Strategic Agility by Bettina Büchel and Rhoda Davidson - Preview

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Strategic Agility: The Art of Piloting Initiatives

Stacking the odds in your favor

Distilling strategy into a few core initiatives that focus on improving existing operations and exploring new possibilities for driving growth is difficult enough, but it is during the execution phase that things get even more difficult and derailment often happens, so quick learning is essential. Just 18% of strategic initiatives succeed; by this, we mean they were actively adopted and widely implemented in their organizations or introduced into the market. 1 Why are so few strategic initiatives successful in generating commitment and delivering value to their businesses? Our

experience indicates that the successful outcome of a strategic initiative is largely linked to a successful start – namely a pilot. So, here is our message: Pilots showcase a new practice to the rest of the company or introduce a new product to a customer. On the one hand, they are about quick learning, but they are also about creating widespread commitment to a strategic initiative or getting a customer excited about a new

“ Our experience indicates that the successful outcome of a strategic initiative is largely linked to a successful start – namely a pilot.  ”

product. A well-managed pilot offers many tangible ways of increasing the chances of success of an initiative. So, plan to be successful from the start. We wrote this book to help you stay competitive by launching strategic initiatives that improve your business and deliver innovative ideas for new products or services through successfully sequencing and learning from the early implementation of these initiatives – the essential ingredients for strategic agility. By strategic initiatives, we mean action-oriented choices – exploitative or exploratory in nature – that matter to the organization’s success over the next few years. Piloting a strategic initiative is the process of creating a new 1  S&P 500 companies use a variety of labels for strategic initiatives ranging from strategic priorities, areas of focus, strategic objectives, ambitions, etc. (Source: Sull, Donald, Stefano Turconi, Charles Sull, and James Yoder. “Turning Strategy into Results.” Strategic Management Journal , Spring 2018: 1–12.)