Hey Changemakers,
Ever had this happen? Your freshly ratified strategic plan sits on the shelf like a ship in a bottle. The rigging exquisite, the wood polished to a sheen. So pretty you may have forgotten it was built to sail.
Strategic planning stretches imagination. Implementation is where you and your team change your minds, and then your behavior. Those are two separate labors, and plenty of people stop after the first; they craft a beautiful plan, set it on the shelf, and keep bringing yesterday’s thinking to tomorrow’s work. (No judgment. The shelf is very convenient.)
Fear not: There are good, practiced ways to pull the cork, and set your ship to sail.
This month, we finish the Strategy Spine we’ve been aligning since July, adding the last vertebrae: the ones that turn what you imagined into what you do on a Monday morning.
Anchors and Imperatives: How You Decide, Where You Bet
So far, we’ve built the slow-moving layers: core ideology and values, envisioned future, and programs, domain, and advantage. Strategic anchors come next. I borrow the term from Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage. Your anchors are the handful of critical success factors every decision must respect. They answer one question: How do we decide? When a shiny opportunity shows up, it has to pass through the anchors.
Imperatives are the big bets: the two to four commitments that carry you toward your envisioned future. In October, we talked about giving ambition direction; imperatives are where it puts on work boots.
These five layers form your Strategic Vision Framework, the part the board ratifies. The last two vertebrae are your implementation plan, and that’s where most plans stall.
Initiatives: Where the Plan Learns to Walk
By “initiatives,” I mean a discrete scope of work that turns an imperative into something with a name, an owner, and a schedule. Notice the cascading time horizons: vision a decade out, imperatives three to five years, initiatives 12 to 18 months.
Initiatives usually stall in two places. Work gets handed to one department when it really spans three. And nobody checks whether it’s working, so enthusiasm, with no evidence to feed it, evaporates. Execution disciplines fix both.
Execution Disciplines: The Reflexes
Execution disciplines are about culture: the practices of how we behave together while we do the work. That’s why the seventh vertebra connects back to the first: your core ideology lives in these daily habits. When they’re in place, information runs along the spine all the time, and the whole system feels connected and energetic. A McKinsey webinar on transformation offered a culture practice I love: start celebrating problems. A problem raised early is information traveling the spine, right on schedule.
Three habits I’ve found helpful; the first two fix the stall points:
- Build cross-functional teams. An executive sponsor or team lead takes on an initiative and shapes its scope of work with frontline staff from every department it touches. Think of it as building new neural pathways for the organization.
- Name early wins. Pick one to three things you can finish within a quarter that tell you you’re on the right track.
- Write it all down. Record who is responsible, how the team will hold one another accountable, and when everything needs to happen. Unanswered questions will rise like bubbles in a pot. Write those down too.
Leadership sets the tone here, friends. One leadership team I worked with recently recorded how they prepared and rolled out their cascading communication after a strategy session, so other leaders could watch how they did it and learn from it. Executives modeling the behavior they hope to see sounds simple, and it is. That’s what makes it elegant. It’s also what makes it hard, because it asks leaders to be vulnerable in public. McKinsey names role modeling as one of its four building blocks of change, alongside fostering understanding and conviction, reinforcing with formal mechanisms, and developing talent and skills.
Try This: The Initiative One-Pager
Take one imperative and develop the following, on a single page:
- Initiative name and the imperative it serves
- The outcome you’re aiming for by month 12 to 18
- The project owner, plus the cross-functional team who shares the work
- The 90-day win, small and easy to notice
- The check-in rhythm, with dates on the calendar
- What you’ll need: people, skills, budget, and anything this depends on
If filling it out makes you want to start tomorrow, you’ve found a good one.
Unplug the bottle and set your plans in motion.
As we enter the season of gratitude, THANK YOU for being a loyal subscriber. We love your feedback and wish you all the greatFULLness of Thanksgiving.
Until next time,
Kimberley
