Perspective
Leaders face difficult decisions about how they focus their resources. Operating budgets are designed to commit resources to stakeholder priorities from earlier in the year. Organizations are built to fulfill those commitments with the totality of their allocated resources, which restricts its flexibility to address situations that may arise mid-cycle.
Maintaining the flexibility to create and respond successfully to opportunities is more accessible than one might realize. The conditions can be created and maintained in which an organization can be adapted to meet new challenges – shifting people, processes and technology – without hurting business as usual and the bottom line. Both innovation and business-as-usual could be more effective as well as safer, encouraging leaders to experiment, take chances and seize emergent opportunities to contribute to growth.
To achieve this organizational agility, we advise an operational strategy. An operational strategy is not just what you are going to achieve; its how you are going to achieve it – specifically. For every strategy, there is a a set of objectives that must be achieved by the organization. And those objectives will be realized through deliberate and concerted actions performed by the implementation team. Operational strategy is at a minimum the who what how and when of Strategy Execution. Its the action plan ready to be put into motion.
We believe it can be something more as well.
When enriched with with a broad understanding of an organization’s composition and capabilities, an operational strategy provide a holistic, unified and balanced framework for deciding how to allocate and realign resources – when you need to in order to seize on mid-cycle opportunities without destabilizing business as usual or compromising on current investments
This competitive advantage requires more than domain expertise and more than industry experience. It requires a deep and lasting commitment to understanding people – how they work, how they relate to their work and the people with whom they work – and how they are incentivized and disincentivized. It requires constantly identifying and cultivating the social conditions and the traits in people that encourage desirable thinking, speaking and behaviors throughout your organization as a matter of course rather than the exception. It requires an appreciation for the value of agency among stakeholders, and how to instill it in people so they strive to win for all of us.
When viewed through this perspective, an operational strategy should kindle a virtuous cycle of positive reinforcement and continuous improvement. This is foresight derived from the wisdom of hindsight – not all of it earned directly though lesson learned and shared just the same – which if applied in practice, we believe creates a formidable competitive advantage.
An operational strategy done our way endows the security of predictability while affording the flexibility of alternatives – to inform those big decisions when new opportunities present themselves, clearing the way for you to bring it all together.