Making Strategy Real | Evan Campbell

A strategy can look flawless on a slide deck and still fail the moment it reaches the real world. I’m joined by Evan Campbell, technology executive, former management consultant, and author of Adapt to Win, to unpack why organisations with “good strategy” so often struggle with strategy execution, strategic alignment, and making day-to-day work match leadership intent.

We get practical about what breaks: strategy decay as clarity gets lost down the hierarchy, the inertia of an organisation already in motion, and the false comfort of performative rollout activity. Evan explains why OKRs only deliver focus, alignment, and accountability when they are built with a genuine bottom-up contribution, not pushed downhill like old-school MBOs. We also separate the work into three capabilities you can actually improve: strategy development, strategy deployment, and strategy execution, including the controls and feedback loops that stop teams from discovering failure at the end of the quarter.

From there, we move into lean portfolio management and investment decisions. If you cannot kill projects, you cannot be adaptive. We talk zombie projects, budget defensiveness, and why portfolio managers often default to ROI and NPV because it feels “objective”, even when it quietly starves innovation. The thread running through everything is trade-offs and accountability: executives must be clear about what not to do, give teams decision rights, and shorten the loop between decisions and consequences.

If you want strategy to survive contact with reality, this conversation will give you a sharper lens and a few uncomfortable questions to ask on Monday. Subscribe, share with a colleague, and leave a review with the biggest execution problem you see in your organisation.

Find Evan's work here: 
Adapt to Win: https://adapttowin.co/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evcampbell/

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Transcript

Strategy And The Guest Setup

Mike Jones 0:00

Most people don't think of strategy that way.

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Developing a new strategy.

Mike Jones 0:04

Strategic blind spots. When strategy meets reality and innovation in the strategy world.

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Drive their strategic goals.

Mike Jones 0:10

And welcome back to Strategy Meets Reality Podcast. And welcome back to the Strategy Meets Reality Podcast. Again, as always, I'm delighted to be joined by um my guests. And today I've got a fantastic guest called Evan Campbell. He's joined all the way from uh from America. So welcome to the show, Evan. Thanks, Mike. It's great to be here with you. Oh no, thank you for you know, I'm always pleased when people want to come on the podcast and have a conversation with me because I just love these conversations and I know we're gonna have a great one today. But before we jump into that, um, can you give a bit of background and a bit of context about what you've been up to lately for our listeners?

Why Implementation Breaks Down

SPEAKER_00 0:50

Sure. So my background, I've been a technology executive, business leader, um, and a management consultant through the years, and I thought it would be interesting to record some of the work that I've done, some of the lessons I've learned working in strategy consulting and lean in a book. So I published a book with Wiley. It's called uh Adapt to Win. And uh I think you can see it behind me. Yeah. Yeah, so I've been uh talking with people about strategy. I've I've been enjoying um, I think what's unusual about the book, Mike, is that um there are a lot of strategy books out there, a lot of wonderful strategy books. Most of them are about advice on how to conceptualize your strategy, how to develop and express your strategy. It's really strategy development. And one of the reasons I'm excited to be on with you is you and I have both had the experience of encountering organizations who had actually developed good strategies, often in concert with expensive premier consulting companies that we all know, and really struggled to implement it. And so, my my focus and in in many ways yours in strategy has been helping organizations develop the capability to really realize that strategy that they've developed. And one of the keys to actually implementing or realizing your strategic objectives is making the right investment decisions as a corporation or a company and in what initiatives you fund, what projects you bring forth, and which ones you reject. I have, and I assume you have, encounter so many organizations where the strategy isn't deployed down to product managers and portfolio managers and people making investment decisions in a way that really enables them to maximize strategic returns from their portfolio investments. And I think my book is the first one that really uses OKRs as the steel thread to make sure those investments are delivering the strategic objectives of the leadership of the company.

Strategy Decay And Inertia

Mike Jones 3:01

Yeah, you make a really good point, and I I always revert to the film Um is it Field of Dreams? Isn't that one where they feel yeah, yeah, Field of Dreams? And I think that um whole title is quite apt for a lot of uh strategy development as well, because it is is dreams mainly. Um but there's that thing where they're like I always see that connection with strategy and execution. It's almost like the strategy is they'll build it. If we build it, then it will happen. Yeah, and and there isn't there isn't that connection, and you get all this noise, and it's the same thing, you get all this energy around the strategy, they got the strategy. Um, we can argue on a different conversation if it's strategy or not, but then they get all the comms teams and all that lot, and they do the little um town halls and gatherings, and they get all the power points, they get the mugs out, you know, they get the you know the new cars on the um lanyards, give those out. Yeah, and they think that's it.

