are some of the most vital to get any strategy moving. We'll go into these in more detail in upcoming blogs.
In the meantime if you're still struggling or just fancy a chat about the particular implementation challenges you’re facing then we'd be happy to help. Sometimes all it takes it a fresh perspective to help you see things more clearly and get past some of the hurdles all businesses face. Be the king (or queen) of strategic implementation and make your growth ideas happen - call GrowThink on +44 (0)7770 325 252!