Disconnects are a big cause of strategy failure. You think you've communicated well, then find out you have—just not to your target audience. Or maybe at the end of a long research session, you realize that input from colleagues in the company's Ohio office was critical to your strategy, yet was overlooked in favor of input from more-assertive colleagues in the New York office.
There are five major disconnects that consistently trip up strategy implementation:
1. A Noninclusive Interpretation Process
Everyone should be familiar with this one. You spend lots of time doing an audit, gathering data, and refining your questioning. There's a lot at stake, and you have included and filtered and are ready to present data that you know will make the difference in getting the strategy implemented. Things look good.
But wait. You were less than inclusive in vetting the relevance and meaning of that data as perceived by the VPs in the organization. Or the strategy is budget-intensive and no one from Finance was included in your information-gathering. Maybe you purposely didn't include Jay, your mortal enemy, even though you knew he held valuable information, because you thought it might derail acceptance of the strategy.
The cost. When the right people aren't included in the decision-making process, context gets lost. Key decision-makers don't understand the situation. Impractical approaches get used. The "wrong" problem gets fixed.
Make certain you include people from the appropriate levels and business units within the organization, some who are new to the organization, and several who have been with the company long enough to know "where the bodies are buried." And be sure to include any expected naysayers.
2. Ideas That Aren't Vetted
Ideas are great except when they're not checked to ensure that they're in concert with the realities of the organization. When they aren't, the strategy is resisted at all levels, wreaks havoc, and simply doesn't work.
The cost. This kind of error results in impractical approaches to solving a problem and conflicting guidelines. And what was supposed to solve issues ends up creating issues of its own.
Reality-check your ideas. Kick them around using "What if?" scenarios. Press them to a yes or no. Make sure the departments or business units that are advocating the idea are known, as well as those that are soundly against it. This kind of checking in before moving forward will go a long way toward identifying barriers and providing information that will help you "socialize" the vetted ideas.
3. Missing Practical Steps for Strategy Support
A strategy needs support to work. When people in an organization don't understand which practical steps need to be taken to ingrain the strategy within the company culture, the strategy can fail.