Agility through Unity and Fluidity

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From the course by University of Virginia

Strategic Planning and Execution

207 оценки

University of Virginia

Strategic Planning and Execution

207 оценки

Course 4 of 5 in the Specialization Business Strategy

Avoid the pitfalls of strategy planning and execution with the tools and skills from this course. You'll learn the pillars of strategy execution--analysis, formulation, and implementation--and how to use the 4A model to effectively approach strategy execution. Finally, a panel of leaders from entrepreneurs, nonprofits, and industry, share their expertise gleaned from years of successful strategy planning and execution.

From the lesson

Strategy Implementation

We welcome Professor Scott Snell to the course this week! He's a global specialist in strategy execution, and he shares his 4A Model for effective strategy execution: alignment, ability, agility, and architecture. This framework will help you ensure the human and organizational resources are in place to effectively execute your strategy.

The Importance of Strategy Execution6:15

The 4A Model of Strategy Execution7:14

Introduction to Alignment6:57

Achieving Alignment8:43

Introduction to Ability9:12

Investing in Talent9:39

Introduction to Architecture6:59

How Architecture Drives Performance8:07

Architecture Best Practices4:34

Introduction to Agility6:02

Agility through Organizational Learning6:31

Agility through Unity and Fluidity5:04

Module Lessons2:53

Meet the Instructors

Michael Lenox
Senior Associate Dean and Chief Strategy Officer
Darden School of Business
Jared Harris
Samuel L. Slover Research Chair in Business Administration
Darden School of Business
Scott Snell
E. Thayer Bigelow Research Professor in Business Administration
Darden School of Business

Now, the second dimension is leadership unity, and

we put this in brackets because the unity is almost a misnomer.

The unity occurs because the differences within teams,

particularly leadership teams, are ironed out in advance.

So think of a think of a medical group in a surgery unit or an emergency room.

There is unpredictability.

Somebody can walk in the door or have an emergency, and

they have to diagnose quickly and make quick decisions.

Being able to do that and doing it in a responsive way is absolutely central.

But in a team like this, you would have distributed knowledge.

And we can see this in lots of leadership teams

that each person has their area of expertise.

In the best cases where there's unity,

these leaders understand what each area's expertise is and how it connects.

Academics call this transactive memory.

We know who knows what, and we know who to go to very, very quickly.

Now the truth is there's oftentimes conflicting views.

Each area of specialization brings a person to a particular perspective, and

those perspectives clash.

What the best teams do is they have vigorous debate.

They work it through so they know where each person's coming from.

And they get that out of the way in front

of any kind of unpredictable decision that they have to do.

So that when the situation occurs, they can go to work and

make the decisions in a very, very speedy way.

The next part is that these are highly dynamic situations.

So they have to try things, get fast feedback, and learn quickly from one

another and bring all that together so they make the best decisions.

At the end of the day it's the focus on the patient, focus on the customer.

This leads to strong team identity.

Each person has their perspective in their expertise.

But they're bringing that together so that the real focus is the team working for

the patient or, in this case, the customer.

Each of those is important for creating that kind of unity in the leadership team.

Now the last part of this is resource fluidity.

This is having resources in your organization, human resources,

financial resources, material resources that are multipurpose and can bend.

And what we've seen is that when organizations can have unrelenting focus

on their customer as the focal point, they then can have continuous improvement to

strengthen the core and prepare for when they're going to need to change.

Those two are givens.

The third is that the resources themselves can be flexible.

This could be that there's a general purpose resource, for

example, computer aided design.

These systems can be adapted for different uses over time.

Even human resources can be flexible.

They can learn quickly, or they may have general skills or

multiple skills that allows them to be flexible.

And the last one is allocation flexibility.

There's a fair amount of research that's been done that the best performing

firms are the ones that can take resources from one purpose and put them to another,

allocating across business units or across functions rapidly.

This is a very critical element for having that kind of agility.

So if we come back to it, these three elements, organizational learning,

creating that company, that organization that it's responsive to

the external environment and bringing it inside.

Having a leadership team that, while having differences and

distributed knowledge, is bringing that together to make a precise decision.

And then having resources that are adjustable and

reallocated across situations.

Those seem to be the keys to agile execution.

Now as we review this, a couple of things to keep in mind.

First of all, strategy execution is not just sticking to the plan.

Things change and the organization needs to be responsive to this.

Agility is both responding to and

creating change for others more rapidly than competitors.

And it's about focusing on the customer and

adjusting to bring something to the market.

It's very difficult to be agile from a standing start,

so each one of these points of learning is about

how does the organization continue to move, continue to adapt and change.

And at the end of the day, agility is about reconciling opposites.

It's not either or.

It's about creating stability in the midst of change,

creating the present performance with an eye toward the future, and

creating efficiency with a capability that drives innovation in the future.

All of those work together, and it's not choosing one or the other.

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