Marrying Strategy & Execution

I’ve spent the past decade working closely with college presidents, vice-presidents, directors and front-line staff to make sense of digital transformation. Everything from formulating and executing high-level strategy, to working with developers to implement CMS solutions, crafting content guides and social media strategy too. So much of the conventional wisdom that we embrace, comes from people who are far removed from the day to day challenges that many organizations face.

From my travels around the country, I have heard from thousands of people who have significant challenges that would mystify the most ardent believers in organizational change. Most of the books, frameworks, and other tactics that we use to order our steps at work are born out of a belief that all you have to do is implement and execute change and that people regardless of their position, power or orientation will embrace change wholeheartedly.

Those of us who live in the real world recognize that that is not actually what happens at all. Change can be difficult in transformation can be impossible in most organizations. The funny thing is, if you ask most leaders they would think their organization are exempt from this kind of criticism.

In a world with increase student loan debt, diminishing state funding for public institutions, and an increased assault by Silicon Valley in the form of rhetoric that indicates for the first time since the 1970s that a graduating high school student doesn’t have to go to college semicolon higher education is under assault by threats that could not have been foreseen a generation ago. Without a wholesale change in the way institutions approach organizational design & strategy, the industry as a whole will suffer across the board.

It’s worth noting that while I’m focusing almost exclusively on colleges and universities because they are the audience I have primarily worked with, it’s also been my experience that many of these tactics, ideas, and strategies apply to other types of nonprofits, agencies and companies across the board.

The challenges ahead

There are serious issues with understanding how to manage the full user-experience to include digital. Most technical concerns are being managed by non-technical people within their silos and at the moment, Technology/IT issues are solved as more of a “problem solving” entity than from a strategic view.

This leaves lots of people who are outside of the depth of their experience making key decisions and leaving the rest of the decisions to outside consultants who lack a real understanding of the complexities of the environment that having a system entail.

Most traditional marketing and strategy books do not have the capabilities necessary to complete a digital world. By the time you read a book about strategy or the workplace examples are outdated.

Too often the case studies that they use our case studies that affect major corporations with billion dollar budget. While these ideas can be instructive to some degree, the reality is that institutions or organizations at a much smaller level don’t have the capabilities to compete with these types of examples.

Strategy means nothing without execution

“In the context of strategic design, ideas are important, but only when they lead to impact.” 
— Recipes for Systemic Change (Helsinki Design Lab)

Too often strategy becomes proxy for formulating ideas without execution. It’s common to end up in organizations to spend hours, days and years formulating strategies semicolon pivoting between 180 and the next idea without any sort of action plan to actually execute what it is they’ve been talking about.

How many times do you set in a meeting about a project you knew had no chance of ever being launched, but were expected to act in good faith as though it might.

These types of families are common when thinking about digital in higher institutions, because it’s the newest shiniest object. Given that digital strategy, platforms and other tools are constantly evolving, it gets really easy to always feel the need to adapt to the newest thing. I can recall x years ago when it was very difficult to convince any marketing director anywhere that social media was a valuable tool. Today attend any conference and you will find 10 or 20 sessions talking about the best ways to use Facebook or Twitter. Times change and so do we.

In thinking about strategic design, there is a need to reflect on how the work that we do is so interconnected and so intertwined that it doesn’t necessitates another department or silo to do the work.

Instead, what we need is to reimagine and envision creative role and functional roles that leverage the complexities and details of individuals expertise that comes with living in a digital society.

Gone are the days that one person did one job for their entire career, now people are expected to have capabilities in diverse arenas. We need people working together across silos to devise the problems and solve them, rather than relying on a brilliant few to save us all.

Fewer experts. More collaboration.

It’s seductive to think one or two experts can solve all of our organizational woes. Everything from funnel problems to structuring the entire website cannot be solved by speaking it into practice. It takes a more deliberate and slower path, but with a type of coordination that will enable better decision-making.

Your people know your organization better than you think. It’s seductive to think hiring a consultant can solve every problem, but that’s not the consultant’s role. Think of the consultant like a generator providing extra power to a team that’s already plugged into a strong grid. If you’re having constant power failures, the generator is surely an expensive way to keep the lights on.

Empowering the people within our own organizations is a much better method to curating experiences.