No leader can implement a strategy by themselves. You need supporters to make it happen. You need a movement, a critical mass of people who will champion the change on the frontline. We use a mobilisation process that is broken down into 6 stages.

Here are the first 3:

1. Walking

Understand the Strategic Population ( Why it’s important to learn to walk in another person’s shoes )

We refer to the critical mass of people necessary to support the implementation of your strategy as your ‘strategic population’.

Understanding and effectively communicating with your strategic population is the first (and most important stage) in the mobilisation process. You must learn to walk in your strategic population’s shoes – understand the changes from their perspective.

This is the group of people who can block the change required to implement the strategy if not engaged and mobilised. They are the people critical to breaking the current paradigm and allowing the change to happen.

These are the people who will have a high impact on the success of your strategy. This population can be at any level and across any function in the organisation. The strategic population will change over time as you move from the status quo ‘As-Is’ to the desired future state ‘To-Be’.

A critical mass of people from the strategic population must be involved in developing the strategy and its implementation: this is a crucial step in mobilising your troops. Consider this as mobilising your army for change.

2. Waterfalls

Do we cascade the strategy?

Once you have built your great strategy and you are ready to mobilise the people in your organisation to implement it, the second stage (after understanding who your strategic population is and how to walk in their shoes) is to decide whether to cascade your strategy and if so, who to and how!

As a first step, you and your leadership need to decide whether a strategy cascade will add significant value and make a material difference to helping leaders implement the strategy. If the organisation’s structure is quite simple and the strategy scope narrow, skip this section and move on to the next stage of mobilisation.

In larger organisations that operate different business units, with different functions in different geographies worldwide, there will be one overarching strategy for the whole organisation. This strategy is then ‘cascaded’ to each business unit, functional level department and/or geography. This means that each subordinate strategy addresses the needs of each operating unit more specifically.

By providing more focused strategic elements, objectives, and a high-level plan relevant to their area, you will empower people to understand their role and take action to implement the strategy.

Regardless of the size of your organisation, the most important aspect of the mobilisation process is ensuring that you have captured the strategic population’s hearts and minds and engaged them in the KUBA journey.

3. Gaps

Clarify the gap & change (How to Steer Clear of Mobilisation Pitfalls – Avoiding the Tripping Hazard)

Who doesn’t like to take a trip? – Preferably somewhere warm and sunny, not one where you end up on your backside or down a deep dark hole!  When it comes to successfully mobilising your organisation to implement your strategy, Stage 3 of our 6 step mobilisation process focuses on ensuring that your organisation and its people have the necessary capability to avoid avoidable pitfalls!

First up, you need to know what capabilities are required to implement the strategy and achieve your vision: your to-be. It also requires a realistic assessment of your current capabilities: your as-is.

             The gap between the two is what you need to address.

It’s not about how to step over the gap but how to fill it so it can no longer be a trip hazard. These gaps can be quite broad and may include products and services, customer service, distribution channels, systems, processes and financial resources.

You must involve your strategic population to help identify the capability gaps. Don’t rely on just what the leaders see as potential barriers. Remember, they are not always involved in day-to-day operations and don’t have their fingers on the pulse of every situation.

The added benefit of involving your strategic population in this process is that the solutions developed are owned by those who need to make them happen, which drives quicker and more effective implementation and more rapid realisation of the benefits of the change.

Let’s test your decision making in 3 seconds: Would You Run Towards Or Away From The Tiger?

Our brains have evolved to protect us from harm – Fight, Flight, Freeze: if we don’t have an option when faced with danger, we may not find a way out of it.

Yet, given too many choices, we may become confused and make the wrong decision. We run towards the tiger instead of away! Consumers want choices, but not too many – we tend to get overwhelmed, and buyers’ brains become stressed with too many options.

 In business we often categorise in sets of 3:

Probability: high, medium, low

Sales Leads: hot, warm, cool.

In marketing, my goal is to have a maximum of 3 unique claims communicated on any product – all linked to a single differentiated customer benefit.

It drives creative tension, focus, simplicity and memorability.

We can simplify most aspects of our lives by applying the power of 3 – reducing options & choices & focusing on what’s most important.

Paper, Scissors, Rock – Ready, Set, Go  – Knife, Fork, Spoon!

‘Everything you want is on the other side of fear’
– Jack Canfieldmotional commitment to implementing the strategy

Change is uncertain & risky even for those who embrace it. The very idea of change triggers a defence mechanism: Fear- whether the threat is perceived or real!

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for proving that humans make decisions emotionally first. We have five times more negative neural networks than positive ones, so we have an inbuilt ‘negativity bias’.

Dr Evian Gordon, integrative neuroscientist and author of The Brain Revolution, described this ‘as the phenomenon by which humans pay more attention and give more weight to negative rather than positive experience or other kinds of information’.

It means that we are more likely to focus on the negative aspects of change that drive our fear in the first instance. Research shows that we prefer the certainty of an adverse outcome in a situation rather than the uncertainty of what the outcome may be. We can’t control uncertainty & worrying only makes things worse. As a leader responsible for implementing any changes in your business, having empathy, and understanding the emotions & fears that get in the way of accepting change is a great first step in overcoming the resistance.

𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐝. 𝐁𝐮𝐭 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫. 𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐞𝐬

𝘙𝘰𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘵 𝘒𝘦𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘥𝘺

To implement any change in strategy, you need to change the way people undertake their roles within your organisation; the way to do this is to mobilise them. Without mobilising your people, you won’t achieve the successful implementation of your strategy.

Mobilisation is not a deliverable in its own right, rather it is a crucial enabler – a mechanism to bring your strategy to life.  Mobilisation focuses on aligning mindsets, providing clarity and ownership for each person’s role in the change, determining what actions they will take within the strategic element guidelines and getting them to take individual responsibility for their role in implementing the strategy.

Many of us can be resistant to or even afraid of change, research shows that we prefer the certainty of an adverse outcome in a situation rather than the uncertainty of what the outcome may be. We use a process called KUBA to mobilise people and help overcome the inertia that can be experienced when confronted with change.