The middle ground you speak of is increasingly important to the information workers in an agile enterprise. The Army’s concept of the ‘Commander’s Intent’ is a very effective approach to making sure the ultimate objectives are clear while providing the front line workers with the ability to adjust and adapt to changing circumstances. This flexibility has to extend to the tools they use to accomplish their tasks so they are able to work in the manner they are most effective. These kinds of support systems need to be able to be configured and adapted by the users and still report status and progress in a consistent and accurate manner. The difficulty here is that the enterprise, the worker and the tools must all evolve together.

The middle ground you speak of is increasingly important to the information workers in an agile enterprise. The Army’s concept of the ‘Commander’s Intent’ is a very effective approach to making sure the ultimate objectives are clear while providing the front line workers with the ability to adjust and adapt to changing circumstances. This flexibility has to extend to the tools they use to accomplish their tasks so they are able to work in the manner they are most effective. These kinds of support systems need to be able to be configured and adapted by the users and still report status and progress in a consistent and accurate manner. The difficulty here is that the enterprise, the worker and the tools must all evolve together.

The situation is analogous to the communism-socialism dichotomy in the economic scenario. Reconciliation can be obtained using a mixed economy :) possibly, where the employees and the customers are given certain freedoms to execute business strategies in the volatile environments, with the central board intervening when critical situations crop up.

Hello Professor Davenport,
I have worked in organizations where those approaches were used and agree with you that a balance is required. Communication has changed and information is much more spread out today. I my opinion the biggest issue is clear communication of goals and a laser sharp focus on the most important priorities. It is a fine line between micro-management and a a lose approach.
Looking foward to know your point of view on the issue.
Thanks for the blog, it has been very usefull!
Jorge

Dear Prof. Davenport,

Strategic Engineering can at best yield moderate results. Strategic Anarchy can produce either extremely good or very poor outcomes. Neither would be acceptable to large sections of stakeholders.

The middle ground that you advocate can be termed Strategic Flexibility. There is a need for quantifiable outcomes, but not to a degree that it becomes an obsession. One needs to look at windows of opportunity rather than water-tight compartments. Similarly, it is desirable for innovation to be an organization-wide phenomenon, but not to the point where the environment becomes chaotic.

Dealing with ambiguity is an important component of strategic flexibility. Equally important is to have goals that stretch an organization but do not result in a breakdown. Learning has to be accompanied by un-learning. This would lead to a virtuous cycle - aim, discover, achieve, discard, re-discover - that can grow as long as we want.

Warm regards

I am doubtful if the rights answer to effective strategy execution lies somewhere in the middle of the two extremes (strategic engineering vs strategic anarchy). Leaving alone whether the two extreme views can be reconciled or not, i am concerned whether it is right to attempt to reconcile and adopt something in the middle of the two extremes.

Just as information explosion causes a bang releasing large volumes of data and not much sense can be made of the humongous volume of data without having intelligent information architecture in place, the strategy execution requires structuring and engineered approach.

As it is said "If you plan you can fail, but if you don't plan, you plan to fail." Not having an engineered approach, a defined roadmap, metrics and benchmarks make is extremely difficult to execute the strategy and to measure the performance of the strategy.

The changing business environment, the "flat world" and information explosion make is vital to adopt an engineered approach - to be able to steer the company and measure and alter the strategy execution. With anarchic approach you will have too many approaches where we will neither be able to measure if we are on track in our execution or if we need to change to adopt to a new business world where that change has to occur.

I think we have seen these two approaches employed to some degree in tandem in many companies. The top-down strategy execution approach using traditional Strategy Maps, Scorecards, Briefing Books and Structured Business Reviews comes from management and it's success depends on how well (not how throughly) it is engineered.

Although rarely at the level of "Strategic Anarchy", most organization try to measure their people on what they do, improve and contribute. Often, the "Annual Goals" and review process is used for this purpose. Done well, this process should link to the top-down strategic goals and allow "those who know" to pursue new, different, and/or entrepreneurial approaches that might have future value. This could range from redesigning a mundane process through the year to organization like Google or 3M that encourage employees to work on pet project that may or may not payoff for the organization in the future. Ideally, this process would feedback into the top-down approach to modify the "engineered" strategy based on employee innovations, ideas, and process improvements.

So the trick, first, seems to do the trick is to do both top down and bottom up performance management well. Then you can really connect the two by doing the following:

* Make the corporate strategic goals and measures clear to all employees
* Make who is responsible for what very clear
* In a real and meaningful way, link employee goals to those corporate goals
* Encourage employees to have other goals (less formally linked perhaps) on their personal list of objectives
* Regularly review corporate goals at a management level, and employee goals with individual employees
* Feedback employee innovations, observations, suggestions, etc. during business reviews.

Mr. Krishnamurthy's comment stands out for me. The "flexibility" required means having standardized processes that enhance both innovation and strategy execution (e.g., strategy creation, linking strategies to tactics and projects to tactics, project acceleration/prioritization/alignment, others). My recent exposure to high-value PMOs, or PMO-like organizations, which I write about in my blog www.projectmanagement411.com, leads me to believe that "PMOs" are a crucial element, along with a governance board (or set of executives) that the PMO supports, for strategy execution.

I believe some of the most important hinderences to the successful execution of strategy are:

LACK OF LEADERSHIP SUPPORT

LACK OF ACCOUNTABILITY

LACK OF ACTION

INSUFFICIENT DEPLOYMENT

POOR DATA ACCESS AND DELIVERY

Planning plays a very important role in the success of the strategy execution. and as a famous saying goes..
" If you plan you can fail, but if you dont plan , you plan to fail ".