💡 Could We Dim It A Little? 💡 - Strategy Execution Visibility
“We need full visibility, insight and control across every initiative. Let’s hire someone to deliver it.” Six months later, the strategy execution leader flips the switch and the whole room reaches for the dimmer.
This one comes straight from our community. Thank you to Ethan Schwaber for sharing the story. Organizations hire a strategy execution leader because they know something is not working. They want to see what is really in flight, where the risk is and what is delivering. Then the capability comes online, the lights come on, and it turns out visibility works on everyone’s initiatives, including the ones we were hoping nobody would look at too closely.
There is no villain here. It is human. Visibility creates accountability, and accountability is uncomfortable, especially for leaders who are used to running their own priorities with a lot of autonomy. Suddenly the demand that used to travel through informal channels is on the table. The decisions that used to run on advocacy are being made on evidence. Everyone loved the idea of the lights right up until they saw their own desk.
But a capability that dims every time it shows something uncomfortable is not a capability. That is why the 10 Key Principles of Strategy Execution treat this as a leadership commitment as much as a process. Principle 1, Expose the Cost of Poor Strategy Execution, secures C-Suite commitment up front and makes clear what this capability means, including the transparency that comes with it. Principle 2, Establish an Enterprise Function to Orchestrate Strategy Execution, gives that function the mandate to see across silos. Principles 5 and 6 then keep all demand visible and the portfolio decisions objective, so the lights stay on after the novelty wears off.
The 10 Key Principles aren’t something we came up with on our own. They’re being defined in the open by the StrategyXF community, multi-disciplinary leaders and practitioners across Strategy, Operations, Finance, HR, Architecture, Transformation, PMO, Delivery, and Change Management, naming the real challenges holding organizations back and sharing what’s actually worked.
When your organization asked for visibility, did everyone realize that included their own initiatives?👇
StrategyXF Painfully Accurate Series (Sad, but True!)
This cartoon is part of Painfully Accurate, a StrategyXF series built from real Strategy Execution challenges our members have actually lived through, laughed about, and found a way past.
Every scene started as something a leader or practitioner described, not a hypothetical, an actual moment somebody in this community said out loud and everyone else in the room recognized instantly. Sad but true, every one of them, and every one of them survivable.
If any of this feels a little too familiar, you're exactly who this community was built for. Join StrategyXF and help us turn these shared war stories into the practical, personalized strategies that finally put them behind us.
