If we want better results and outcomes, then something has to be changed or adapted. That’s a given, at least for the context of this message. Another given is the virtually ubiquitous goal and expectation of creating better results, particularly in global business organizations today. With those two givens as context, let’s consider the following questions: what are the typical patterns of what an organization needs to change, and how can those changes be affected in order to get the intended better outcome results?
The answer is found in the challenging dynamics of changing the ecosystem; the potentially complex system of interactions that connect the people, process, and technology of any business venture.
Culture and Execution on a change spectrum
It is said that “execution is the key to results” and that “strategy drives execution”. It is also said that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. That means changing execution practices directly to change results will generally not be sustainable. However the “other end of the spectrum”, attempting to drive better results by changing culture, is typically too slow an approach for today’s fast-paced business environments of perishable opportunities and emergent disruptions.
But don’t Strategy and Execution need to be aligned?
Absolutely they do. They just cannot be aligned directly, without addressing additional factors.
So what else do we need to know? What are the additional factors?
First, let’s look at the drivers behind the Culture to Execution spectrum. At one end, Culture eats Strategy for breakfast because Culture embodies the principal execution habits of an organization. Execution habits, on the other end of the spectrum, are sustainability reinforced by the habits that form a Culture. Those two dynamics tend to reinforce the current status quo, or at least the current trajectory of our results pattern.
So what’s missing, if we want better results and outcomes? What’s missing is the additional realization that Culture emerges from an Ecosystem, not from a direct influence.
This realization allows us to propose the following hypothesis based on typical patterns observed across multiple organizations: aligning strategy and execution is primarily dependent on the ecosystem that exists for an organization. The corollary hypothesis is that creating better results and outcomes requires aligning strategy and execution in a symbiotic relationship. The concluding hypothesis is the following: to create better results and outcomes, in a sustainable way, the seminal change target is not Strategy and not even Culture; rather, the transformative change target is the ecosystem.
There’s a lot I could and will say about the ecosystem and driving transformational change;
- initially, I’ll refer back to OKRs and MBIs as a key component of the ecosystem;
- secondly, I’ll highlight the observation that we must sustain changes and the transformative dynamics in the ecosystem until the Culture itself changes, not merely until the change is understood;
I’ll plan to elaborate on these observations and the related patterns in a future post, to be written shortly.