Fire when ready, but don’t shoot blind
Finally, decisions need to be embodied in plans. These plans serve as the bones of agreement for the structure of strategy execution. They at once strengthen and reinform sense making and decision making activities, as they surface new complexity that needs to be accounted for and provide operational clarity where only conceptual clarity might have existed before.
Iterative planning implies iterative sense making and decision making, too.
Plan making activities rely on an organization’s known and accepted disciplines. Every organization has its own way of making plans, but a few principles apply to all disciplines:
- Plans require accountability
Plans are essentially mechanisms by which groups form an agreement. The activity of reaching agreement is valuable for building conceptual and operational clarity, but it is insufficient to drive execution. For that, clear accountability mechanisms are required.
Leaders benefit from seeing plans formulate because they aid managerial oversight. It should be easy when reviewing a plan to see what is on track, and what is not. But leaders — beyond the CEO — must model this type of accountability in their daily work. They must sign up for accountability as well, typically in the role of sponsors of key parts of the strategy execution plan.
- Changes to plans should occur, but they must be explicit and agreed
It is now common wisdom that plans should be iterative. Plan making is not a one-off activity but rather a cyclical activity which integrates the latest business intelligence. It can be easy however for operations to ‘unspool’ the sense making and decision making which has been done. Iterative planning implies iterative sense making and decision making, too.
For example, a large University looks at trends in consumer media and seeks to digitalize the delivery of their education. This entails the large scale creation and distribution of educational content through novel channels. In making the plan to execute, the program team discovers that digital education carries a deep seated stigma of lesser quality with their employees. Alterations to the plan need to be made, and these may be major. However, if the changes to the plan are not managed with explicit dialog and new agreements, the plan loses momentum, decisions lose their binding power, and the shared understanding erodes and crumbles.
- Planning should include culture and organizational change
Plans need accountability and discipline to become effective parts of your strategy execution approach. However, organizations have different levels of comfort with the level of scrutiny that accountability demands. The level of accountability needed to benefit from plan making might not exist in the organization as it stands. For that reason, to be effective, planning should always include culture and organizational change as an overlay.