4th March 2025
30 Tactics To Improve Strategy Execution
Hi there, .
We officially launched PuMP Academy last month!
It's the new home for all things PuMP. It's where you'll find all the new articles from Measure Up, including today's. And over time, as I update older articles from staceybarr.com, they'll start appearing on PuMP Academy too. If you want to check it out, click here:
In Measure Up today, it's a BIG one! I fleshed out 30 clues & tactics to improve your strategy execution success. To avoid overwhelm, I suggest you scan through and focus on the clues that jump out for you, then follow the tactics just for those.
Stacey Barr
PuMP Creator and PuMP Academy Host
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Watch Our Free Educational Videos...
Here is one video that builds a little on this month's Measure Up topic:
Create True Organisational Alignment With a Results Map. We talk a lot about how we want organisational alignment. We want every department, team and individual to be aligned with our organisation's purpose and strategic direction. Sure, there are tools, like strategy maps, that many leaders use to do this. But let me share with you something you may never have heard of, that works a LOT better at aligning your organisation to your strategy...
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30 Tactics To Improve Strategy Execution
Use this checklist of 30 tangible clues, and practical tactics, to make sure your strategic plan isn't one of the 90% that will fail in execution.
We don't have to look too hard to discover that strategy execution has terribly high failure rates. For example, Jeroen Kraaijenbrink, in his Forbes.com article, notes that most research points to very high failure rates of strategy execution, and it can be as bad as 90%. Research from Harvard Business Review, Bridges Business Consultancy, and Kotter
International also suggests that anywhere from 60-80% of organisations fail to achieve their strategic goals due to poor execution.
There are many reasons why strategy execution can fail, but there are some very visible and tangible clues. These clues are easy to spot, and offer us immediate opportunities to boost our strategy execution success. And, many of these opportunities can be easily acted upon with the tactics I'll suggest, from our PuMP methodology.
8 categories of tactics to boost strategy execution
Because 30 tactics is quite a lot, we'll organise them in eight categories, and you can jump to whichever resonate with you most:
- Depth: Was your strategic direction informed by enough analysis and thinking?
- Focus: Does your strategic plan communicate ruthless priorities?
- Change: Does your strategic plan respond to challenges and opportunities?
- Progress: Does your strategic plan have a mechanism for progress?
- Structure: Is your strategic plan designed with a navigable structure?
- Clarity: Are your strategic goals written so everyone understands them?
- Alignment: Can every team map a cause-effect link from their goals to the strategic goals?
- Holism: Can the strategic plan tell a unified story of changing toward the vision?
Depth: Was your strategic direction informed by enough analysis and thinking?
When the strategic plan contains much of the same goals and strategies as previous years, and there is no commentary about where the goals came from, chances are that the analysis and thinking behind its creation wasn't deep enough. A strategic direction that doesn't distinguish compelling change priorities won't likely inspire the execution of anything different to business-as-usual.
Here are some clues that your strategic plan might need a bit more depth, and tactics to give it a bit more thought:
- No mention of the industry, competitor, market or internal analysis and their findings.
Tactic: To get depth, without reworking your entire strategic direction, you can layer in a bit more thinking with a small variety of strategic thinking tools, like Strategyzer's Mission Model Canvas or Business Model Canvas, McKinsey's 7S framework, or Francis Aguilar's evolved PESTLE analysis
- Goals are very broad or generic in nature.
Tactic: Specific goals are much easier to execute than vague goals. In PuMP we make sure that every goal is measurable, and that means it's important to make each goal specific, not broad to clearly say what we really want. Being specific is one of the fundamental keys to successful strategy execution.
- Goals are action-oriented and worded as programs or projects.
Tactic: One of PuMP's Measurability Tests makes sure that goals describe the results we want, not actions. If you have goals that sound like actions, then ask what impact you want from the action. That's probably your real goal.
- The same old KPIs or metrics or performance measures are used.
Tactic: There's nothing wrong with using the same KPIs if they are directly relevant to monitoring our goals. But we need to sift out the KPIs that can misdirect strategy execution. To do this we set a relevance score for each KPI, against the goal it is supposed to be evidence of.
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For greater success with your strategic performance measurement, strategic alignment, and strategy execution, contact us and find out how our suite of PuMP programs could help you.
 
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