Certain Uncertainty

7The Nine Derailers of Strategy

Ben Pring

New initiatives fail for a variety of reasons. One of the most common but underreported and under‐analyzed is the inability of an organization to generate wide or deep enough alignment among different parties (business units, groups, vested interests et al.) around the product/service/strategy/idea.¹ Without such alignment, even the best new strategy will struggle to generate the momentum expected of it. Right now, with the business and technology landscape changing faster than ever, creating alignment has never been so important, yet never been more difficult.

Dealing with VUCA

Alignment is necessary throughout the lifecycle of a strategy but is of greatest importance in its early stages. Commonly, a new strategy is introduced in response to a change in market conditions: a competitor has introduced a new product, a client is no longer buying something, or a disruptive new vendor has emerged on the scene. This change produces significant VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) and often an organization is forced to respond in the “stall zone,” i.e., where old approaches are no longer working as well as they did, while new approaches have yet to take off.

Often the organization faces a “chicken and egg” scenario—forced to generate new revenues from the strategy to fund investments in the strategy. Typically, the new strategy is more complex and requires more sophisticated talent and behaviors than previously and takes ...