Why strategy fails
It ended with energy and much hope, but 6 months later...nothing has changed.
We've all been there, done that.
We've all sat in the ‘inspirational strategy workshop’, led by a great facilitator. We've spent the time (and money), said all the right things...made all the notes of said things that seemed right.
It ended with energy and much hope, but six months later...nothing has changed.
All that promise and hope for change and you end up right back where you started.
Why does strategy fail? Why is real change so stubbornly elusive?
Well... think of a company like this...
A company is its own little world.
In this world there are characters, there are unique ways of seeing and doing things, there are power structures, there are many relationships, philosophies, perspectives and there are vested interests.
Some of these things can be clearly seen and are obvious, but most of these dynamics are hidden and go largely undetected. These are the shifting forces that shape the world that the company occupies and help to produce how we (all the stakeholders that are involved) experience that world.
Seeing the company in this way, you can perhaps begin to appreciate just how wildly complex a company's world can be.
Strategy itself is a form of problem solving and a ‘strategy workshop’ (a small part of the practice of strategy) is usually called in an attempt to fix a perceived problem that has been identified within this complex world.
As much as a robust strategy practice (applied over an extended period of time) is a wonderfully useful tool to position an organisation for success, assuming that a brief strategy workshop is somehow going to successfully comprehend the complexity of the company world and identify the exact problem supposedly causing all of the chaos, is simply impossible.
Far too much is often expected from the intervention.
Yes, a strategy workshop itself has a lot of value to offer to encourage open dialogue and begin the process of exploring possible futures, but companies themselves are far too messy to somehow ‘set right’ with such a superficial mechanism.
Strategy is a weak factor of change. And for this reason is a remedy that requires prolonged and sustained dosage to have any kind of organisational effect.