The legend of the Elephant Graveyard says that when an elephant senses death approaching, it leaves the group and goes to a special place to avoid becoming a burden to the herd. With strategy failure rates that can go all the way to 90%, the legend serves as a good analogy for business management: Is execution the place where all brilliant strategies go to die?

Data from the State of Strategy Management Report 2024 reveals that 61% of professionals in the MENA region disagree or are neutral to the statement, ”My organization is highly successful in executing strategy.” Only 4% of respondents strongly agreed with this statement. In addition, research from the Project Management Institute shows that 70% of strategic projects fail during implementation or face serious difficulties.

Given this challenge, how can organizations close the strategy-execution gap and successfully bring their strategy to life?

Strategy Clarity

Traditionally, strategy is the brain (critical decision-making) and execution is the hands (plan implementation). However, corporate strategy may appear as a collection of projects, goals, and targets in a fancy PPT or PDF format but rarely addresses implementation issues. In reality, strategy implementation is always confronted with big decisions, with teams often left to sort out operational details on their own and make decisions that impact the strategy’s outcomes.

Another challenge is the need for a 1:1 interdependency between a strategic initiative and a corporate objective, which requires teamwork among several departments. This is true in MENA organizations where cross-collaboration is found to be the main reason for strategy failure. How should management solve this?

Action Item 1: Demystify Concepts

Strategic clarity can be achieved by building a common language. A simple step is progressing from a confusing collection of projects, goals, and targets to clearly defined terms and a hierarchy of concepts used in strategy planning (see Figures 1 and 2). Action

Item 2: Cross-Functional Alignment

Functional areas must be supported to develop strategy maps and performance scorecards aligned with corporate strategy and across departments. This alignment process has to facilitate cross-functional discussions to synchronize priorities. At this level, the Strategy Office must moderate different trade-offs in terms of KPI targets and resource allocation to ensure the best outcomes for the organization overall.

Strategy Planning as a Continuum Rather Than a Linear Process

Traditional five-year plans, often broken down into annual priorities, limit leaders and hardly reflect daily business needs. The strategy planning framework should leave room for adaptability and new opportunities. It is important to note that the degree of flexibility varies among organizations and industries. For instance, start-ups tend to carry out “strategy planning on the go” unlike mature companies.

Action Item 1: Analyze Data

To adapt to the developments in the market, organizations must be able to collect data, analyze trends, and foresee trends within the industry. This involves assigning a team or a staff member to regularly (quarterly, biannually) research and submit reports for executive review.

Action Item 2: Test Ideas

Organizations that test their ideas, fail, and learn fast are much more likely to succeed. Google’s 20-percent time policy enables employees to use work time for new ideas, and Amazon’s “Day 1” mentality promotes experiments for incubating new capabilities and embracing failures for learning.

Action Item 3: Prepare a Fallback Strategy

Scenario planning and contingency plans provide the necessary agility to overcome challenges and thrive in an uncertain business environment. This approach can provide an organization with a buffer when the initial strategy fails. A case study to look at is Caterpillar, whose CEO insisted that all divisions have contingency plans in the case of a recession, and it served them well when recession hit in 2007.

Governance and Management System

An organization has to establish a clear operating model, especially when a new strategy requires significant changes in operations. The operating model must define the responsibilities of each business unit and department and indicate how services and products are produced, marketed, sold, and delivered to the beneficiaries.

Action Item 1: Assign Owners

Strategic objectives, KPIs, and initiatives must have assigned owners. Even with shared objectives (by two or more departments), one stakeholder should be appointed owner. It is also desirable to define accountability and responsibility and assign them to the people closer to the action to make sure that executives are not burdened with too many operational issues.

Action Item 2: Encourage Collaboration

The strategy office can engage with the human resources department to create collaboration mechanisms and engage stakeholders in executing strategy. In addition to routine performance reporting meetings, ”communication bridges” must be built between functional areas, such as mixed project teams, cross-functional initiatives, internal communities of practice, and company-wide problem-solving workshops.

Action Item 3: Align Talent

Clarify the roles and responsibilities for all positions and implement structures that maintain accountability while allowing flexibility and empowerment, avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy. Assign the right people to the right roles or invest in upskilling them or acquiring new talent. Fill organizational layers with leaders who have focused mindsets and adequate discipline to follow things through.

Optimized Reporting

With thousands of hours lost in meetings every year at the organizational level, performance review meetings can be optimized by using a structured reporting framework and focusing on the most relevant KPIs.

Action Item 1: Structure Meetings

Meetings should have clear distinctions and scopes. For example, the corporate performance office can have a 40-minute meeting for scorecards and initiatives every month. Then, the quarterly meeting can focus on strategic discussions. Lastly, the annual meeting can be about the organization's results, analyzed to align with the medium-term targets and expectations for next year.

Action Item 2: Choose the Right KPIs

Organizations should select fewer KPIs and shift the focus from financial outcomes to other indicators that can drive the right behavior. For example, since its inception, Amazon has focused on KPIs such as # Online reviews per product, # Affiliates selling on the platform, and # Prime members joining the program [sic]. Meanwhile, their competition concentrated on $ Year-overyear same-store sales, approaching e-commerce similar to a brick-and-mortar store. Experimenting with new KPIs, as opposed to indicators that are popular or easy to measure, can bring a fresh perspective to the business.

Stakeholder Engagement

When strategy moves from the CEO's desk into execution, resistance among the people arises, as if all they can see are the roadblocks and risks. The brilliance of the strategy is rarely acknowledged, and the two sides become defensive, pushing their opposite perspectives against one another either out in the open or in silence. True ownership can only be achieved through participation.

Action Item 1: Identify Stakeholders The organization must identify and map its stakeholders based on their importance, impact, and expectations. This applies to both external and internal stakeholders.

Action Item 2: Engage Internal Stakeholders

In drafting a strategy, top executives should be directly engaged, and feedback should be collected from the lower levels of the organization. Middle management may provide written observations or a diverse strategy review committee can revise and comment on proposals. Listening sessions, surveys, or one-to-one interviews can also be conducted depending on the target audience. This approach is done at BL Companies, an architecture and engineering organization that is 100% employee-owned. An annual survey is conducted among employees to gather insights for strategy planning.

Action Item 3: Design Communication Flows

Engaging stakeholders in strategy planning is important, but it is equally important to maintain effective bottom-up and top-down communication during the execution stage. Through a structured reporting process, disciplined rituals to follow up on decisions, and communication bridges (vertical and horizontal), the organization can successfully implement its strategy plan.

Turning Strategy Into Reality

Strategy execution does not have to be the graveyard of brilliant strategies. With the right approach, it can instead be the factory that turns dreams into reality. To achieve this, organizations must acknowledge that the problem they are aiming to tackle is twofold—systems and people. Both aspects have to be addressed properly by clarifying strategy, planning as a continuum, building the right governance and management systems, optimizing reporting, and properly engaging stakeholders throughout the entire process.