Is your organisation ready a new Strategy Launch?
Assess whether your organisation is ready for a new strategy launch.
Launching a new strategy into an organisation that’s not ready to absorb it comes with a high risk of failure. We’ve put together this short checklist based on years of working with leaders and organisations to help you assess the risk to the organisation of launching a new strategy.
The same failure modes are evident across industries. The good news is that by understanding where it is you’re not ready, you can take steps to prepare to get the organisation ready and drastically increase the chances of the successful launch of a new strategy.
Download the short , one-page, checklist and see how you score.
Why Launching a new Strategy into an Organisation that isn’t ready is suboptimal
When organisations launch strategies without understanding their capacity to absorb them, things often don’t work as hoped for. This can be for a number of reasons, which as
The checklist helps you understand:
Which parts of the organisation are / are not ready to absorb a new strategy
It amplifies them
This white paper helps you assess:
Leadership Commitment and Capacity
Without both, strategies are likely not to land as desired.
The level of Measures and Feedback required
When the wrong measures are used and feedback is misinterpreted, failure is not only more likely but also more likely to be missed.
How visible strategy is to the workforce
If the workforce can’t see it, or can’t see its value, strategy is unlikely to succeed.
Overall the checklist contains five groups of questions taken from many years’ real-life experience in implementing strategies in organisations across different business domains.
If the organisation isn’t ready to absorb your strategy, it’s doomed to be suboptimal at best. Knowing your organisation’s readiness is, therefore, critical.
Toby Corballis
This checklist is quick to do and will help you get a real sense of where you are in terms of readiness.
It is written for leaders who want to escape the trap of half-implemented strategies and get a real understanding of how to maximise for strategic success
Related article – Why Strategy Dies at the Front Line: 5 Red Flags Your Organisation Isn’t Ready for a New Strategy
What this checklist is (and isn’t)
This checklist is:
A quick list of pointers to determine how ready you are to launch a new strategy .
Aimed at those wanting to understand where in the organisation needs improvement to ready it for the laugh of a new strategy.
This guide is not:
A comprehensive deep-dive into organisational strategic readiness.
A guide to how to solve any issues with lack of readiness.
A checklist of “things to try”.
Who this is for
This checklist is for leaders who have experienced suboptimal implementation of strategies in the past and want to know if their organisation is now in a good place to launch. In particular:
CEOs wanting to understand the likelihood of strategic success.
Leaders accountable for strategy governance and value realisation.
Leaders wanting a quick way to assess organisational readiness.
If your organisation has struggled to implement strategy in the past and you weren’t quite sure why, this checklist is for you.
(Free. No registration required.)
Common questions about Strategic Readiness
This is a big area, but one of the biggest is the inability of the organisation to absorb the new strategy either because it is miscommunicated or because of alignment problems.
That would be nice but one of the main issues is how people understand the instruction to do so? Often this is interpreted by different people in different ways, even within leadership.
There are many tools for this and, to a degree, what is best for you to use will depend on the size and shape of your organisation. One of the best – when implemented well – is Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).
Further reading
If you want to know more about strategy and organisational flow, we suggest the following articles:
Why strategic alignment fails without delivery confidence.
Why sensible strategies fail to produce outcomes.
Build delivery confidence even as strategic priorities shift.