SPEAKER_00 4:02

Right. It's the commonest thing in the world. Yeah. Bless my mind. I mean, if I if I if all the CEOs that I've spoken to who said, you know, our our fancy we spent two, four million dollars for this fancy consulting company. They left two years ago. The my board of directors thinks that we're executing. They loved the strategy, they loved the PowerPoint deck in the videos, and they think we're actually executing it. And I'm really starting to get nervous because you know, we just did the employee engagement survey, and nobody in the company knows what the hell they're supposed to be working on. And I, you know, I've sent out all the emails, we printed all the mugs, you know, we did all of the town halls, and sometimes they're mad, like it's the employees' fault that all of the noise and the chaos is producing what I call strategy decay. Um, strategy decay and inertia have to be overcome deliberately with force, with an investment of energy for the strategic objectives of the company to remain clear so that employees can focus and align around the work that matters. Different organizations have a different level of strategy decay and a different level of inertia that must be overcome. I mean, large banks, insurance companies, very traditional large organizations with many vertical layers of hierarchy. Man, those places are really hard to deploy a strategy with clarity that enables the employees to really understand and focus on it. And it requires constant investment of energy and tracking and interceding when these employees go off the rails, which you know that's that's overcoming strategy decay. That's making sure that the signal-to-noise ratio of the strategy versus the whirlwind and the chaos and the pipeline and all of the emergent of you know things that are happening in a company, that that signal stays clear above the noise.

Mike Jones 6:13

Yeah. I mean that's the thing, isn't it? You we we see it where uh they they get new strategy probably at most, what they'll probably do is get people to write their objectives about how they're going to deliver it, which is um really a sort of post-rationalization of activity they're already doing, and they're just going, well, I can sort of justify that against these objectives, and you know, I'll get my bonus. Well, I think what we're talking about in in that initial phase, which I think is really missing, is the interpretation of this is this is what I need you to do. Um how how are you going to deliver that? You know, and there's that two-way feedback, and then there is the the element we're really focusing on here, which is how do we actually maintain that? So once they've under interpreted, how do they maintain that? How do they understand it? You you talked about uh using OKRs and elements like that. Um so how how do you how do you find that? Because I uh you know we've we've chatted on this programme. I always have a bit of a challenge around OKRs and stuff. Not not necessarily the it's not the tool, so it's is a tool, but it's it's more about how do we stop how do we stop the people from that becoming the only focus to also understanding that we need to make sure that we're also looking at um are we actually having the effect that we want. So we we're also looking at Stanley as well.

What OKRs Are Meant To Do

SPEAKER_00 7:41

Right. Which, you know, couple thoughts. I mean, you and I have discussed this, and and I think we're very aligned philosophically and and in in the principles that um we bring to our clients that we advocate with regard to strategy realization programs. OKRs got popular, and just like I've you know, you and I have worked in a half a dozen different strategy methodologies and processes from Hoshan Conry to G2Mom to V2 Mom, rather, you know, MBOs. They all ended up, you know, they all have goals and measures. Um the the thing that was different about OKRs, and half the companies are implementing OKRs badly and not embracing the thing, right? So that's you know, it can get dragged down to be as ineffectual and irritating as MBOs or anything else that we've experienced. But the thing that really was innovative and different about OKRs wasn't that there were goals and measures, it was that they the goals were substantially developed by the people who were going to be accountable for delivering them. You know, MBOs deservedly got a really bad reputation because it was really this, you know, goals rolling downhill, you know, just very top-down. I've been handed this thing. It doesn't really even make sense in the context of my job or what I'm focused on, but this is how I get my bonus this quarter. Okay. I'll, you know, I'll sandbag and play the game and get my bonus. The thing, you know, the OKR superpowers, you know, you talk about focus, alignment, accountability, those superpowers that OKRs do better than MBOs all come from the fact that there's a significant bottom-up component. When the employees are exposed to the strategic goals, leadership intent, um, the mission of the organization, and the high-level objectives of the company, the division, the product lines, the business units. And then they're asked, we'd like you to think really deeply about what the company and leadership are trying to accomplish. And given your passions, your skills, your ability, and your role in the organization, we'd like to hear what you think your objectives should be that would best support or ladder up to the corporate objectives. And it's not unmanaged. I mean, the the employees, the teams are proposing their objectives and the measures, and management can tweak those or approve them or adjust them. But just that process of really thinking deeply about their contribution, it creates focus and alignment and accountability. Um, and and that's you know, you can absolutely run an OKR program just like it was MBOs and way too many people do, and you lose all the benefits out of it. Yeah, yeah. Or you can call them MBOs and you can run them bottom up and get just as effective a program as what I'm describing.

Deployment Versus Execution Discipline

SPEAKER_00 10:58

The key is, you know, there's strategy, there's three major subprocesses, each of which in strategy, each of which have their own capabilities that have to be measured and developed in the organization. There's strategy development, which we talked about. There's strategy deployment, which is decomposing, breaking down, communicating the strategic objectives at the appropriate granularity at every level of the organization. And then there's strategy execution. And you were referring to that as well, Mike. It isn't enough just to deploy the strategy, set it and forget it, come back after a quarter and say, Well, how'd we do? Well, we sucked. Uh, well, we could have noticed halfway through the quarter that we were sucking and done something about it. Ah, well, that's strategy execution. We're actually putting some controls and measurement of the progress. Are we really producing the outcomes as an organization uh that are necessary to realize our strategy to win? You know, you you'll often see, very often, you know, a part of the organization, you know, everybody's paddling furiously, the little flotilla of canoes, and we're all trying to get to the North Star. And then we notice, oh my gosh, these three little canoes are paddling furiously with all the enthusiasm in the world, straight into the rocks, and they're gonna die. So, you know, we've got to intercede, get them back on track, and strategy execution processes let us do that.

