It’s insufficient to just share the goals and objectives of your strategy and hope implementation will succeed. In this article, the author explains how to shift from an operational to a contextual mindset so that you can better identify the hidden obstacles that may be thwarting your strategy’s implementation so you can address them before they take root.
In 1992, Robert Kaplan and David Norton identified four barriers to effective strategy implementation: lack of understanding, lack of communication, disconnected incentives, and disconnected budgets. Over the decades, other experts have expanded on this list, identifying additional barriers including unaligned goals, insufficient resources, and inadequate performance tracking. Yet successful strategy implementation is still an ongoing struggle today. Are leaders simply not communicating well enough? Or does the intrinsic problem lie elsewhere?
