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Episode Transcript:
In this episode of the Strategy Podcast,
I want to talk about the eighth mistake
I see companies make that makes
strategy execution really hard,
and this is a mistake
that actually slows down
the execution of a strategy.
And it really relates to
having a decision cycle
that is too slow or has no tempo to it,
which is perhaps even
worse than being slow.
By tempo I mean regularity.
You want it to be happening
on a regular basis.
What’s common is you come up
with a strategic initiative,
you maybe use a steering
committee or some group
or executive that’s responsible
for that initiative.
There’s a work team or
maybe there’s sub work teams
underneath that that are
trying to get work done.
Because of people’s calendars,
you end up scheduling the
steering committee meetings
every four weeks or every six weeks
and what happens is you
have a huge batch of issues,
decisions that need to be made
over the course of those four weeks
and they get packed into this
steering committee meeting
and every issue that
possibly can get addressed
tries to get squeezed into that meeting
because if you don’t
get it in that meeting,
you’re going to have to wait
another four to six weeks
to get any progress on it.
So you end up with these overloaded,
over pressured meetings,
then you have the meeting
and then the executives
needs more information and now
it’s another four weeks before
you’re getting to a decision.
So you end up just slowing everything down
with this slow pace.
And if there’s not a regular pace,
then people don’t know how quickly
they need to get things in
and that causes a lot of confusion
and problems within the execution process.
A much better way to approach this
is to actually have regular meetings
in a much shorter duration
in terms of lapse time
between the meetings
and in terms of the time you
actually take in the meeting.
If you’re meeting, say,
for two and a half hours
or three hours every four weeks,
meet for an hour every week
or 45 minutes every week.
Frankly you’ll get more done,
the project will go faster,
decisions will get
addressed much more quickly,
you’ll find that there’s
fewer urgent things
that need immediate
attention because they’re
kind of all fitting
into this weekly cycle,
and in a week, you’re giving the team
enough time to actually
get some work done.
And the other thing
about a weekly schedule
is it prevents the team
from over investing
in elaborate presentations that they may
end up doing if you have four weeks
because you just can’t keep up that pace
and come up with elaborate
material every week.
You end up with things that
are more like a discussion
and a conversation about
progress that’s being made,
decisions that need to be taken,
issues that need to be addressed.
And that’s really what you
want is that conversation
to be happening among the people
who can actually move the project forward,
and by having that on a
frequent, shorter basis
you’ll find that you end
up moving the process along
much more quickly and
much more effectively.
I hope this Strategy
Podcast has been helpful
and useful to you in your work.
I’m Alex Nesbitt, I’ll see
you in the next podcast.
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