Mike Jones 12:27

Yeah, there's there's a lot to unpack there, some really good things that we need to really focus on. And I think the one is the first one is the is the um ownership of of people from the organizations because you know they're the ones that have to deliver it. And as soon as you remove agency from them, you move any sort of i uh idea and um that they're ever going to adapt to the changing circumstances because things will change. So they must own it, so they must understand what is it that you're asking them to achieve, and of course, they they're closer to their situation, they're closer to their people, they're closer to the resources they have, and it's that two-way conversation going back, going right, I've understood what uh what you want, and this is how uh I think we can best achieve what you're after, which I think is a really important part. And I think there's another element that I see that gets missing with all this is the feedback loop between all the activity that they're doing, they've set they've set the objectives and they're doing, and they're going off and doing those. Are those things actually achieving the like you said earlier, the outcome or the effect that we we needed to happen? Because we could do a lot of activity, um, it just may not uh achieve the effect that we wanted because things have changed, or you know, our hypo hypothesis was slightly off. And then the other one is that um given given how things are changing and how we're interacting through our activity with the external environment, is is our strategy still valid for what we thought it was? Um, and I think it's that those things are my concern that doesn't happen. And then this is where I get the sort of the view of activities like OKRs, because then I just see it as people are not doing the whole thing, they're just doing a lot of objectives just to try and make it look like they've got some sort of control going on.

SPEAKER_00 14:25

Well, yeah, I mean there are a million ways you can do it wrong, uh, but and it's true of any process strategy process or framework. Um, the one of the things that I see, I mean, you you've touched on a couple really important problem areas or areas where a lot of organizations have opportunities to improve their strategy realization process. One of them is it's really common. I mean, I see this with clients all the time, whether they're using Hoshin Conry or OKRs, you know, their strategy deployment really, when I look at it, is deployment of a bunch of tactics. The clarity of the strategic objectives, the strategic intent is lost. A couple layers down in the organization, they're just deploying a bunch. Do this project, you know, have this task done by this date. That is the surest way to lose strategic focus by the employees because at that point they're just doing checkboxes on a work breakdown structure, nothing more. The other thing you mentioned that's that's really important is this idea that a strategy is a hypothesis. Um, and this ties in really closely with organizational adaptability. My book's title is Adapt to Win. And there's sort of this base foundation capability that an organization needs to develop to deploy their strategy and track execution and intercede. Well, in a dynamic environment or in an organization that's intending to use innovation to disrupt a market or anything, things are changing. And strategic adaptability is one of the most powerful differentiators that an organization can use to compete and win. That adaptability comes from recognizing that the strategy is a theory and being willing to continually assess whether the strategic outcomes that we're producing from our program are leading to the impacts in terms of realizing our mission that the organization and leadership intend. And, you know, this ability to sense disruption or an opportunity, quickly develop a strategic response, deploy that new response, and then witness in the X strategy execution process that something's changed. The employees are focused on different work. We've re-jiggered our portfolio investments, we've discontinued or reallocated funds from some initiatives to others. That that's strategic adaptability, and that's a competitive advantage that's almost insurmountable if you master it.

Killing Projects And Moving Money

Mike Jones 17:10

Yeah, and that requires um great sort of integration between the different parts. Because we we've known um you know the organizations that we worked for that you know, as soon as something changes, everyone gets defensive over their budgets. Yeah. Because they're just like, you know, oh um, I need to hold on to this because I may need it for something, and it that's it. And the thing is we want to, and we always talk about you know, we need to um provide all the component parts of your organizations with the decision rights, the resources, um uh that they need to be able to make those adaptations we're asking for, but then but but we also need to be able to integrate also that if we need to move um resources around because things have changed and you know our main effort is now focused over there, that that can happen smoothly without it needing to be this uh almighty battle for drawing the lines of sharing anything um across your your functional boundaries.

SPEAKER_00 18:16

Yeah. One of the fun questions, one of the first questions, especially in an engagement where I'm really focused on enterprise portfolio management and investment decision making, one of the first questions I like to ask is well, tell me about the projects you killed in the last half, you know, in the last half a year. Tell me about the initiatives you defunded and how you reallocated those funds to promising new emergent investment opportunities that popped up mid-year. And it's maybe not to you shocking, but it's disappointing to hear in many, many cases, maybe more often than not, we really struggle with killing projects around here. You know, zombie projects just hang around until the budget is gone. And you you can't be agile, you can't be adaptive if you can't reallocate funds. I mean, you and I have encountered, you know, this the industry metrics that are pretty well substantiated say that you know 70% of strategic initiatives fail to deliver the the outcomes intended. John Cotter, the famous change management uh you know, thought leader, he says 70% of change initiatives fail. All of these numbers float around the same thing. And it as you were alluding, it's often a horizontal alignment problem. It's it's an inability to get the organization to overcome their local optimizations, their selfish and parochial budgets to collaborate, cooperate. You know, every change has winners and losers, but being adaptive requires change.

