Strategy Execution Alignment & Coordination Playbook
(a meta-framework for navigating strategic change)
Over the last few years, I have been broadening my skills by studying various strategy, design and execution frameworks and various disciplines’ “books of knowledge”.
This has included courses and texts on Enterprise Architecture (TOGAF), Business Architecture (BizBok), Data Management (DAMA DMBoK), Cyber Security (NIST), Business Process & Decision Modelling Notation (BPMN, DMN).
I’ve also picked up some useful techniques and perspectives from two courses tackling issues of complexity and uncertainty. These were Model-Based Systems Architecture & Engineering (MIT xPro) and Scenario Planning (Oxford Said Business School).
Added to the above body of knowledge is the range of recently published books at the forefront of developing tomorrow’s best practices in certain technical disciplines. O’Reilly Media is making a killing off me!
Some of my studies were necessary for the work that I was doing at the time. Others supported my longer-term interest in demystifying strategy and bridging what is often called the strategy execution gap.
However, with all this study and direct experience comes the nagging concern that we are further slipping towards a “tower of Babel” type scenario as organisational design trends call for deeper coordination between disciplines in pursuit of more responsive value creation capabilities and the elimination of waste. As these disciplines and their respective frameworks are required to work more closely together, alignment issues emerge.
I originally trained as a Civil Engineer and learned that a tall steel scaffold erected just a few degrees out of vertical alignment is significantly weakened and more at risk of collapse. The challenge with scaffolding is that as you build upwards, minor misalignments are not easy to spot without regular conscious checking, and issues compound until they become obvious or caught by later checks. However, once caught, alignment issues are difficult to rectify if you have built past the point where the initial misalignment occurred. With scaffolding, such issues are often introduced by poor alignment of the couplers, which join the horizontal and vertical poles together.
When it comes to the alignment within organisations, I have seen numerous instances over the years of vertical misalignment between a top-down strategy and how it was translated into a new product offering or transformational change program. I have also seen many horizontal coordination issues between different organisational functions, which undermined their strategy execution.
I am certainly not the first to write about this alignment concern. In the 2015 HBR article Why Strategy Execution Unravels — and What to Do About It, MIT’s Donald Sull, along with Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull, highlight the risks to strategy execution by not achieving what he terms horizontal coordination across different functions within an organisation in addition to vertical alignment issues:
“In the managers’ minds, execution equals alignment, so a failure to execute implies a breakdown in the processes to link strategy to action at every level in the organization.”
However, the research also found that:
“Fully 84% of managers say they can rely on their boss and their direct reports all or most of the time — a finding that would make Drucker proud but sheds little light on why execution fails. When we ask about commitments across functions and business units, the answer becomes clear.
Only 9% of managers say they can rely on colleagues in other functions and units all the time, and just half say they can rely on them most of the time. Commitments from these colleagues are typically not much more reliable than promises made by external partners, such as distributors and suppliers.
When managers cannot rely on colleagues in other functions and units, they compensate with a host of dysfunctional behaviours that undermine execution.
Even though, as we’ve seen, managers typically equate execution with alignment, they do recognize the importance of coordination when questioned about it directly. When asked to identify the single greatest challenge to executing their company’s strategy, 30% cite failure to coordinate across units, making that a close second to failure to align (40%).”
How many times have the strategies in your organisations that you have worked for failed or fallen short due to alignment or coordination issues?
Orchestrating Assemblies
In his 2018 book Big Mind, How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World*, author Geoff Mulgan address the issue of coordination through the orchestration of collective intelligence using what he describes as “assemblies”:
“Collective intelligence can be light, emergent, and serendipitous. But it more often has to be consciously orchestrated, supported by specialist institutions and roles, and helped by common standards.
In many fields, no one sees it as their role to make this happen, as a result of which the world acts far less intelligently than it could.” (p5)
“In our own brains, the ability to link observation, analysis, creativity, memory, judgment, and wisdom makes the whole much more than the sum of its parts. Similarly, I argue that assemblies that bring together many elements will be vital if the world is to navigate some of its biggest challenges, from health and climate change to migration.
Their role will be to orchestrate knowledge and also apply much more systematic methods to knowledge about that knowledge — including metadata, verification tools, and tags, and careful attention to how knowledge is used in practice. Such assemblies are multiplicative rather than additive: their value comes from how the elements are connected together. Unfortunately, they remain rare and often fragile.” (p5)
New fragile assemblies for Strategy & Execution
Following Geoff’s advice, I have been building a few of my own fragile assemblies, which seek to orchestrate the numerous disciplines I have studied related to strategy & execution.
One of my assemblies is designed to fill the gaps or reconcile overlaps between different strategy tools, parts of which I have written about in earlier articles.
My latest assembly, shown below, attempts to provide a “playbook” to help select, align, and coordinate appropriate tools and frameworks from various disciplines concerned with strategy, architecture, and execution.
This diagram is divided into three layers and highlights the role that the discipline of Business Architecture seeks to play in bridging the strategy execution gap.
Each layer is composed of different tools and frameworks represented by the boxes, and each layer is further divided into three to four levels within each layer. Each box will link to or align with one or more boxes within the various levels and layers of the diagram. The boxes in this version represent tools and frameworks that I often use, but you are free to change these to the tools and frameworks used in your organisation.
The main way to use this playbook is to connect the boxes with arrows in an order that makes sense to represent dependencies and information relationships between them.
The method and style used in this diagram are based on a simple systems entity-relationship type diagram. The diagram is intended to prompt you to think through the current 70+ steps listed and identify the ones relevant to your current needs.
Given what I wrote earlier in this article regarding horizontal and vertical alignment issues, the usefulness of this diagram will become apparent if you identify dependencies or relationships between boxes in various levels and layers that may not have been obvious before.
Other tips on how to use this type of diagram:
Top-down but Iterate: The layer and level diagram layout is intended to support decomposition techniques used in numerous disciplines, such as enterprise architecture and project management. Start from the top left. Work to the bottom right and iterate to find the optimal set of steps for your situation.
Skipping allowed: Review each step, but skip the ones which are not relevant to your needs.
Iterate! If you get stuck, move on to the next step. Subsequent steps often answer your unanswered questions, so iterate through the process.
Note the Notes section: Note your insights, options, decisions, and follow-up actions in the boxes at the bottom to share your thinking with others.
Develop Numerical models: The icons on the right-hand side of the page are intended to prompt you to develop numerical models to accompany your entity models as you apply the tools and frameworks represented by the boxes. Add spreadsheet names or sheet numbers in these boxes to provide a link to them.
Fragile or Flawed?
So, do you see value in this fragile new assembly? Do you see its potential usefulness? What resonates, and what breaks? Below is a version without lines between boxes for you to scribble on.
Does it lead to a tangle of intertwined lines as you try and connect the boxes as you try to create your transformation playbook, or like a child’s “follow the string” maze on a page, does it help you identify the path that you need to take to design and execute your strategy?
Normally I would spend more time refining this sort of diagram before publishing, but as someone reminded me last week, “perfection is the enemy of good”, and Geoff Mulgan promotes the view that we need to experiment with fragile new assemblies if we are to collectively change our world.
Book Reference:
*Mulgan, Geoff. Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World, Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition. 03/2024.
