Every organization has a strategic implementation stack (and some have more gaps and holes than others).

And organizations often wonder how Objectives and Key Results may fit with, or map within, their existing practices and methodologies. Here, we’ll share a peek at the typical approach we see most organizations operating with, and compare and contrast that with a fully connected strategic stack.

Start here to assess your organization’s existing strategic stack and gaps, and then you can craft a plan to fill the most important gaps to help your organization connect implementation to strategy.

After reviewing the biggest gaps below, check out a draft chapter from the upcoming No-BS OKRs, which goes into more detail about the Connected Strategic Stack.

How most organizations plan

And, this organization may be so busy trying to complete their planned activities and hoping they achieve that annual plan: where, here, are they able to identify and reduce their operational frictions?

So this brings us to discussion of a few specific gaps present in this typical approach.

The hope / confidence gap

Over and over, I work with visionary, innovative leaders who feel they’re struggling to motivate and energize their teams around their vision. These leaders are often working to deliver on external expectations: they may be responsible for projecting optimism and confidence to shareholders and board members. They may be responsible for achieving aggressive growth goals (often without a commensurate increase in resources).

What these leaders have is an abundance of optimism and hope, and often a high level of trust and confidence in their teams. But that’s different than having a high level of confidence in a connected operational plan with signal data at their fingertips to know — objectively — how the organization is performing to plan.

The fuel / friction gap

I owe an entire article about the fuel / friction gap, but here’s a short version. Organizational Psychologist Loran Nordgren talks about the human tendency toward focusing on fuel. That we typically, naturally, rely on fuel to elevate and enhance the value of an idea. Our visionary leaders will talk about that long-range strategic plan with fuel, with excitement, with emotional appeals, with giving us data, with persuasion, with evidence. And all of those things are intended to help us get excited about change or a new initiative. Often, leaders are able to do this with high integrity (although sometimes, when the inherent allure of the thing is insufficient, our tendency is to just keep adding fuel).

Fuel also comes in the form of answers, of solutions, of ideas. And fuel is very important. But in an analogy I use when teaching Planning Coaches and OKR Coaches involving a car with its front bumper resting against a bumper-height brick wall: fuel can only get us so far.

That proverbial bumper-height brick wall: it’s an extreme example of friction. It’s an unseen force that impedes our forward progress. And there are many frictions in our organizations — and especially in our change and transformation efforts. They may be psychological forces and the behavioral forces that resist change. Our frictions act as drag on our innovation and our ability to change.

Professor Nordgren also teaches that frictions require curiosity and discovery.

They are not simple problems with simple answers. They also, often, bear more of a resemblance to calculus than simple arithmetic: so jumping to an answer — applying fuel — can lead to the wrong answer (at best) and may even be harmful to the organization (at worst).

In the work I do with large enterprises this is one of the largest pitfalls I see with traditional approaches to integrated strategic planning even after the implementation of methodologies meant to increase our alignment — like OKRs. The work we do to align on our strategic implementation plans often results in awareness of these frictions, but I have yet to see a major organizational friction resolved through the frantic random activity of ideas about how to solve them that come even from well-executed bottoms-up OKR setting.

Addressing our most important operational frictions takes investigation and courageous, cooperative strategic leadership — which, you’ll notice, isn’t present in that typical strategy stack above.

For more information on behaviors around fuel & friction with Loran Nordgren listen to: ‎Hidden Brain: Work 2.0: The Obstacles You Don't See on Apple Podcasts

The aspirational / achievable gap

In this traditional approach, organizations also tend to have a confusing mix of scales their goals align to. Some goals may be commits: mandatory must-achieves where there are serious consequences for non-achievement. Other goals may be aspirational or hopeful: lofty, visionary goals we’d love to hit in support of our mission (that if we make progress toward them but don’t fully achieve them, that’s still important progress). To complicate it further: in many organizations individual performance pay may be connected to these goals, creating incentives for conservative goal-setting and disincentivizing us from boldly setting stretch goals where sometimes we must in order to transform or innovate.

The urgency / importance gap

In traditionally-planned organizations, we may have long-range, strategic-plan-oriented folks with their eyes focused on some point in the organization’s future three to five years out, sitting next to implementation teams mired in surviving their next two-week sprint. Those teams — who may need to collaborate and cooperate to ensure our near-term and long-term success — may be working on different calendars without any way to translate between their time horizons. Taking an annual focus doesn't drive urgency around near-term progress; it’s too easy when we plan annually to continue our business as usual and then just hope it adds up to our annual goal.

Instead, we must shift away from siloed and inconsistent planning approaches and align on and stay focused on our most important impacts on a more frequent basis.

The activity / impact gap

We’re in the home stretch on the gaps, friends. And this one is huge. Traditional approaches to planning tend to have huge gaps between our company-level strategy and then teams that often start and finish their planning by identifying what activity they have planned. But over and over what these organizations find is that they’re stuck in an activity trap: delivering on their plans, achieving milestones, and checking items off of their checklists and then wondering

“But what does all this activity achieve?”

Our teams can deliver every item on their work plan and we may fail to achieve our growth goals for any number of organizational, market or ecosystem factors. Especially, if we’ve not agreed in advance on what our leading indicators of progress are toward our lagging most important outcome measures.

When we don’t identify the most important objective measures of success that signal progress toward our larger strategic priorities, we may find ourselves on an activity-treadmill: running hard, but not necessarily actually getting where we need to.

It can be extremely challenging for teams and people to shift their thinking from activity to impact: there are a slew of organizational (and human behavior) factors that make this shift a challenge. But, when organizations succeed in enabling and then making that shift, we see cooperation unlocked, efficiency increase, wasted work and effort reduced and an increased ability to manage capacity and resources based on agreed priorities (instead of assumptions or other subjective criteria).

The cross-functional alignment & cooperation gap

Last, despite talk and good intention around collaboration and togetherness, in traditional planning models teams are often ultimately competing for budget, capacity and resources. Even in organization that work well together, given the other gaps discussed above, we may find ourselves unable to aligning together because of lack of organizational focus, and even simple lack of cross-functional awareness and visibility because of how siloed our planning and operations may be.

Sound familiar?

If so, you’re in good company. And: hope is not lost. When we recognize these gaps we can more easily close them with a few shifts to our strategic stack.

Closing the strategic implementation gap

Curious to learn more?

• The No-BS OKRs Workbook is available in PDF format!

• My full-length business book, “You Are A Strategist: Use No-BS OKRs to Get Big Things Done,” will be out before the end of the year.

• Check out this draft chapter from the print books in progress, dedicated to the Connected Strategic Stack.

Join our email list here for more information, and if you have additional questions in the meantime, I’d love to hear from you.