Mike Jones 19:53

Yeah, it it does. Uh you know, people often argue these um, you know, the 70% of change fails or or strategy fails. But you don't really need to argue about a number because you just look at experience and we know the experience, and my experience is is a hell of a lot more. Um than you know, because we're we're seeing the same challenges that we deal with, and it's it's shocking sometimes. And uh but you you see it, this this local thing, and I think it's this um pet project. It it's like everyone's got their pet project and they're the thing that they they really like doing. And I don't think there, and especially in the public services I work in, I don't think there's a sense of r enough ruthlessness in those, and and people that are probably in these these organizations are probably laughing at me about going, oh it's terrible about that. But I don't think so. I think it's there's so much consensus going on. Like we won't I couldn't do that because you know Dave's gonna get upset, or you know, it's all about emotion and where we need to really look at the cold heart fact of like what what is it that we we are trying to achieve to to maintain that viability and what is no longer serving that um that that person and we need to cut it quick and this is not and I'm not advocating at any point in this thing, I'll just make very clear to people. I'm not about cutting people at all. I'm a big advocate of agility, yeah. But I want to use I want to focus that resource that we have onto actually achieving something rather than wasting energy on stuff that is just not going to to to keep us viable.

SPEAKER_00 21:39

I love what you said about organizations avoiding conflict, you know, or hurting somebody's feelings or taking their pet budget. One of the things I encounter a lot, a whole lot, is yeah, as as I have made clear, I'm I'm usually not really working on the development. Development of the strategy. Oftentimes that's that's been done and done well enough. The trouble is we have a strategy. How do we make it our reality? That's that's where I prefer

Trade-Offs And Strategic Clarity

SPEAKER_00 22:10

to focus.

Mike Jones 22:10

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:11

Kind of cleaning up after the white shoe consultancies or or following them up and enabling the good work that they have done, not competing with them. And the first, you know, conversations, you know, the CEO or the chief strategy officer, well, yeah, you know, we did the strategy, we've we've got a mission and vision, you know, we've got these high-level objectives, having a really hard time figuring out what to do now. But, you know, but the senior executives, we're really aligned, you know, the senior executive, we're all on the same sheet of music. We just need to figure out how to get the rest of the org dancing in tune. And so, you know, you show up, you're in the boardroom, you know, with all the senior executives, the GMs of the divisions and the heads of the products and all the all the functions. And man, you know, you just scratch that thin veneer of consensus just a little bit. You know, you ask some of these classic questions, these clarifying questions. Well, where do we play? And how do we win? And who's our biggest competitor? And which of these market segments are most strategic for us to focus on? And instantly it falls apart. And they've been operating with this um sort of warm, fuzzy, vague, good feeling that everybody's happy and signing off. Well, they haven't had to make any of the trade-off decisions. You know, strategic focus is as much about deciding what you're not gonna do. And if the executives haven't confronted some tough decisions about, you know, which of their precious babies aren't going to live, aren't going to be invested in, aren't going to be supported, that's all superficial. And so you got to cut, you know, your strategy development work isn't done. You've got to get to that level of specificity clarity that is going to allow a deployable strategy to move forward. And I I really I have a theory, Mike, that you know, often, oftentimes there's this gap in strategic clarity between the top-level corporate annual objectives and the work that the product, the decisions that the product managers and investment portfolio managers are making day to day, where they have to make up their own objectives because there's this gap in clarity. I think a lot of that just comes from the unwillingness of the executive suite to confront the trade-offs.

Mike Jones 24:39

Oh, there is it. Um I often write and you know, people laugh, but I always I always talk about that we we've spent over a decade now um convincing leaders that they work in a fairy tale. That they are uh they are parts of a fairy tale, and it's all about belief. As long as they believe and everybody else believes and got the right mindset, they'll can achieve anything they want to. But that's the problem because the reason why that gap exists there is because often the the strategy that they've conceived is not a strategy that forces choices. Like we are going to focus our attention here, we are going to we are going to move in this, we're going to challenge these constraints, we're going to move here, and we're going to take this ground here before anyone else does. We don't do that. We we don't keep it vague and open. And because we're not closing off options for ourselves, we're not, as I call it, binding, we're not binding, we're not closing those options to make us more focused. We leave them open, and then the organization starts to fragment. They're the people on the paddle paddle uh boats you're talking about that are now going off because we're not.

SPEAKER_00 25:51

Move there. Yeah.

Focus Beats Seven Pillars

SPEAKER_00 25:53

And we do and we do things. I mean, there's there's a million ways that organizations aggravate this problem. You know, well, we've got seven strategic pillars or strategic themes. You know, there's nothing wrong with having I I'm actually a big fan of of pillars or strategic themes. And if you really need seven, that's a lot, but well, the problem comes when every lair, every team has an OKR in every set in what in every pillar, you know. So I've got seven OKRs for this quarter. Should I be working on beating our key competitor in this market segment, or should I be making this a great place to work? Yes, yeah, yeah. You know, one or two at most, you know, strip them down. Most organizations need to develop the muscle of focus much more than they need to do more things.

