Problem #7: Ineffective Sensemaking
In my experience in helping companies solve strategy execution problems, they all struggle with the six problems below. Consistently, it is these six problems I’ve most explicitly dealt with over the years. However, I found out that solving strategy execution problems involved solving an overlooked, seventh problem. While initially more unconsciously than consciously, a crucial part in making strategy execution effective was helping down-the-line managers and employees make sense of the (newly generated) strategy in their own specific context.
Sensemaking is the process by which people give meaning to the things they face and experience. We do it all the time when we experience—sense—something new and try to figure out what’s going on. For example, when you arrive in a country where you don’t speak the language and don’t know the culture, you immediately start trying to make sense of the things you see and hear.
The same is going on during strategy execution. Like an unknown country, a new strategy tends to contain many new elements that people need to make sense of. They need to give it meaning by relating it to their existing ideas, assumptions and beliefs. And it is often even written in a corporate language that does not immediately appeal to them and that they need to make sense of too.
Sensemaking in strategy execution refers to the process by which people give meaning to the new strategy. Indeed, give meaning. This means that each and every person that is involved in executing a strategy needs to give it a meaning that works for them. They look at the strategy from their own specific perspective and context and need to translate, or “contextualize” it.
For solving the sensemaking problem, none of the aforementioned six types of solution works. Efforts to improve communication, alignment, change management, performance management, project management, or the strategy on its own will not work. They may help to improve the success rate of strategy execution, but they don’t solve the underlying sensemaking problem.
What is needed is to help people make sense of the strategy. This means taking their unique situation as starting point and help them figure out what the new strategy means in their situation. As referred to earlier, one way of doing this effectively is by discussing examples of what the strategy could mean when translated to their specific context—their business unit, department or job. You need to answer their questions as to how their work will change according to the newly adopted strategy.
People need these examples because they cannot make the connection themselves. Or at least, not initially. As I’ve experienced, once they get the hang of it, they can do without further support. But until that, active help with sensemaking is the only way to effectively address this seventh strategy execution problem.
In the end, solving this seventh problem is all about empathy and putting oneself in the other’s shoes. If we can manage to do that, we might avoid becoming yet another statistic in the “Strategy Execution Failures” database.
