Implementing strategy means communication and execution. A list of initiatives is neither

An implementation has two components, and it is worth separating them, because companies usually do only the first. Communication ends at the moment you can show the whole company what we are doing and why it is this in particular. Execution starts where a specific team agrees how it will work on it. Between the one and the other, usually everything else falls away, and that is the reason a strategy stays a presentation.

Communication means bringing the strategy down to a single page. On it go: why we exist, where we want to be in the distant future, where we are today, which problems and challenges we are addressing, with which policies (our guiding principles), what our strategic goals are and how we measure them, which indicators of financial health we keep an eye on, what the annual and quarterly goals are, and who takes part in delivering them. Underneath sits the full analysis: markets, competition, data, everything that led to these decisions. We communicate the essence, not the analysis, because from a document several dozen pages long everyone will take away something different and be convinced they understood it correctly. That single page is also a living document: we update it with every iteration of the quarterly objective, when the annual goal changes and when the strategic assumptions change, no less than once a quarter. At the start of an implementation it can be every week.

Execution starts with one quarterly objective and a team put together specifically for that objective, from people in different departments, with the full set of competences needed and without anyone being seconded full time. There is no team for implementing the strategy; there are teams for specific objectives, and their make-up changes from quarter to quarter. Before they start, we check dependencies and the real workload of these people, because the objectives always end up with the same people, the ones who handle everything and are already jammed with day-to-day work and running their teams. The order matters too: first we design the objectives against the strategy, and only then do we apply the team's constraints. The other way round, from people's availability to ambition, is worth doing only when the team is extremely overloaded. Then the work goes on week in, week out, and the quarter is closed by a retrospective that isn't there to improve how the team works together, but to check whether the assumptions from three months earlier held up, and to update the annual goal, the assumptions and the single page.

That leaves the question of how to tell that a given piece of work is strategic at all. Without short-term objectives with hard metrics this can't be settled, because you can stretch a three-year strategy to cover any initiative, and the discussion will end in special pleading. One control question helps: if we had no strategy and no such objectives, would we still be doing this. I won't hide that the methodology itself matters least here. They all grew out of the experience of people who were implementing something, and they are all alike. What decides is the nuances of working with people, and writing a strategy and objectives is decidedly easier than implementing them.