Mike Jones 26:51

Yes, and actually, if you to that point, you've got to make a great place to work, get focus, and stop you know, stop sandbagging people on crap that'll normally work. The a clear thing is with that is the um is the demand on the organization. So any strategy has a demand on the organization, and it doesn't not every part has um demand equally. So if I'm going off to do this strategy, I know that I either don't have the capability, so I need to get that capability, so that's some sort of development that I need to do. Change or I've got the capability, but is is not is not doing the thing I need it to do now, so I need to change that and give it new direction. Um or I've got it all, um that's fine, and they just need to crack on and keep rowing where they want to go. But the demand is going to have a focus on certain things. So for us to achieve the strategy, I need to do X, Y, and Z. X belongs to um the operations function, Z that's the sales team, you need to go do that. But the problem is we've got this thing where once we announce a strategy, it's for everyone. And I keep seeing this thing on LinkedIn, it breaks me, and I've mentioned this before. Is that people go, oh um, disqualifier strategy is that if if you've got a strategy and it doesn't include everyone in your organization, it's not strategy. What absolute crap. What absolute crap. Because the um your the your organization exists doing what it does, but you you're not suddenly changing everything for every strategy, but you you're always adapting parts of it, not whole thing. If you're changing the whole thing, something has probably gone seriously wrong.

SPEAKER_00 28:38

Yeah. Well, I mean, there's keep the lights on stuff all all the time, right? And you know, I think depending on where the organization is and its life cycle, how dynamic an organization is, how competitive the marketplace is, you know, there and certainly the layer of the organization that we're addressing. You know, there's there's an old metric somebody came up with that said, you know, the executive suite should be spending an hour a day on strategy, the directors should be spending an hour a week on strategy, the manager should, you know, it I'm not sure that's a particularly useful set of metrics, but the idea holds that there are people for whom the day is full of working tickets and you know, working tickets well, uh your your OKR in that environment, be more efficient and more effective, continuous improvement, okay, so those kinds of things, right?

Mike Jones 29:36

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:37

Not to go seize a new unpenetrated market that's going to, you know, transform the business and the strategy for the next three years. But we we all have a strategy, we all have objectives. Where we contribute and how much of our time and focus is tracking directly to winning in the marketplace, you know, it varies.

Mike Jones 29:58

Yeah, it's the um all different parts contribute to the strategic effect. It's just sequenising those things to to do it. Um but I think this comes back to the point what makes strategy execution or or deployment um that part very difficult is just the lack, and you said it before, I think the real lack of clarity around this this is this is the strategy, but this is what I want you to do, and any sort of form of accountability around that, because it's it's really hard to give accountability to people when they don't really understand what you're asking them to do.

Portfolio Politics And Innovation Starvation

SPEAKER_00 30:40

Well, I yes, exactly. And I have felt, and we could explore why or not, part of it's my background, but I I've had a lot of empathy for the pain that organizations who are not investing in strategy deployment and execution, the pain that they thrust, I've mentioned it a couple times, you know, the the product managers and the the portfolio investment managers, they are in an impossible no-win situation because they're trying to serve the interests of really politically powerful people in the organization. You've got these sponsors who are the general managers, the head of product lines, the people that hold the PLs and run the various functions. Um, they they have things they want. They are very well conditioned to know that investment funds are the lifeblood of power and influence and advancement in the organization. These are politically adept people, they've been rewarded for being aggressive and competing with one another to get resources. And so the poor product manager or portfolio manager is trying to make these trade-off decisions, you know, assigning value. We'll talk portfolio. You've got these this huge pool of initiative candidates. You've got unlimited demand for scarce resources. And as the portfolio manager, you're allocating scarce resources, humans, money, capital, facilities, you know, fleet of trucks, whatever it is, to um just this endless list, wish list that these powerful sponsors have requested, right? So when you're trying to achieve, you should, as a portfolio manager, have a balanced portfolio of investments that are producing strategic benefits as well as simple financial returns. But if the strategic objectives of the firm are so opaque or are subject to lots of argument and disagreement by these powerful sponsors, it's a very dangerous position for you as a portfolio manager to decide, I'm sorry, we're gonna fund your baby and we're gonna let your baby starve. And they don't have the tools in an effectually in an ineffectually deployed strategy to objectively say the value, the strategic value of this opportunity is better than that. So the defensive posture, having been beaten about the head a number of times, that the portfolio manager takes is I'm only going to assign value and prioritize initiatives based on something completely objective, ROI, you know, NPV, whatever IRR. So well, what happens? Oh my God, you know, all the cost takeout initiatives are getting funded because they're super easy to measure. You know, a monkey with a calculator can measure the ROI of a simple cost takeout initiative. But innovation initiatives, by definition, have no ROI. And so you're starving that that sector of your portfolio and losing competitiveness as a business. So those are the kinds of things that really get me agitated about the real injury that a failure to deploy objectives with clarity creates in the organization.

