Why Strategy Without Implementation Is Just Decoration
There's a graveyard of beautiful strategies that never changed anything: the presentations were polished, the consultants were sharp, and the leadership team left the offsite energized. Yet, six months later, almost nothing was different. The problem wasn't the strategy, it was that nobody built the operational infrastructure to run it.
Most implementation failures aren’t failures of will or intelligence, but rather a failure of infrastructure. Sometimes a new software is added before the process behind it is figured out, different teams are simply looking at different reports to drive their decisions, or the strategy just hasn’t been aligned with the reality on the ground. Understanding where you are right now, and where you want to be are enormous leaps forward, but the actual implementation of that transformation can be challenging without the right tools.
What do I mean by “Implementation Tools”? As I’ve mentioned before, the consulting industry is filled with a variety of terms that are used inconsistently and interchangeably, the following is my definition of implementation tools, and should not be considered a universal standard. With that out of the way, “Implementation Tools” in this context cover a versatile array of tools that help engage personnel in the correct process. I would consider these tools at the juncture of an execution plan and a change management plan, such as:
SOPs that translate a process on paper into a repeatable action that can be quickly trained on
Dashboard that surface the right information at the right time to the right people
Workflows that route work through the right people in the right sequence
Templates that reduce the decision load and improves information accuracy
Training materials that make onboarding simple and the new way of working learnable
Diagnosis and design are intellectually interesting, while implementation requires a lot of time and effort. This is why, unfortunately, a lot of incredibly competent consultants prefer to keep their engagements scoped to deliver a plan, not necessarily to build the infrastructure. Clients tend to accept this because the plan feels like the deliverable they wanted, and getting a consultant to build the infrastructure can also be cost prohibitive; for these reasons, this step often gets pushed to internal teams. But, the tools are where the strategy becomes habit, and habits are what actually change implementation outcomes. Internal teams are sometimes able to handle this, in which case the implementation is often successful. However, in order to balance cost and effectiveness, I’ve found that having a rough outline of the desired tools be created by the consultant, as well as having regular check-ins with the internal team to determine where the tools need tweaks or where there is a gap in the implementation, can be incredibly useful.
The gap between strategy and implementation often leads to situations where the team reverts to old behaviors because they either don’t understand the new behaviors, or find that the new behaviors aren’t supported by their SOPs, dashboards, workflows, templates, or training materials. The future state design ends up sitting in a pitch deck collecting dust while in reality the current state continues to run. Leadership ends up getting frustrated and concludes that “the strategy didn’t work”, when really implementation never happened. This can lead to knock-on effects, like avoiding similar strategies or proactive analysis of the organization because of the bad taste that leadership is left with after the experience.
Closing that gap is challenging, but when successful, the impact is clear and the symptoms are very easily recognizable. New processes are documented in a way that makes them understandable and executable; the metrics that matter are visible to the people who influence them and help drive timely decisions; new team members can onboard into the new way of working, not the old one; and, most importantly, the consultant can walk away and the system keeps running on its own.
— Basile
