Aligning Vision and Action, HivePowered.Ai Take on "The Quest for a Strategy"
In the business world, we've all encountered an "air sandwich"—that big gap between strategic decisions made at the top and their execution on the ground. High-level executives issue directives from the 80,000-foot view, while the teams tasked with execution are stuck working from a 20,000-foot view. This disconnect leads to a lot of missed opportunities and inefficiencies. Addressing this issue requires implementing strategic measures to create alignment and eliminate the gaps. Nilofer Merchant’s book offers a clear roadmap for tackling this challenge, ensuring that execution systems work seamlessly with leadership’s vision.
What is an Air Sandwich?
As Merchant explains, the primary reason for an air sandwich is that people in organizations get too focused on their individual roles. They lose sight of the larger picture. For speed to market and successful execution, cross-functional collaboration is key. However, what often happens is that the teams responsible for execution feel that leadership doesn’t understand the nitty-gritty details, while leaders think the execution teams aren’t performing effectively. This gap, compounded by poorly designed transactional systems and execution systems, leads to inefficiencies.
Merchant identifies three key systemic issues that contribute to the air sandwich:
Tunnel Vision: People often don’t step beyond their own roles. When there’s no cross-functional participation, the strategy falls apart.
Getting Ahead of Yourself: A focus on action without proper planning or shared thinking will lead to disaster. Without the correct measures in place, execution suffers.
“It’s Not My Job”: When employees see a problem but refuse to solve it because they think it’s beyond their scope, the entire organization suffers.
The Solution: The Quest Process
To close the gap between strategy and execution, Merchant introduces the Quest Process, a step-by-step guide to aligning your team around a shared vision and executing on it effectively.
Questions
Before diving into solutions, start by asking the right questions. You must understand the scope of the problem you're solving. This is called problem architecture, where you define exactly what needs to be tackled. Once that’s established, conduct a fact-finding mission—interviewing key people and gathering insights. Ask questions like:
What do we know about what has been done before?
What results did those actions generate?
What do we need to know about why this worked or didn’t work?
By engaging the right people and gathering a variety of perspectives, you set yourself up for success. Don’t just stop at gathering information—organize it into four categories:
What we know for sure.
What we believe but haven’t confirmed.
What we doubt.
What doesn’t fit.
This phase should take anywhere from one to ten weeks, depending on the complexity of the issue.
Vision
The vision phase is about creating a set of options to solve the problem, given your current circumstances. It’s crucial to involve people at all levels of the organization. This is where you start filling in the gaps—the meat of the air sandwich. The goal here is not harmony but productive conflict. Let ideas clash, but ensure that everyone is clear on what success looks like. For instance, strategic measures like clarifying success criteria for product development, sales, and customer service levels can guide decision-making effectively.
Define success criteria that are specific to the various areas of your organization. For example:
Does it align with our core strengths?
Can it be executed in regions where we are strong?
Does it meet our revenue goals for the next few years?
Select
Now that you’ve gathered options, it’s time to narrow them down. You want to choose the best path forward, not just the easiest. The key is to avoid maximizing, which is when you review every option in excessive detail without making any decisions. You also don’t want to satisfice, which is settling for the first option that meets the minimum requirements.
Use the following steps to select your strategy:
Decide what matters—formalize your criteria.
Sort the ideas—determine which ideas meet the criteria and which don’t.
Test the options—apply the strategy hypothetically and see what insights come up.
Choose—select the strategy based on everything you’ve learned so far.
This phase typically takes a day, but could take longer depending on the complexity.
Take
In the final phase, execution begins. Now that you’ve decided on the best strategy, make sure everyone knows who is responsible for what. Establish clear and measurable terms, just like setting SMART goals. To ensure accountability, ask questions like:
What are the key actions needed to make this a reality?
Do we need to change anything organizationally?
What specific dependencies do we have on other teams?
What risks should we account for?
This phase is all about getting into the details and ensuring that adaptation measures are implemented to adjust for unforeseen obstacles. Clear communication and defined responsibilities reduce risks, especially for transactional systems or wastewater systems that require collaborative effort across multiple teams.
The Role of Feedback, The Cleveland Report
One way to ensure progress is by creating a report card for your organization. The Cleveland Report, an innovative feedback mechanism, can measure the impact of your strategies and track service recipients’ satisfaction. By reviewing the Cleveland Report regularly, you can assess whether your customer service levels are meeting expectations and adjust your execution systems accordingly.
Conclusion
The gap between strategy and execution is a major roadblock for many organizations. But with Nilofer Merchant’s Quest Process, you have a clear framework for aligning your team and turning your strategic vision into reality. The key to success lies in collaboration, detailed planning, and a commitment to seeing things through. When you close that gap, your company will be unstoppable.
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