Mike Jones 34:14

Yeah, yeah, that's really open up something for me in the fact that you're right, and maybe that's why everybody gets so focused on efficiency, because it's easier to justify than it is for all the other activity you talk about. Like you your book's called Adapt to Win, and you know, adapt takes great agility to be able to do. Agility is expensive. Um, you know, innovation is expensive sometimes, you know, to be able to do when there's no no guaranteed returns. And I think there's that easy, it's easy to politically justify going, look what I've done. I've my objectives, I've saved you X amount of money rather than being able to go, yeah. Actually, do you know what we've we've done all these um experiments and tests, and we've know now that like we need to do this because it doesn't that's not giving them anything.

SPEAKER_00 35:07

Yeah. And that's that's where your comment earlier about you know being hypothesis driven. Well, a hypothesis, we need a testable hypothesis. We want to be use the experiment uh uh scientific method where we actually express our value hypothesis, and this is part of the portfolio principles and practices and tools that I that I advocate in the book is you know, your portfolio should have a value hypothesis about what what um within within the context of the specific portfolio, the investments that are appropriate to it are going to deliver the strategic objectives, and we're testing it continuously and we're adjusting it and refining it continuously, and that means you know what we're funding changes, but that's where the adaptivity comes from.

Mike Jones 35:57

Yeah. And I really like your point you made um earlier around that we don't invest in the deployment execution. So it's it's always and you're right, like it you can find loads of books on how to develop strategy. Yeah, there's not much on what to do with it afterwards. Right.

Capability Gaps And Simple Pulse Checks

Mike Jones 36:20

Yeah, and it's almost if it's like, well, you've developed the strategy, surely that's enough, isn't it? But there is there's a lot more to it, and I think that I think people underestimate what that means, and I think they underestimate a really crucial thing that the organization without your strategy is doing something already. So you're you're you're not going against, and and I think this is the thing that most leaders get in their heads is that now I've got the strategy, it's almost if they're talking to a a blank sheet of paper that's got nothing, they've got no commitments, no investment, no emotional investment, no nothing into what they're doing, and you're saying, right, okay, this is the strategy, now I'll go ahead and do it. Well, they can't, they're already doing something, they're already a steam train in motion. So you've got to figure out how do you redirect that steam train if you need to or not, or just let that one go through. I think they just think it's just a blank sheet waiting for their wise words.

SPEAKER_00 37:25

Yeah, that inertia effect we were talking about. I mean, it's it's immense in some organizations, and you can't be adaptable if you let inertia win, or if you let the destination, uh the objective, become unclear because the confusion and noise within the organization has overcome the strategic signal, which is that strategy decay idea. But you know, I uh I had fun. I I don't know, I think this is funny, but I I go around telling clients, and I think I have it on my on my website, you know, uh, you know, Sun Tzu, the author of The Art of War. You know, I I have this quote. It says, Sun Tzu should have said, Victory comes not from developing great strategy. Victory comes from executing strategy with great effectiveness. And uh, you know, I have a a long time ago in in early career as an executive, I think it was the first time I probably had a VP title. A bot the boss asked me, he said, uh Evan, which do you think is more important? Uh developing a great strategy or executing it really well, if you could have one or the other. And I just to be provocative and irritate him, I I gave him the wrong answer. But um, you know, the truth is a company that develops a grade B level strategy and executes it with A-level performance is gonna beat a company with a A-level strategy and B level execution every time. A brilliant strategy that the organization doesn't have the muscles or the capabilities to make into reality, is like you said, it's just a dream.

Mike Jones 39:09

Yeah, yeah. And it is, you you've got to have you've got to have both in the sense of like you've got to have a strategy that the organization is capable of delivering, and I think that's where a lot of people have this what what seems brilliant strategy, and I'm no doubt it is, it's probably uh amazing and looks great on paper, but is worthless if it can't be delivered. It's what's the point in it? What what is the what is the point in in that? It has to be able to um be delivered, and I think that's the gap that people forget. They don't look and go, well, what's what's doable in their choices? Oh, this is great to fancy, but what's doable? And actually, I I would rather take this strategy here that's less than this one, um, in ambition and stretch and stuff like that, because I can deliver this one, and if I can deliver this one, that means that once I've delivered that, I I can do that one, but I can't go from there to there, but uh that and that's what the problem is. I think people go from here to here, like stretch, and in one foul swoop and they can't deliver it.

SPEAKER_00 40:18

It's a great point, and organizations often do not invest enough in really doing capability analysis. And in the book, I introduced this sort of framework, supporting framework of capabilities, which are things that the organization has developed the muscles to be able to do, good things that actually help them win. And then there's competencies, which are more individual. There's there's capabilities, competencies, and skills. And competencies are things that the individual human beings that make up the organization actually collectively, you know, and and and capabilities may include technology, facilities, capital projects that enable the organization to do things, but certainly the humans are an important part of it. And yeah, and their competencies, their their their skills, their abilities, um, enable the capabilities of the organization. There's there's kind of two important things you said. One of them is that essentially the organization has to know, understand the gap between their strategic desires of the destination, the North Star that they're trying to achieve in a given horizon, and the organization's actual capability to deliver it. And that's where strategy development, strategy deployment, and strategy execution actually have a set of organizational capabilities, and you have to select individuals who have the competencies in order to make anything happen.

