One of the questions being asked about our book Agile Strategy Execution: Revolutionizing the HOW!, is a desire to better understand what it is about the Agile Strategy Execution Framework (ASEF) that makes it agile. As mentioned in previous posts, I have defined Agile Strategy Execution to mean “translating strategy into a reality that is aligned, accountable and responsive.”
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• RESPONSIVE REALITY is an organizational or team environment where the corporate culture and organizational governance processes support ongoing adaptation and realignment to evolving and changing internal and external landscapes.

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​In other words, Agile Strategy Execution delivers timely value in an aligned, accountable and responsive way that contributes to the achievement of identified goals or business outcomes. These include growing revenue, improving margins enabling more effective internal efficiency and effectiveness, strengthening customer or partner Net Promoter Scores/satisfaction/loyalty, reducing risk or driving competitive advantage.
 
As everyone who has any connection to software development knows, this idea of enabling execution agility is not exactly new. For the last 15+ years the Agile Manifesto has been a key driver behind enabling a software development process that is more responsive to change.  In other words, systems/IT departments are better aligned and responsive and accountable to business user needs as they evolve, or in some cases transform, in response to market and customer landscape changes.
 
So as to make strategy execution agile, we have integrated a number of important ‘Agile Concepts with Strategic Planning ‘Best Practices’ and created a set of strategy execution themes that value:

• Individuals and collaboration especially cross-functional and even multi-enterprise interconnectivity (i.e with customers, suppliers, partners, and Alliances.)
• Self-organizing, self-managing and sustainable teams that are focused on projects, programs, Run-the-Business activities & process improvement work efforts (i.e. managing from middle rather than top-down.
• Continuous delivery or incremental improvements based on knowledge transfer, a learning culture and a bias for action. (i.e actionable intelligence)
• Results and the ability to drive course corrections when results deviate from expected tolerances. (i.e. metrics, targets and agreed upon variance thresholds)
• Real-time innovation in the way organizations respond, adjust, test, evolve and change with Scrum as a mechanism for getting things done quickly.
• Transparency and a single-source-of-truth for all information seeded from disparate data sources and applications.
• Backlog as a place to capture areas of needed work, execution alternatives or user stories outside the immediate need with sophisticated processes to re-prioritize the ‘backlog’ as needs change.  

​​These strategy execution themes provide the underlying philosophical foundation for the Agile Strategy Execution Framework Dimensions and Influencing Factors and are fundamental to organizational evolution up the Agile Strategy Execution Maturity Curve.

As most leaders and strategy practitioners know, strategy execution efforts for the last 20+ years have, on average, not been all that successful. The research statistics are everywhere.  In the 1980s business reengineering was thought to be the answer and yet on average 70% of those initiatives apparently failed. Twenty years later, with change management all the rage, a 2006 global study of 1,500 executives indicated that 62% of change initiatives failed to create the desired performance results.  In 2013, a PMI-The Economist sponsored research effort showed that for 61% respondents, their biggest challenge was in “bridging the gap between strategy formulation and its day-to-day implementation.”   
n April 2015, Harvard professors Stull, Homkes and Stull, based on research involving 400+ global CEO’s, provided insight into why strategy execution unravels by identifying and debunking “five of the most pernicious myths and replacing them with more accurate perspectives”.  These included:

• Myth #1 Execution equals Alignment: Though top-down alignment and cascading of goals is important, more than 50% of managers want more structured processes for coordinating activities across units.
• Myth #2 Execution Means Sticking to the Plan: Managers are craving more fluid mechanisms to reallocate funds, people and attention as circumstances change, within a specific set of strategic boundaries.
• Myth #3: Communications Equals Understanding: Sending out a large number of communications doesn’t necessarily enable clear understanding. A core set of key messages on how a firm’s strategy, priorities and initiatives all fit together to drive achievement of a specific set of goals are critical and must be communicated throughout the organization, not just to the leadership team.
• Myth #4: A Performance Culture Drives Execution: The internal public and private cultures must be aligned and care about agility, teamwork, and ambition, and be willing to innovate and support experimental failures.
• Myth #5: Execution should be Driven Top-Down: Effective execution needs to be driven from the middle and guided from the top. In other words, executives should enable more structured processes to facilitate coordination and model teamwork.

