How to realise your strategy with innovation

Key Takeaways

Executives often struggle to identify initiatives that are most likely to have the greatest strategic impact.

Why? In large part because of what is not known. Most large organisations generate too little evidence of how inputs translate into strategic objectives and KPIs. This makes it almost impossible to have a more dynamic grip on the company’s project portfolio and its impact.

Aligning, evaluating, and prioritising initiatives based on outcomes, on a regular basis, is an ongoing, multi-year journey. It’s a fundamental shift in how everyone in the company thinks and works — acting as one team to deliver on shared goals. The benefits are evident: stronger trust and confidence, shortened cycle time, more value for the money invested.

To make a start, consider the following:

• Get line of sight on all initiatives across your company.
• Create a holistic view of what value they are contributing (or will contribute) to your strategic targets.
• Articulate the KPIs initiatives should meet to demonstrate progress.
• Enable initiative leads to easily capture and report on value, and how frequently; the easier this is to do, the more regular the updates will be to correct course as needed.
• Design a process to attract and allocate talent to the highest-priority initiatives.

From there, kick off with an emphasis on learning what works instead of performance per se. Performance will come naturally as the team gels and you collectively learn more about what drives value for the customers and stakeholders. Focusing too eagerly on performance, especially for high-risk high-reward endeavours typical of innovation, can often erode trust between executive sponsors and delivery teams.