Conceiving and Executing Strategy

The Harvard Business Review recently featured a 'Spotlight on Strategy' and one of the contributions (Bringing Science to The Art of Strategy) came from A.G. Lafley, reflecting his experience as Chief Executive of Proctor and Gamble

Strategic planners pride themselves on their rigor. Strategies are supposed to be driven by numbers and extensive analysis and uncontaminated by bias, judgement or opinion. The larger the spreadsheets, the more confident an organisation is it's process. All those numbers, all those analyses, feel scientific, and in the modern world, "scientific" equals "good". 
Yet of that's the case, why to the operations managers in most large and midsize firms dread the annual strategic planning ritual? Why does it consume so much time and have so little impact on company actions? Talk to those managers, and you will most likely uncover a deeper frustration; the sense that strategic planning does not produce novel strategies. Indeed, it perpetuates the status quo. 

To overcome this scenario Lafley (and his collaborating authors) propose a series of steps which allows teams to combine creativity and scientific rigor in generating novel strategies and pinpointing the one most likely to succeed. 

While FranklinCovey is not a 'strategic consulting firm' (ie our capability is not in helping organisations to develop strategy), reviewing the 7 step process proposed, it is clear how the experience we do have fits specifically at the start of the process and then also at the end of the process

1. Frame a choice - Here Lafley advocates a 'possibilities based approach' which involves strategists defining mutually exclusive options that could resolve the issues in question, thus framing the problem as a choice. What the article doesn't specific (however) is creating the conditions that allow these options to be defined in the most effective way. Here, thinking from FranklinCovey's '3rd Alternative' curriculum can be specifically helpful in allowing teams to gather and refine the widest range of perspectives into a series of choices which go beyond traditional thinking or 'business as usual', thus creating an effective platform for the steps that follow.
2. Generate Possibilities 
3. Specify Conditions
4. Identify Barriers 
5. Design Tests
6. Conduct The Tests
7. Make Your Choice - The scope of the article finishes at the point of the strategy group reviewing the analytical test results and choosing the possibilities that face the fewest serious barriers. We know from our experience, however, that this is just the start of the organisation maximising value from the strategy it selects. Where this value is derived is from the successful execution of the strategy, and this is where FranklinCovey has specific capability. In particular, our expertise is in the behavioural change elements of strategy execution, where an organisation (large or small) wants people at the front line to have total clarity on a small number of strategic priorities, to know what they mean for them in their role and to be doing things on a daily / weekly basis that contribute to the organisation collectively executing on (and realising value from) the strategic choices it has made.