Thanks to those of you who voted in our first poll, which asked "What is the single biggest challenge that impacts your organization's ability to execute strategy effectively?"
The results (shown below), indicate that the 2 biggest problems are:
- A lack of focus (too many competing objectives, initiatives, projects)
- Too much "fire fighting” to rise above the chaos
In my opinion, these two issues are different sides of the same problem, which is the lack of a disciplined management framework that prioritizes and focuses on the critical few objectives and initiatives in order to make progress toward your long term vision (which, in turn reduces inefficiencies, chaos, and stress.)
Until # 1 (lack of focus) is addressed, chaos will persist in any organization, and does exist in most. It must be handled through triage or "fire fighting" and will not improve until the root causes for it are eliminated.
To address this systemic problem requires a culture change that involves not only why and how to prioritize and focus, but how to manage that way over time, how to hold people accountable for executing the most important priorities, and which methodologies to use to eliminate the root causes of chaos-causing problems.
First, an organization has to be motivated to focus better. Usually, that entails either a "burning platform" that persists or even just a chaos-like culture that persists, with no apparent progress toward improvement. Even when there is a motivation to focus better by working on fewer objectives and initiatives, people in general aim to please and may just naturally say "yes" to too many initiatives that can't be resourced.
The good news is that there are great prioritization methodologies available to use during Strategic and Business Planning and, rather than pushing lower priority initiatives off the table, they can be sequenced (delayed to a later date). Emotionally, people deal with sequencing of initiatives much better than eliminating them, although the result may be the same. Regardless, the most important ones will be worked on first.
If a disciplined methodologoy is then used with those high priority initiatives to eliminate the root causes, and if monthly progress reviews are used to hold people accountable for timeliness, the chaos and stress will gradually be transformed into order and business results will improve.
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