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Two Questions Every Leader Asks For Successful Strategy Execution
To know if a strategic plan is being successfully implemented, leaders need to keep asking and answering two vital questions.
Sure, there are more than just two questions we ask to check on the success of a strategy's execution. There are questions about building the right culture, allocating resources, keeping change projects on-time and on-budget, and adapting to external changes. But my PuMP Partner for the US, Brook Rolter, always talks about two questions in particular that precede them all:
- Are we achieving what we want to achieve?
- How do we know?
While Brook has a lot of wisdom to share about these two questions and their power, my recent case study interview with a PuMP client, Hanlie Erasmus, in Australia triggered my own train of thought about them.
These two questions are two parts of a single intention: to be confident that we know how well our strategy is making the organisation more successful. We need a good answer to each question. Any other questions we have about strategy execution only matter after we have answered these two questions.
Hanlie Erasmus, Associate Director of Public Library Services for the State Library of South Australia, was asking these two questions. It probably comes as no surprise that a Librarian would prize both impact and information in her leadership of an organisation.
"It's very important for us that our measures really provide strong evidence as to the range of services and the outcomes and value and impact delivered by public libraries, but also to tell that story with evidence. And that was what I think was missing in all of our previous approaches."
Hanlie Eramus, Associate Director of Public Library Services, State Library of South Australia
Hanlie committed to finding a better way to know whether Public Library Services was achieving what she and her team wanted to achieve, and finding a better way to really know. She chose PuMP, and worked with PuMP Partner Mark Hocknell to build a performance framework to make answering those two questions easier and faster.
Question 1: Are we achieving what we want to achieve?
If we designed a strategic plan that clearly describes what we want to achieve, it means we know what to look for to answer this first question. It means we know which goals are the ones that matter, which specific performance results across the organisation relate to those goals, and what "achievement" looks like.
In the complex environments that organisations are, it is easy to lose ourselves in all the problems to solve, challenges to overcome, and results to improve. A good strategy is ruthlessly prioritised. FranklinCovey set this as the first discipline of execution: focus on the wildly important. Without prioritisation, trying to answer the first question feels too overwhelming and
unsettling.
Because too many strategic plan documents tend to gather dust (real or digital dust) rather than being tools used in everyday organisational life, a visual map on a single page can be more powerful at keeping the strategic priorities at the forefront. When we ask ourselves the question "are we achieving what we want to achieve?" our first action should be to look at that visual map and remind ourselves of what exactly it is we want to achieve.
Use a Results Map to focus on what you want to achieve.
Hanlie and her team used PuMP's Results Map to visually map what they wanted to achieve. They determined the strategic priority performance results first, the ultimate results they wanted to achieve. They then built out the Results Map with cause-effect chains of the priority results for business processes and day-to-day activities.
In the following 2-minute video, Hanlie takes us on a walk-through of this Results Map (they call it their Outcomes Map):
To answer this first question, "are we achieving what we want to achieve?", we might be tempted to rely on presentations, anecdotes, completed project milestones and other qualitative or subjective information. This is rarely enough evidence to convince us of exactly how well we are achieving what we want to achieve. We need more direct and objective evidence. And that's why we need the second question.
Question 2: How do we know?
If we designed a strategic plan that measurably describes what we want to achieve, it means we know which evidence informs the answer to the first question, "are we achieving what we want to achieve?". It means we know both the quantitative baselines and the quantitative targets for each of the goals that are the ones that matter.
The inertia of our legacy reporting systems has left many leadership teams with performance dashboards that efficiently report the data they've always had. They haven't moved and evolved to follow the movement and evolution of the strategic directions over time, and cannot report the data they actually need now.
This is one reason why answering the second question seems so much harder than answering the first. The cost of getting new data and rebuilding performance dashboards is big. But the real difficulty is that the cost of answering the first question without properly answering the second question is much bigger, but it's hidden.
We can start coaxing this cost out of hiding by aligning our performance dashboard with the visual map of what we want to achieve. The gaps that can't be filled with existing data will show just how much we can't yet know.
Align the Performance Dashboard to the Results Map to know if you're achieving what you want to achieve.
Mark guided Hanlie and her leadership team to make sure their goals were measurable, and then to design the most feasible and relevant KPIs to measure them (using PuMP). Then Hanlie's analytics team got busy setting up the KPIs to align with their Results Map and provide the direct and objective evidence that answers that question, "how do we know?". They didn't have all the data they needed, and they're still working on getting more. But with what they already have, they're getting insight
and making improvements.
One example is the following KPI for the percentage of library members that find reading improves their communication:
Another example is the following KPI for the percentage of library members that find reading improves their concentration:
In the following 2-minute video, Hanlie talks about one of the KPIs aligned directly with their Results Map, and how it is giving them evidence of impact:
You can hear the excitement in her voice, as Hanlie describes the power of this alignment of KPIs to strategy, and what it means to her. Hanlie is one of the best examples of an evidence-based leader.
Evidence-Based Strategy Execution
Our strategy-execution is evidence-based and has a much higher chance of achievement when we can easily answer these two questions:
- Are we achieving what we want to achieve?
- How do we know?
If we can't answer these two questions, we're hoping and guessing and getting little to no leverage from the time and resources we invest in strategy execution. Evidence-based leaders are not only great at designing strategy, they're also great at leading successful strategy execution, because they approach both those questions very deliberately.
"Our performance framework is a credible evidence-based tool that the State's Public Library Association, but also the local government association can, for example, use to engage with corporate and public funders and advocate for increased funding to further board, for example, social capital, but also enhance the position of public libraries in the social infrastructure offered by local and state governments."
Hanlie Eramus, Associate Director of Public Library Services, State Library of South Australia
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