How Strategy Really Looks in Practice: Implementation Antipatterns That Break Strategy

After discussions about choices and priorities calm down, strategy moves into implementation. At that point it is no longer a clean diagram with arrows showing logical connections, but a set of spreadsheets and a long strategic-plan document, often managed through HR and reduced to incentive calculations based on KPIs.

If you’re curious about why more than 80% of strategies fail¹, let’s look under the hood at how a typical strategy actually looks when implemented…

I’m not a classical strategy consultant who talks about strategy as choices and priorities (I believe your team has enough expertise to pick the right directions). What I’m interested in is how to effectively project those choices and priorities into a result-oriented strategy architecture.

Strategy Implies Uncertainty; It Cannot Be Treated Just Like Another Project

There is a famous saying by Roger Martin that a plan is not a strategy. In the context of the HBR video² where it is articulated, it makes perfect sense.

A typical follow-up to the “a plan is not a strategy” opener is discussion around what strategy actually is—strategy as a set of coherent choices, strategy cascade, etc.

But the “plan” part is rarely in focus. It feels implied that a strategy execution is like any other plan implemented according to project-management principles…

But is it?

I’d argue that it’s quite different. The main difference is that:

A strategic plan deals with a significantly higher degree of uncertainty, and that uncertainty impacts how it should be implemented.

When implementing strategy, we are trying to manage this uncertainty from different angles:

• Understanding uncertainty itself by analysing external factors, competition, and most importantly stakeholders and their needs
• Constantly validating strategy in execution, where we set up experiments, track execution with performance metrics, find unexpected deviations, and learn from them

This affects how a strategic plan is managed. Instead of a simple project with a due date and completion indicators (i.e., KPI-centric execution), we need to:

• Capture results of analyses,
• Formulate hypotheses (goals) we’d like to test and their rationale,
• Define effort and outcome metrics, and
• Plan feedback and learning loops.

Actual Strategy Implementation Lives in Spreadsheets, and It Is a Problem

When leading conversations with our clients, we often see the “starting point”—where the strategy lives before organisations start their journey toward automation.

You might suppose that in most cases we have to convince clients to switch from competitors’ platforms, but that’s not the case.

Most strategies live in Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides.

Even if a company has an ERP with strategic planning functionality, the real strategy still lives in spreadsheets.

And it’s a problem because of various factors:

• Data consistency is not guaranteed; anyone can change a KPI value;
• Either it is oversimplified and doesn’t capture the actual performance model, or it is more realistic with performance-based formulas that tend to break³;
• Strategy maps are static and require manual updates; as a result, they are typically outdated;
• Evidence documents don’t form part of this, so any audit is a nightmare;
• All this is typically distributed across various spreadsheets, without real alignment between them.

For example, one retail client tracked customer satisfaction in five different spreadsheets owned by marketing, support, regional managers, HR, and finance. Each used a different formula and reporting period. At the executive meeting, five different “customer satisfaction” numbers were presented, and no one could explain which one reflected reality. The strategy discussion was about debating numbers instead of improving customer experience.

The bottom line:

• A strategy in spreadsheets is not a scalable option.

We discuss this in “ROI for Moving from Spreadsheets”⁴ and provide an ROI calculator to estimate potential savings.

“Outsourcing” Strategy to Line Managers Breaks the Learning Loop

Another practical observation is about who is actually behind strategy implementation.

While strategy (as choices) is typically a responsibility of the C-level, strategy implementation is often “outsourced” to line managers who manage the strategy spreadsheets and ensure reporting is smooth.

That might be an efficient way to report performance, but it is not the way organisations learn from strategy execution.

Learning happens when you try to break down complex goals into actionable chunks, when you discuss with your team the best way to measure success, when you try to work on this in practice and it doesn’t work as expected, you learn from this and start over.

Reducing all this to a simple reporting function and expecting bright insights is rather naive on the part of senior managers. Why do most strategy implementations fail? That’s one more reason.

Performance Management Is Not Just Calculation of Incentives

Another frequent case is incentives-first strategies.

The role of strategists in this case is played by HR, and the overall logic is to align strategy execution directly with incentives. If an employee does what he or she is supposed to do, bonuses are paid. It’s a nice attempt to make things work. It might be relevant for more deterministic levels, but it typically fails at the strategy level.

My logic here is that strategy is not a fixed plan; it’s the validation of many hypotheses in practice.

What we can do is align incentives with the validation process itself, but not with the results of those validations.

Otherwise, we’ll simply see a shift from trying new hypotheses to business as usual, just to keep indicators in the green zone.

What Does It Actually Mean When Someone Says “We Have a Strategic Plan”?

To complete the theme of “what strategy looks like in practice,” it’s worth mentioning what you can expect if someone says, “We have a strategic plan!”

Talking about format, it won’t be a spreadsheet document (not yet); be prepared for at least a 40–60+ page document.

In essence, there is nothing wrong with those documents. If we look separately at their parts, we can typically find what’s needed:

• Strategic choices and their rationale
• Objectives articulated
• Performance measurement methods defined
• Even detailed analysis of stakeholders and driving forces

But there are also two typical problems you need to be prepared for:

• Frameworks are often followed superficially by filling in empty boxes. For the Balanced Scorecard, for example, aspirations will be grouped according to four perspectives, but no cause-and-effect logic will be captured.
• Aspirations are formulated but are typically not decomposed to an actionable level where it’s clear how value for stakeholders will be created and how success will be measured.

Last but not least, large textual documents are not the best format to discuss and communicate strategy, so the document is usually archived until the next annual review.

The implementation part then goes back to spreadsheets, with all the drawbacks discussed before.

These patterns are common across industries, and they explain why strategies that look convincing on paper rarely survive implementation.

Conclusions

The first step in solving a problem is recognising it. Review your existing strategy implementation and reflect on possible weak points:

• Do those who “implement” strategy only perform reporting, or can they contribute to the learning loop?
• Isn’t your strategy a pure fiction limited to calculating incentives?
• Does your strategic plan actually create clarity for those who execute it? Is it manageable?
• Do you treat strategy as just another project, or do you recognise the uncertainty it deals with?
• Do your strategies live in spreadsheets and presentation slides?

Alexis Savkín

Alexis Savkin is a Strategy Implementation Architect and founder of BSC Designer, a strategy execution and Balanced Scorecard software platform. He helps organizations automate performance management and turn strategy into measurable results. Alexis is the creator of the “Strategy Implementation System”, author of 100+ articles on strategy and performance measurement, a regular speaker at industry events.