How To Prevent Strategy Fatigue
The recent Harvard Business Review article, How to Prevent Strategy Fatigue, stated that strategy fatigue is on the rise, with 85% of a survey of business leaders noting “an explosive increase”. It also stated that Gartner reported that the typical organisation has undertaken five major, firmwide reorganisations in the past three years.
HBR describe Strategy Fatigue as being caused by frequent and erratic changes in an organisation’s strategic direction. This constant change indicates to employees that senior management don’t know what they are doing, and fatigue quickly sets in, with even competent employees losing confidence, motivation and energy.
The report gives some examples of when and why strategy fatigue occurs and outlines four key processes to reduce the danger. It recommends following the steps below to ensure your organisation is focused and purposeful.
- Set up a screening criteria
Use this to evaluate if new ideas are aligned to the strategic direction of the organisation and be willing to say no to ideas that don’t fit. - Use scoring frameworks
Use frameworks, such as the WSJF (weighted shortest job first) SaFE methodology to rank ideas by impact and feasibility. - Employ proof-of-concept experiments
Small scale tests of a number of ideas can quickly validate feasibility and highlight the best option, ensuring major resource efforts are correctly focused. - Maintain a single, visible pipeline
Keep a project pipeline to provide visibility and review this on a regular basis to promote and cull projects, ensuring that the pipeline is always accurate.
How can Enterprise Architects Help
As architects, our job should be at the heart of this process, minimising strategy fatigue by facilitating the conversation between different groups:
- We understand the strategy and can spot if ideas are aligning with it or not
- We can run the sessions to prioritise the ideas objectively
- We should be at the core of the PoC, working across teams to validate the ideas work across our business network. It makes us well placed to know who to bring in and when
- We should be at the heart of the change portfolio, knowing which projects can wait or be culled, which can be used to deliver additional capability and where new ones are needed
Clearly, a high level of engagement with the business and good credibility is needed to play this role. For less mature EA teams this is difficult, but it should definitely be an aim for those teams.
How Essential Can Support the Process
If you are an Essential user, we have some powerful support for this. Use the Proposal Editor and Business Portfolio Manager to support steps 2 and 4. See a short video here and contact us for a demo.
Links to other blogs:
Why IT Organisations fail to Exceed Expectations – and How EA can Help the CIO
Turning Strategic Trends into Actionable Proposals