Dynamics of Strategy Deployment

Following on from my last post, and based on the feedback in the comments, I want to say more about the dynamics of Strategy Deployment.

The first point is to do with the directionality. Strategy isn’t deployed by being pushed down from the top of the organisation, with the expectation that the right tactics simply need to be discovered. Rather, the strategy is proposed by a central group, so that decentralised groups can explore and create feedback on the proposal. Thus information flows out and back from the central group. Further, the decentralised groups are not formed down organisational structures, but are cross-organisational so that information also flows between groups and divisions. The following picture is trying to visualise this, where colours represent organisational divisions. Note also that some individuals are both members of a “deployed from” group, and a “deployed to” group – the deployment isn’t a hand-off either.

This means that a Strategy Deployment can begin anywhere in the organisation, in any one of those groups, and by widening the deployment to more and more groups, greater alignment is achieved around common results, strategies, indicators and tactics.

That leads to the second point about emergence. In the same way that the tactical initiatives are hypotheses with experiments on how to implement the strategies, so the strategies themselves are also hypotheses. Tactics can also be viewed as experiments to learn whether the strategies are the best ones. In fact Strategy Deployment can be thought of as nested experimentation, where every PDSA “Do” has its own PDSA cycle.

With regular and frequent feedback cycles from the experiments, looking at the current indicators and results, strategy can emerge as opportunities are identified and amplified, or drawbacks are discovered and dampened. In this way Strategy Deployment explores the evolutionary potential of the present rather than trying to close the gap towards a forecasted future.

These dynamics are often referred to as Catchball in the lean community, as ideas and learnings are tossed around the organisation between groups, with the cycle “Catch, Reflect, Improve, Pass”.

I also like the LAGER mnemonic I mentioned in Strategy Deployment as Organisational Improv, which is another way of thinking about these dynamics.