Every large organization has experienced the perennial gap between strategy and execution.
Generating a great idea is (comparatively) easy. Developing an articulated strategy is hard work – but companies are great at it. But, for most large companies, reliable and effective implementation – and a realisation of the planned benefits almost never happens.
Organizations and their leaders have great plans, but the outcomes consistently fail to be delivered at the scale that the dream implied.
Improved practices for understanding the certainty of achieving the anticipated value from your efforts is a core component of better practice. There are disciplines such as “Governance of benefits realisation” and others that can be integrated within the a broader suite of organisational value creation practices – and future value accounting techniques – to help make sure that more of our efforts are being put into activities that will deliver the outcomes we want… and the outcome we need.
The latest research means that we can now start to measure our capacity – our reliability of being able to create value from strategy.
Where a financial audit tells us whether our accounting information is reliable or not, the Value Creation Maturity Assessment tells us how reliable our future oriented, multi-bottom line accounting for value creation is. Are we able to develop, maintain and comprehensively apply evidence of a quality sufficient to support the decisions we need to be making.
These assessments tell us that, if we have predicted the project is going to deliver a fantastic outcome, should we believe it? How strongly should we believe it? What is the chance that it is actually going to happen, and actually going to deliver the outcome we wanted.
An enhanced stream of “evidence” can help us make better decisions – every day. To not over invest in unproven ideas. To not underinvest in experimentation. To replan if the original plan has run into difficulties, or to invest in finding new ideas if none of our projects are taking us where we want to go.
Being strategically agile using better quality foresight – understanding the likely outcome of your committed actions based on everything you know and have learned to date – doesn’t mean every strategy will succeed. It means your strategies are reconsidered and tuned where and whenever its needed. But it does mean that your collective organisation-wide efforts are always focused on strategies that are deemed most likely to achieve your chosen objectives.
New practice closes the gap between strategy and execution, lifting your capability for both, to deliver real value to your organization’s future success.