Strategy and The Challenge of Implementing Change
Posted by Oliver Nyumbu
November 16th, 2008
Studies have found that less than 10 percent of effectively formulated strategies carry through to successful implementation. Some 90 percent of companies consistently fail to execute strategies effectively. One key to effective strategy execution is the fact that it results from executing the right set of strategic projects/work streams in the right way. These numbers seem to chime with the experience and research of change expert John Kotter.
Referring to his work for the book Leading Change, Kotter explains:
“That book was based on the analysis of about one hundred efforts in organisations to produce large scale change: implementing new growth strategies, putting in new IT systems, reorganising to reduce expenses. Incredibly, we found that in over 70 percent of the situations where substantial changes were clearly needed, either they:
- were not fully launched, or
- the change efforts failed, or
- changes were achieved but over budget, late, and with great frustration
We also found that in about 10 percent of the cases, people achieved more than would have been thought possible. Surprisingly, at least to us, in those 10 percent a similar formula was used in virtually all instances”
Sound familiar? What has been your experience?
Tags: Change, growth, john+kotter, strategy
November 28th, 2008 at 11:12 am
I have found that one of the major flaws in strategy development is that the starting point is often too obscure and unfocused on the particular change that would make the difference and that is required to deliver the rest of the strategy. Public authorities suffer from a particular interface with political imperatives that makes for incongruity throughout the development process. The major flaw here is what i term the ‘the principle of serving too many masters’. Political members want to be elected so they don’t support the strategy that could be unpopular though very good chance of effecting the sort of changes that is required to produce the outcome they seek. Officers, senior officers in particular, are afraid to take the sorts of risks that is often required to bring about effective change (all change brings with it risks). So they ‘play’ safe and have discourse about being ‘risk avert…challenging and robust systems, policies and procedures’ much of which usually means procrastination, waiting for the political wind/temperature to change. The workforce, having been through so many ‘poorly managed changes’, become hardened and sceptical of the efficacy of any such change process. The strategy, often, then gets lost; the vision even more obscure and the delivery having less impact where it is most needed. Finally, strategies too often change before the previous approach has had time to bed down, to see if indeed it is working….the some short time scale for ‘making it happen’ often leads to rash decision making and fail to take people with the changes. First and fundamental mistake in strategy delivery…. it is my view that ‘people make systems work and not systems make people work’.