Strategy-setting involves wording your mission, vision, values, the Big Why, and the Small Why. In defining your organization’s ambitions, you’re defining what you’d like to achieve in an ideal world, on paper. But will your organization be able to execute this strategy you’re envisioning? What is your organization capable of, and what won’t it be able to pull off? Sometimes you need to face the inconvenient truth.

Strategy execution starts with ambition, which is why I made this the first building block of the Strategy Execution process I discuss in my book. Without an appealing and compelling ambition, you won’t get very far. You need this to provide direction and to motivate your people. Yet your ambition must be realistic. It can’t be pie in the sky. If you’re a small Dutch software company, your ambition might be to become the new Microsoft, but you know that it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever achieve this. Which is why I recommend you take a critical look at your jumping off point: look before you leap.

Capabilities

So before you leap into the next phase of strategy execution, you need to analyze your organization’s hard and soft capabilities. Hard capabilities include structure, performance management system, business processes and technology. Soft qualities include culture, conduct, and leadership and collaboration styles. Hard and soft qualities can apply to daily management, or Running the Business, but also to transforming your existing business model, or Changing the Business.

Maturity

Analyzing the qualities that determine the effectiveness of your company’s strategy execution is a key step you need to take before finalizing your mission, vision and strategy. This analysis gives you an idea of the strength, maturity and coherence of your business’s basic qualities.

When your basic qualities are good, your ambition or bar can be commensurately high. When you have lower basic qualities, this is not necessarily the case. Your strategic ambition must be in line with your organization’s execution capacity or change capacity. A low score on hard qualities does not necessarily mean you have to lower your ambitions, but it does mean you’ll need to put in extra effort to realize them. For example, if your analysis of hard qualities reveals that your main structure is not an effective platform for management and renewal, then it makes sense to adapt that structure before launching a new strategy. An old or faulty structure can never be a good jumping off point for strategy execution.

At this point you may find yourself in a chicken-or-egg situation. Imagine you determine during Building Block 2 that you want to have five strategic initiatives in your portfolio, but discover when measuring hard qualities that your senior management structure needs an overhaul, which is a project in itself. This, in turn, can become a preparatory project, a separate initiative in itself.

Turner Consultancy has developed an online Strategy Execution & Change Accelerator called SECA.NU. This research tool consists of 25 questions that generate a very accurate analysis of an organization’s maturity in strategy execution. This can be broken down into four main metrics: maturity of executive management (Running the Business), maturity of change management (Changing the Business), the quality of hard conditions (processes and systems), and the quality of the soft conditions (leadership, cooperation). These are the four main dimensions of effective strategy execution. It takes less than 20 minutes to fill in the answers and get online, real-time information about your organization’s execution capacity compared to benchmarks. This feedback can help you bolster and accelerate your strategy execution.