BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER
This is perhaps the most difficult step in the playbook, and many business articles are written on the myths of implementation of strategy and execution failures (1, 2). Exhibit 4 visualizes the operational cadences based on concepts from Hoshin Kanri (3), modified for software companies implementing agile development practices: 1) 3-5 year strategy, 2) yearly operating plan, 3) quarterly goals and roadmaps, 4) monthly report-outs, and 5) bi-weekly demos and retrospectives to practice continual improvement.
Operational cadences at 3-5 year, 1-year, quarterly, monthly, and bi-weekly time horizons.
I especially appreciate the work of Sull, Homkes, & Sull (2015) on this topic as it highlights an opportunity to combine the approaches practiced in design (collaborative ideation and execution), leadership (individual behaviors), and organizational design (team behaviors) at the top levels of business management and across the entire firm.
Design Thinking
Beyond the buzzwords and hype, the point of design thinking is that the approach is methodological, scientific, and collaborative. Design thinking proposes understanding our assumptions, conducting research to uncover new or refute current hypotheses, deriving insights, ideating concepts, and creating prototypes and strategies for evaluating ideas (4). In the field of design, we bring teams together to uncover these assumptions and insights, conduct research, design concepts, and test them through prototypes. We work with product and engineering or service development partners to create a vision, and continuously refine our ideas, throwing out what does not work and adding only where necessary. In 101 Design Methods: A Structured Approach for Driving Innovation in Your Organization, Kumar provides a breadth of methodological approaches to innovation, market sensing, and ideation, all of which are conducted as workshops with cross-functional peers (5).
I approach strategic, operational, and execution planning from the designer’s perspective: as a facilitator of the generation of the best ideas, rather than the sole proprietor of strategy and direction. With the information from phases 2 and 3, a team can come together to generate ideas, formulate hypotheses, and establish a clear vision and strategy for the firm.
Leadership Practices
In my experience, the design thinking approach models to others how I expect them to behave, establishes a shared vision with the team, enables them to act with the same information shared across the individuals, provides opportunities to challenge the process, and gives rise to opportunities to encourage and celebrate learning. These also happen to be the top five leadership behaviors identified by Kouzes & Posner in their research for the book Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations (2012) (6). Effective leaders don’t try to do everything on their own, and according to Kouzes & Posner, employee engagement is correlated strongly to these five leadership behaviors. But for a leader to be effective, they need a strong team that is focused on results.
Organizational Design
Design thinking approaches and effective leadership are only as good as the teams we are leading. The final piece of enabling people to execute a strategy is ensuring they are effective teams. In Five Dysfunctions of a Team (2006) (7), Lencioni identifies five elements of teamwork that lead to a results-oriented organization. First, the team must have established enough trust to admit to errors and weaknesses. This important step establishes the vulnerability needed to enable critical debate. Like any good movie, conflict is the driver of progress. Trusting each other enables us to have healthy conflict around process and approach and avoid the distraction and political maneuvering of interpersonal conflict. For strategy and execution, conflict arises when we differ on our understanding of the data and are vulnerable enough to bring our perspective to the table without fear of reprisal.
Healthy conflict leads to commitment. A team that feels they have been heard and participated in decision-making is more likely to commit to a goal than a team that is told what to do without a voice. A committed team can then hold each other accountable, both to team norms and team goals. A team that feels they have been heard raises fewer show-stopping questions along the way, is more confident in their understanding, and can make decisions in the face of uncertainty because they have the information needed to make a call and know that if they make a mistake, the team will celebrate learning, adjust course, and move on.
Finally, a team that trusts each other, has healthy conflict, is committed, and holds each other accountable, can focus on results. These are what we think of as high-performing teams. A mistake I have made along the way is focusing on results without first taking a team through the stages of team development. Another mistake is forgetting that every time the team changes, someone new joins, or someone leaves, we need to reset, rebuild trust, and enable conflict and commitment.
CONCLUSION
There is no silver bullet for effective teams, organizations, firms, or strategies. This playbook combines my experience with psychological science, leadership, design, and strategy to provide a methodological, scientific approach to strategic analysis and organizational leadership. The nuances of individuals, teams, cultures, and environments create uncertainty, and the key principle of design is to draw upon uncertainty to inspire insights, concepts, and strategies through a scientific approach to establish a shared vision and enable others to act.
SECTIONS IN THIS CHAPTER
Phase 4: From theory to practice
REFERENCES
Sull, D., Homkes, R., & Sull, C. (2015). Why strategy execution unravels—and what to do about it. Harvard Business Review, 93(3), 57-66.
Kaplan, S., & Beinhocker, E. D. (2003). The real value of strategic planning. MIT Sloan Management Review, 44(2), 71.
Zairi, M., & Erskine, A. (2011). Excellence is Born out of Effective Strategic Deployment: The Impact of Hoshin Planning,". International Journal of Applied Strategic Management, 2(2), 1-28.
Blevis, E., & Siegel, M. (2005). The explanation for design explanations. In 11th international conference on human-computer interaction: Interaction design education and research: Current and future trends.
Kumar, V. (2012). 101 design methods: A structured approach for driving innovation in your organization. John Wiley & Sons.
Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2012). The leadership challenge: How to make extraordinary things happen in organizations. Panarchy, the collapse of the Canadian health care system, 124.
Lencioni, P. (2006). The five dysfunctions of a team. John Wiley & Sons.