Connecting strategy and decision making

If a strategy exists, but people don’t use it to make decisions, does it really exist? An existential question? Perhaps, but it is also an important one when thinking about the ROI of investing in a ‘strategy refresh’, or creating a strategy for an organization. The biggest complaint I hear from clients about strategy is that a lot of time and effort (and money) goes into creating it, and it ends up on a shelf somewhere. The people involved in creating it ‘get it’, but they fail to communicate, to role-model, or to apply it. The people who weren’t involved get un-contextualized communications that they can’t hope to apply in a meaningful way.

You need to spend at least as much time helping people understand how to apply a strategy as you do developing it. In today’s VUCA environment of continual change, turnover, market fluctuations, and information moving at warp speed, you can’t afford to have only a few people in the organization who use the strategy to make decisions.

Here’s a presentation I gave recently on the importance of ‘engaged strategy’ – it talks about how to create a different type of strategy that people throughout the organization can use to effectively make decisions:  ODF Presentation vf

 

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