Developing Strategies that Stick in Complex, Multistakeholder Environments

July 18, 2024

Have you struggled to develop and implement your strategy? You’re not alone. 90% of organizations fail to execute their strategies successfully.¹

The problem is often rooted in an inability to develop the right strategy and the commitment to deliver on it.

Getting both of these pieces right is particularly challenging for complex, multistakeholder organizations. Complex organizations often have many different groups – spanning different parts of the value chain – that need to be effectively managed and engaged during the strategy’s development.

Developing Strategies with a Change Orientation

We’ve heard several stories from clients that other firms made them feel ‘consulted at’ vs. understood and engaged throughout the process. That’s why our culture and approach pay special attention to how we work with our clients. Our process is a part of our product.

A key part of our approach is developing strategies with a change orientation to ensure that the right focus areas are established and that all stakeholders have a deep-set commitment to deliver.

When developing strategies for complex, multistakeholder organizations, we often lean into three key ways of working:

Engage Early and Often

Broad and frequent engagement helps to build strategies without blind spots and create champions throughout the organization.

Early on, we work with our clients to build engagement plans with a baked-in understanding of the groups that are most important to connect with and how to best leverage them – e.g., as an input into priorities, as part of the decision-making process, as ‘fresh eyes’, etc. Strategic planning should not happen in isolated ivory castles.

Empathize to Understand

Empathy helps people feel heard, ensuring that the strategy is reflective of an organization’s realities and nuances. Asking questions to understand different teams’ perspectives and motivations is a key part of strategy development and decision-making. It’s important early on to understand whether some teams have felt favoured and/or slighted, and what hot-button topics need to be addressed either in the strategy’s development or during its roll-out.

Challenge Thinking and Assumptions

Trying to incorporate everyone’s feedback into a strategy is often an impossible task, and risks an overly generic, unfocused plan. While it’s critical to encourage the sharing of perspectives, we strive to push our clients’ thinking and help them prioritize around what matters most.

We’ve also found that it’s very easy to get sucked into a conversation on challenges, concerns, and limitations by discussing ‘how’ we will deliver what we want to achieve. Starting at the end, and clearly articulating ‘what’ our clients want to accomplish, helps to ensure the strategy is ambitious and not limited by perceived restrictions. Often, we’ll craft a narrative that outlines a bold, future-state that challenges assumptions around what the company can and can’t do.

Core to these ways of working is embracing the power of collaboration and working closely with our clients during the strategy’s development. To do this most effectively, it’s important to remain adaptive to clients’ needs and realities. We often try to go at our clients’ pace + 1 to maintain momentum and help them level up over the course of the engagement.

While the principles above help organizations define the right focus areas and build early commitment to the strategy, cascading your strategy and engaging functional teams is key to effective execution.

Stay tuned for Part 2, which lists best practices that have helped our clients effectively execute their strategies.

¹ HBS, Kaplan “The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action”

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