Mike Jones 42:04

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's that them getting divorced from reality. It's the thing where it sounds nice, but in reality, is it real? And I think that's that's the thing.

SPEAKER_00 42:18

Um and it doesn't have to be a huge academic exercise. I mean, you know, it's it's half the time just asking the question and talking, you know, with the organizational leadership and management, and you know, just tracking how quickly the organization can execute change with intention. One of the best things you can do as an organization just to get a sense of your capabilities around strategy are just some really simple pulse surveys of the kind of thing you'd ask an employee in the elevator, you know, who's our biggest competitor? What what are the keys to winning? And you know, the the studies are clear and objective in this area, Mike. I mean, the strategy decay down the levels of the organization. You ask simple questions like what are the three priorities of the organization this year? Man, it it goes from like the top level number in in the executive suite is really bad. It's like 65 or 70 percent. And then you're down into the teams, and it's like, you know, 10, 15. Those are easy questions to answer and pulse surveys on a regular basis. And if you're not seeing that improve, your ambition to achieve strategic objectives should be highly tempered.

Mike Jones 43:41

Yeah, yeah. And again, this comes back to really getting down and understanding what's on the ground. You know, we we've both got a military background, and you know, we know the the sort of one up, two up. You know, I want I want people to understand what you know at least the next level up is doing and this and the Above them, you know, they they understand that that should give them enough understanding what's going on. Um we just need to make sure that that intent is is is right. Um and the the thing is as well, it's like the organization knows it's not like I've had it before where I you know I've asked people to understand this stuff and they're going right, we'll get this. They want another consultancy to come in and do a report for them. I was like, you don't need to, you're wasting time because that's gonna take loads of time now to do it. You're talking months, months for them to go away and do something. You have the answers in your organization. I said I can ask this question now, like you know, what's the last major project you did, and you know, how quick did that take you to do compared to what you expected to do? You know, and normally say, Oh yeah, you know, we're we're quite slow then. Okay, yes, how you know how's that relative to all the other ones? Oh, yeah, we're quite slow. I see probably work on a sort of continuous improvement level of change. Um, is that is that effective for what you need to do? No, we need to we need to actually you know improve our tempo. Okay, cool. There you go. It's it's obvious. You didn't need you know, you didn't need a a full report to understand that, and you just ask these questions of themselves and of the organization, and you you pretty much get start getting a fingertip feel of where you are,

Accountability And Short Feedback Loops

Mike Jones 45:23

yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:23

And along that theme, you know, how many times have you been sitting with a CEO or a chief strategy officer, and they're telling you how difficult it is or how frustrated they are that they're not pri making progress on their strategy, and uh you ask the question, well, who's really accountable for realizing the strategy? You get a lot of hemming and hawing. Well, you know, I'm that's not really my thing, man. I mean, you know, I I I worked with so-and-so, you know, the big consultancy, and we came up with this brilliant strategy, and now it's just you know, like the gnomes are supposed to make it happen magically at night somehow. And it's like the CEO disavows the responsibility, the chief strategy officers. No, man, I'm on an ivory tower thinking big thoughts. I can't get my hands dirty tracking projects, man. It's like you guys are screwed. You know, if you don't have anybody accountable for actually making this, you know, tracking that the strategy is happening, it's never gonna happen. So, what what do we do? You know, it's a classic change management problem. You don't have leadership engagement, and they're not investing, you know, the leadership influence to make these things happen.

Mike Jones 46:39

Yeah, I agree. I I would like to just go into an organization where the chief strategy officer is actually a strategy uh person and not a marketer. That'd be that would be a good start.

SPEAKER_00 46:49

Um I've seen a few good ones, they're out there, but um the ivory tower thing just I mean, I find it really hard to listen to that personally.

Mike Jones 47:00

Yeah, yeah, it is. It's just ridiculous as well.

SPEAKER_00 47:03

And it's like that that way of thinking actually is also a huge impediment to adaptability, right? I mean, the feedback loops that you have to have between execution, sensing opportunities and threats, and feeding that back into strategy development to adapt the strategy continuously. You you can't have you know this waterfall handoff of responsibilities related to it has to be baked into the organizational DNA that we're always adapting the strategy and seeing the effect that it had when we made the decision.

