
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.
