You can’t manifest strategy l Cprime

Introduction

Apparently, at least according to my family’s social media feeds, the secret is simple — all you need to do is wish for something hard enough and the universe will provide it. Manifesting works on the assumption that the universe is a place of boundless abundance and that it’s listening to you. So all you need to do to get wherever you want is to ask the universe hard enough, and it will magically appear. No work, other than really hard wishing, is required. A million dollars? A better job? Easy, just wish for it and it will be yours. And if it doesn’t come, it is your fault for not wishing hard enough.

It’s easy to dismiss manifesting as another piece of new age, wishful thinking (literally) aimed at people who want stuff without putting in the effort to get it. But it’s awfully similar to the way a lot of organisations approach implementing their strategy. They form their strategy. They talk about it a lot. Just like a manifester might write down their wish 100 times before bed every night, an organisation will talk about their strategy a lot. Hundreds of PowerPoint packs are developed, meetings are held, emails are written, press releases made… and they wait for it to happen. Spoiler alert — it usually doesn’t. Strategy doesn’t just happen by talking about it, any more than a million dollars will appear just by wishing for it.

The reality of effort

If you watch videos from “successful” manifestors (I have ruined my algorithm researching this article… the internet now gives me nothing but manifesting content) they always go a bit like this—“I just manifested a great new job. I wrote down my wish 100 times before bed every day… then I went out and applied for 1000 jobs and look — I have a great new job now! ” The real secret is that you can use your wish to drive action which has a result. It’s not the wish that makes things happen. It’s the action you take as a result of the wish.

Furthermore, it’s the same with strategy. Having a strategy won’t make it happen. Talking about it won’t make it happen. All that will happen is everyone will tweak the work they are already doing to somehow attach it to the new strategy — mention the new strategic pillar in the business case, change the strategic alignment labels in the work tracking system — and carry on as before.

Strategy and action

To turn strategy into execution takes effort. You need to use your strategy to focus the efforts of the organisation on making the strategy happen. To do that, you need two things — directional guidance and financial support.

Directional guidance means that people in the organisation know what direction they need to go in to implement the strategy and what they will do to get there. Yes, talking about the strategy is part of giving directional guidance, but it’s more than that. The strategic leadership needs to communicate their strategic intent to the rest of the organisation — what direction we are going, and the rest of the organisation has to respond with their implementation intent — what we will do to get there. Strategic intent and implementation intent must line up. If the implementation intent does not match the strategic intent, the organisation will not achieve its strategy.

Aligning strategic and implementation intent

Many organisations don’t have a good mechanism for matching the two intents – strategic intent is communicated through meetings and PowerPoints, implementation intent is given through project status updates and business cases. It’s a very disjointed view of what’s going on. There is no one place leaders can go and see all the work in the organisation and how that aligns with strategy. To get that view, they would have to spend their lives attending hundreds of individual project status meetings.

Fortunately, there are techniques that can help. Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), a mechanism for organisational goal setting pioneered by Intel, Google and others, provide a very clear way to communicate strategic intent to the organisation and to match that with implementation intent. OKRs allow the organisation to align around work and strategy by communicating strategic intent downwards and allowing the organisation to communicate implementation intent upwards through the work they do that aligns to the OKR. It also gives the organisation a clear mechanism (the KRs) to measure the impact of the work being done.

The importance of a single demand view

Having a single demand view — a single place where work can be matched with capacity and its outcomes and its alignment to strategy can be seen at the right level of detail to make steering decisions¹ — is vital for an organisation to successfully execute on its strategy. All too often we see organisations with good strategic direction, but that direction gets lost in a maze of projects, steering committees and tracking spreadsheets, making it impossible to see whether progress is being made. That also means having the right tooling support. Many organisations keep their view of work in a disjointed set of spreadsheets and PowerPoint packs, which makes creating a single, coherent view almost impossible. The right choice of tooling to support the single view is vital.

The role of quarterly planning

A system like a QBR: Quarterly Business review or similar process like Quarterly Planning or Big Room planning allows organisations to come together and align regularly around strategy and execution: Have the strategic goals shifted? Do we need to change what we are working on? Is the work we have started still aligned to strategy? Is it producing the outcomes we were hoping for, or do we need to pivot?

Balancing strategic and regular work

Matching strategic and implementation intent is not easy. Balancing that implementation intent with all the work that goes on in the organisation is even harder — how does someone contribute to strategic work and run their full-time regular job as well?

This is where the strategic execution falls over for many organisations. Strategic work is thrown into an organisation that is already struggling under a more than 100% BAU workload. Although plans are made to execute on strategy, those plans quickly stall under a mountain of BAU work that can’t be stopped to make way for strategic work because it’s the work that keeps the business running.

Funding strategic work

Strategic work requires effort to execute. If you try to execute strategy on top of people’s day jobs — in their spare time, you quickly find that no one has spare time and the strategy falters. To execute on strategy, you need to invest in the strategy. That means funding strategic work. Funding the effort required to execute the strategy. The organisation needs to have the capacity to do strategy and BAU. That means additional funding for strategic work.

As part of its strategy, the organisation needs to make a decision on how much to invest in their strategy, alongside all the other priorities they are investing in. Just like any other work, the question leaders should be asking is — how big is the opportunity, and how much am I willing to invest to capture it? See our blog on Value Stream based funding².

Conclusion

Successful execution of strategy requires two things: a clear way to match strategic intent with execution intent, and the capacity available in the organisation through funding. Without those two things, strategic execution will likely not generate the results the executive were looking for.

The path to successful execution of strategy starts with the Single Demand View. Without that, the organisation is blind. A system you can’t see is a system you can’t manage. Once you have visibility, two-way communication of intent through OKRs will start to give you control. Once you have the system under control, the system can be optimised by adjusting your governing and funding models.

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