Mike Jones 47:40

Yeah, and and with those that that feedback loops are crucial, and they're the things that aren't present because you you ask about them. But the thing is as well, it's like uh for us in our our background is that the what's unique about us and people talk about the military is that the feedback loop between uh decision and uh and consequence is short. Is it's very short, and we know about the consequences. The stakes are high, yeah, yeah. Um but when you get into that point and they divorce themselves of that, they make decisions because they know the feedback loop is so long, so long that they will they will probably never see or feel the consequences of their decision because by the time it comes back around, they're probably moved on or people have lost interest. So they'll move they'll they'll move on, which isn't a good place to be. You want to close that, you know. If you think about Udaloop, that decision and action, decide and act, you know, that that needs to be um as short as possible, and that feed forward of right now we've acted, this has happened, that wants to be you want to be close to that, that wants to be short as possible as well.

Command Intent And Empowered Teams

SPEAKER_00 48:57

I try not to over rely on my military experience um and metaphors with clients because um you you get two reactions diametric reactions, people either really engage with it, um, or there are people really put off by it. Um, and so um the the one aspect of military strategy that is so salient, especially in these organizations that are always deploying tactics. You know, it's like you guys are Saddam Hussein's army, you know that, right? Like you're you're telling your subordinate units to turn left at the tree, turn right at the rock, walk 17 steps down the hill, jump across the stream right here. Your organization needs clarity of commander's intent in terms of the outcome or objective. Look, find high ground that can control this sector. And then let the people on the ground figure out whether it's better to go left or right around the tree. And oh gosh, the stream is swollen and we can't cross it, so we need to go across this ridgeline. When Saddam Hussein's army lost the command and control chain, it was paralyzed. The thing that makes our militaries, both of our country's militaries, great in comparison, is that the the unit, subordinate unit commanders, are empowered to make good decisions on the ground based on the experience they're encountering on the mission in order to deliver the ultimate objective. And a lot of organizations just have this command and control structure. You know, you just picture them like some Russian or Iraqi general saying, Your team will deliver this on such and such a date, and the buttons will be red, and the sliders will be blue, and it's like, yeah, no, man. You just you just you just devalued all of the intelligence and knowledge and experience of those that knowledge capital that you invested in when you thought you were hiring good people.

Mike Jones 51:17

Yeah. We we have we hire good people and treating them like idiots. Yeah. And we wonder why uh our doors of our organizations are magical.

SPEAKER_00 51:28

It is so hard. That when you encounter that cultural norm and that leadership style, it's really hard to shift too, isn't it?

Mike Jones 51:37

Yeah, yeah. That's the thing, is like I always say, um, you know, uh going to organizations ago, I didn't realize your your doors to your organization were magical. And they're like, What do you want about Mike? And I said, Well, you've got these perfectly intelligent people that you know have lives and they have homes, they have families, and they manage themselves, they manage to pay their mortgages, they manage to deal with technical problems that they have at home. But as soon as they step into your doors, someone lose 50 points the minute, and they have to be treated like children. Yeah, uh it's amazing, isn't it? And you think imagine if imagine if the doors are like to deploy in the organization, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 52:20

Magic doors that cut your IQ in half. Wow, how did you how did you make your organization do that?

Mike Jones 52:27

Exactly, yeah. It's

Closing Takeaways And How To Connect

Mike Jones 52:29

magical. No, but um honestly, I I've absolutely loved this um conversation. But before you go, what would you like to leave listeners to think about from this episode?

SPEAKER_00 52:41

Well, I wish that organizations invested even more time, energy, and executive focus on making their strategy reality as they do in developing the strategy in the first place. And I think that one of the best, most powerful ways that organizations can advance their strategy more rapidly with more adaptability than their competitors is to be really good at lean portfolio management where the enterprise is investing its scarce resources into the things that are strategically advantageous and being adaptable and agile about those in that investment decision making. And uh, you know, I liked OK, I like OKRs as as a tool to create that steel thread. Yeah, yeah. Other things can work if you embrace the underlying philosophy, but that's that's the message of the book and and the mission that I want to bring to the world.

Mike Jones 53:48

Yeah, yeah. And it rings true in your book, your system was kind enough to send me a copy, which I've been frantically flicking through to uh get to this, you know. I I'm the same. What you're saying, get past any labels is exactly what you've been talking about on here. And you know, that you you you utilize a framework that helps you communicate and do it, and and it and it works, and you've shown it works. So that's great. And I and I think that's a real um crucial message, I think, to listeners and to leaders out there is just to you know, honestly sit back and think about how much time are you investing in you know the development, also the execution, and is that appropriate? Is it is it proportionate? That's probably the word. Um and I probably argue it's not. I think there's a lot of a lot of fuss and that around the strategy, but not not equally um for execution. So I think that's an excellent point to put through. Um your your book, I will put the link in this. So if you're if you want to um get in touch with Evan um or to read his book, I'll put the links in there so you can get in touch with him and also you can download you can buy his great book. You know, if you've liked this as much as I have, then please um like and share so many people can get the um the richness from Evan's wise words. So Evan, thank you so much for being such a great guest on this podcast.

SPEAKER_00 55:17

Well, Mike, it's it's been a pleasure. I've enjoyed every conversation we've had, and you run a great podcast. And uh I look forward to interacting with you in the future and hearing from your audience.

Mike Jones 55:29

Yeah, definitely, mate. Let's stay in touch and be good. Take care, everyone.