What is interesting is that the ways that they recommend debunking these myths are all key attributes of organizations executing strategy with agility. In other words these are core cultural values of organizations committed to alignment, accountability and responsiveness based on the use of actionable intelligence. In specific this means leaders should be focusing on driving:

• More structured processes i.e. workflow simplification, standardization and optimization.
  
• More fluid mechanisms to respond as circumstances change.
  
• Strategic messages that are clear that link strategy, Run-the-Business priorities and initiatives.
  
• Public and private culture alignment.
  
• Effective governance from the middle, whilst being guided from the top.
  

​​Leaders of most firms today are painfully aware of how difficult it is to execute strategies effectively in their organizations.  Industry research has well documented this reality, with the needle barely moving over the past 20 years.  Adding to these woes are continued drop-off in employee engagement scores, a unique set of work life expectations from those early in career and even more challenges in executing needed business, operating model and culture changes. After years facilitating the strategic planning process, digitizing strategic initiative execution planning at the portfolio level, and driving metrics variance-based organization performance management systems, I’ve come to the conclusion that no matter what lens is used, current governance and decision making processes must become more agile. To do so leaders need to focus on achieving better organizational alignment, accountability and responsiveness.  For those unaware:

• ALIGNED means that all components of strategy (goals and objectives, strategic priorities, and initiative investment portfolios) are linked and coordinated.
• ACCOUNTABLE, means that all employees involved are committed with direct and visible line of sight to goals and strategy. They can see clearly the interconnectedness as well as their role and value contribution.
• RESPONSIVE means that there is in place a culture and governance process that supports ongoing adaptation and realignment to evolving or changing internal and external landscapes.

 
So how does a leader we make strategy execution more aligned, accountable and responsive i.e. agile? Based on customer experiences both large and small, Agile Strategy Execution co-author Alan Leeds and I, have built a revolutionary approach that we are calling the Agile Strategy Execution Framework. It integrates the strengths of agile concepts with strategy execution Best Practices, resulting in an easy to use set of principles and techniques that are organized in a meaningful, practical and quickly deployable way.  Note that the ASE Framework assumes that there is already in place a strategic plan with goals and strategies that are S.M.A.R.T. not just aspirational. (i.e. are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. )

Our ASE Framework™ is composed of six Dimensions, which are summarized as follows:

1. Building detailed execution plans that include projects, programs, and Run-the-Business (RTB) tactics. Each also needs defined metrics including baselines, targets and variance boundary conditions. 
2. Establishing a process or enabling in a software platform, mechanisms that align and link all of these plan elements directly to the strategies and the goals. It’s amazing what a difference it makes being able to see the specific projects that are expected to deliver the strategy and achieve the goal. 
3. Driving real-time updates, preferably weekly, which is only really possible with digitization. These updates must involve both self and team assessments of progress with transparency and visibility to all. 
4. Engaging leaders and executive sponsors in real-time collaboration, or Cadence Decisions to assess the broader roadmap relative to actual performance metrics and deliberate strategies identified.
5. Making available pools of investment funding, to enable Innovation Bets, that can quickly be used to speed up some aspect of a project or program, or to respond quickly to a new market dynamic or a specific customer hot issue. Next is Innovation Bets,
6. Refreshing quarterly the core business assumptions and transforming strategies as needed to respond to changes in customer or market landscapes.

In addition are two enabling or disabling Influencing Factors:
The Culture Influencing Factor involves assessing formal vs. informal, and preached vs. practiced corporate culture. Leaders can then either use their culture as an enabling driver for managing change or if needed initiate processes to drive needed culture change.
 
Second is an Influencing Factor, Connected Governance,™ involves connecting leadership practices, employee engagement mechanisms and collaboration processes using leading edge digitization experiences to provide actionable intelligence.

This Agile Strategy Execution framework enables organizations to deliver timely value in an aligned, accountable and responsive way that contributes to the achievement of business outcomes because:

• It is inclusive and can be used with all strategy ‘Best Practices’ tools and techniques in place in organizations today.
•  It is strict in intent, yet flexible in delivery style.
• Success can be measured, showing before and after results.
• Each dimension can be worked separately or together, in whatever order is best for the organization.