Poor Strategy Stalls Issues Management

Organizations are potentially risking billions of dollars focused on familiar and comfortable processes rather than making the hard choices required to get results.

They believe strategy is a rational process: assess the situation, establish priorities, allocate resources and execute. But most organizations are not rational systems. They are complex environments shaped by people, competing interests, institutional histories, organizational power, and the politics of decision-making.

Good strategies fail because leaders underestimate the organizational realities. My experience with senior political leadership has taught me that the right answer and the achievable result are not always the same. Successful strategic leaders understand the difference clearly. 

I work directly with the strategic leader to navigate:

• Development of primary strategic leadership.
• The formal and informal sources of organizational influence.
• Competing stakeholder interests and priories.
• Resistance created by those protecting established positions and processes
• Understanding how momentum is created and sustained.

Where I Work

I sit between the strategic leader and the internal and external teams. Internally, I coordinate the directives of the Board into strategic action by the staff.  Externally, I do not replace public affairs or communications teams but help better align their work under one comprehensive strategy. 

1. Issue Strategy Audit

A focused on review of issue strategy, organizational positioning, goals and objectives, resources, team capabilities, and competing interests to uncover strengths, weaknesses and unrealized opportunities. 

• Is the strategic rationale clear across the organization?
• Is the destination clear and achievable?
• Is the value provided by the result greater than the costs to get there?
• Is strategic leadership empowered to act?
• Has power and responsibility been clearly delineated?
• Are resources in place to create and sustain momentum?

2. Executive Issue Advisory

Confidential, ongoing counsel for leaders and boards. Here is where I challenge assumptions, sequence decisions and navigate competing interests to ensure that the flow of information and the velocity of decision-making are optimized. The strategic leader becomes for fulcrum of strategy. The result is stronger decisions that provide better results.

3. Strengthening the Organization

Many of my clients are membership organizations, so making sure that strategy is connected to members is key to long term success. Often issues management strategy is concentrated in the hands of a few and members are kept in the dark. This is NOT a best practice.

By engaging and involving members reach and resources are expanded, retention improves, volunteerism grows, and the effectiveness of the organization is more broadly understood and appreciated. In short, turning strategic agreement into organizational momentum.

Big firms bring analysis. I bring judgment built over 30 years of experience working with organizations dealing with high stakes political, organizational and  existential disruption. My company is small by design: senior attention on every engagement, specialists added only when needed, and developing close working relationships with key senior staff to augment their capabilities.

The NOW to NEXT Strategic Readiness Index is a proprietary 49-question assessment developed with psychometric expertise. It takes about 12 minutes to complete. It provides a structured view of organizational readiness in seven key areas and identifies whether goals are clear, power and responsibility are strategically assigned, resources are in place to sustain strategy, and leaders are willing to make tradeoffs to achieve success.   

NOW → NEXT

Requires demands decisions at the speed of change.