Your strategy didn’t fail. Your execution did.
Why change management makes or breaks forward progress
By Greg Kohn, CEO
“But we tried that before and it didn’t work.”
It’s remarkable how often I hear that from clients during business strategy sessions. More often than not, the plan wasn’t wrong. It was the execution that failed. I've seen this challenge repeatedly across the many organizations we engage with – technology consortia, standards organizations, associations, and other membership-based groups.
It’s why I believe so deeply that the key to any successful new strategic endeavor is highly effective change management: the ever-critical work of converting plans into action.
Change management entails pushing through inertia, friction, and countless other obstacles to make necessary forward progress.
Not surprisingly, the implications of failed execution are significant. Often it causes groups to mistakenly believe their strategy was wrong, so they pivot and “course correct.” What happens then is they lurch themselves into a new and incorrect forward direction. Ironically, these secondary efforts usually also stall due to failure to execute.
It’s not a big leap to imagine how this cycle can become something of a death spiral for organizations.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. When a new plan struggles to take root, the critical first step is to closely review the execution process. Were roles and responsibilities clear? Were the right resources mobilized? Was enough communication delivered to support the change? Was there genuine alignment and buy-in? And was there enough time for the plan to take hold before changing course?
In other words, before tearing up a brand-new strategy, start by vigorously reviewing the change management work. My experience is that boards of directors and organizational leaders are often smartly tuned in to what needs to happen to position their organizations for success. They should trust themselves. But they should also know where to look and what to do when they struggle to make progress on a new path.
There is no sugar coating it: change management is often very difficult. But it’s also the bridge from where an organization is now to where it goes next.