Get the talent on implementation, not strategy

Strategy. One of the most sickeningly over-used words in business and organisational life. And I think this is because it sounds grand and important, and so, of course, this is where many people want to work.

Very often what is meant is a ‘high-level’ plan. And, even there, again, another example: ‘High-level’ is a posh throw draped over the skeleton of what is often an under-cooked, under-considered plan. But it sounds grander than that.

Sometimes what we mean is the ‘general approach’. Yeah, ‘strategy’ still sounds better, doesn’t it?

Used in a special way in business ‘strategy’ means the selected configuration of available choices adopted to compete: Which products, which markets, which positioning. But more often the term is used in a far looser way to mean the general, high-level approach.

We have other very decent words we could use: plan, method, approach, for example. Good, ordinary words. And we have other rather precious, vogue words besides strategy too: roadmap, pathway, for instance. Words that seem to promise more than the ordinary.

I’ve seen some stunningly impressive analyses and their attendant strategies for business – enough to know that, done well, this is a high-skill area to work in. Done properly, strategy is hard work. The problem is that there’s always the possibility of just dressing up something very vague and presenting it as a strategy, without that work. The two look the same on the surface, but one is backed up with analysis and creative thought, the other is just skim.

Strategies are developed by the few for the many to implement. Implementation (execution, delivery etc. – this side of the house has its own fair share of showing language too) of strategy is far more consistently, far harder, and on a far bigger scale. And you can’t avoid the detail.

So it’s really no surprise that many people – in consulting and management – would prefer to work in strategy rather than implementation. It has C-suite exposure. It has pure intellectual appeal. You don’t get your hands dirty in the detail and hard work of implementation. If it comes off, it was the great strategy; if it fails, that was poor implementation – the fallacy of initial conditions: the idea that if we get the starting point right success is assured and therefore any failure was somewhere down the line (which is a half-truth).

Plus, in strategy, there’s always the chance to get away with something high-level.

It’s another case of the familiar knowing-doing gap – and I’d say that this is a KM consideration since we should be looking to be agents of bridging that gap.

Strategy exists in ‘knowing world’. Implementation in ‘doing world’. In a KM sense we would contend that learning comes from experience and the most valuable experience in this case is the experience of implementation. That’s where we get the customer feedback, where we discover the problems and work out solutions. The knowledge is applied, tested and evolves from implementation.

So I’m not really saying that we don’t want talented people working in strategy, but we also need plenty to be drawn more to implementation, and these two sides of the house to be closely collaborating in a learning loop.