Blog Post #4: Taking Strategy from Development to Implementation

The article Good Strategy Execution Requires Balancing 4 Tensions by Simon Horan and Michael Connerty concisely summarize four key methods to help avoid common issues organizations have when implementing new strategy. In general, I highly agree with the authors goal to highlight end-state and target goals for teams when implementing a strategy, as well as decentralizing and creating a more democratic, collaborative work environment.

Initially, when a strategy is being created there is a timeframe and plan for the end-goal. For example, if an organization is looking to forecast certain industry trends ten years from the present, they may work on trend and forecasting analyses in incremental 2 year periods and form supporting strategies around these anticipated industry changes. The overarching goal for the organization is still ten years in the future, however, the approach is much smaller in scale by way of incremental achievements. When forming the strategy, the organization needs to create challenging yet exciting sub-goals for its workers that can be easily interpreted in the grand scheme of the strategy for these sub-goals’ significance and value. Explicitly expressing the value and importance of these sub-tasks will promote enthusiasm and dedication throughout. Thus, promoting the end-state vision will be that much easier to the organization. “Tension #1” discussed in the article relates directly to “Tension #2” of top-down control vs. democratization of change. To influence appropriate change, it is important to have an informed, enthusiastic, and open-minded organization. By decentralizing the power (to an extent) and allowing leadership teams and groups of employees to work together to achieve the overall company goal, tensions will be reduced and the impact of the company’s strategy can come into fruition.

My knowledge in the healthcare industry takes me to hospitals’ implementation of electronic health records in their health systems after reading the articles this week. There is much emphasis during the strategies leading up to the implementation of these electronic health records of how to accomplish complete utilization by the hospital staff. Part of effective implementation processes highlight implementing these electronic health records in incremental steps as well as instilling a communal, physician-led, transparent environment during the implementation process. These features are both touched on in the article by Horan and Connerty: because to achieve a new software within complex hospital operations and staffing, there needs to be complete understanding and enthusiasm of the software from the employees, transparency from leadership, and a structured/detailed step-process from the implementers.

Additionally, I wanted to touch on the authors’ fourth point about creativity versus discipline. While it is necessary to be well-organized and meticulous once the strategy is agreed upon and ready for implementation, I warn readers to think that this means reducing the creativity required during the pre-strategy brainstorming period. It is important to exhaust all potential ideas and methods for a given issue while the strategy is still being worked out. Then, once the strategy is finalized, it is necessary to act in a disciplined manner.

References:

1.     https://hbr.org/2017/11/good-strategy-execution-requires-balancing-4-tensions

2.     https://ehrintelligence.com/news/ehr-best-practices-choosing-an-ehr-rollout-strategy/