Dear Reader,

Most of the strategy execution failures I have worked with are, at their root, Translation Failures. The leadership team may have a clear and shared understanding of the direction, but that understanding has not been translated into something the different teams can actually follow.

But solving it requires something different from a better implementation framework. It requires the leadership team to do the work of genuinely inhabiting the strategy, to be able to speak to it, live it, and model it consistently - before and as they can expect anyone else to follow it.

Direction is not communicated through documents alone. It is communicated through the consistent, aligned behavior of the people at the top. That is the translation work. It begins not with just the strategy document, but with the leadership team’s relationship to it.

Level 1: Your Strategy Document

Most strategy documents are not strategies. They are aspirations. Beautifully articulated, carefully developed, sometimes genuinely visionary aspirations, that bear increasingly little resemblance to what the organisation is actually doing six months after they were written.

The standard, sometimes knee jerk diagnosis for this gap between strategy formulation and actual outcome, is execution failure, insufficient project management, inadequate KPIs, poor accountability structures. And so, organisations invest in better implementation frameworks, more rigorous governance, more detailed operational plans.

Yet even with all that, the gap remains.

What I can tell is that the problem is not execution. Or if it was, it is not that alone. It is and was translation of your strategy, and with that, the human leader architecture in charge of translating that strategy to their teams.

Level 2: Translating Your Strategy Across Your Organization

The process of moving a strategy from the leadership team’s shared understanding, into a form that each of their teams can orient around, is a fundamentally different skill from the actual development of that strategy.

It requires a different kind of intelligence that goes beyond analytical, but into Relational and Narrative. It requires understanding of how the different people in your teams make sense of the strategy in relation to their everyday roles.

Relational and Narrative Translation of the Strategy means addressing a set of questions - before you share the strategy with your teams – so you relay the strategy in conversation and not just as a directive. These include:

1. What does my team need to hear about the strategy, so they can easily translate it into actual everyday actions?
2. What do they need to see for them to take full ownership of it?
3. What initial questions will they want addressed, as I communicate this strategy to and with them?
4. How can I make sure they feel psychologically safe to freely ask questions about the strategy?
5. What do I need to make clear about where we are, where we are going and how we are going to get there, so that we can have a starting point to assess how we will do this together?

These are some of the questions that I help you address, if we are to work together. A lot of these are addressed using the Actionable Strategy format that I developed.

An actionable strategy is a strategy that is clear and focused, and easily translatable and transferable to each and every one in your organization, from grounds staff to front office staff, cleaning, management, and other leadership teams.

Each of them is able to know how each of their roles is and or can contribute to the purpose and vision of the team, department and organization. They become consciously active and contributory owners of the organization's purpose.

Relational and Narrative Translation of the Strategy moves the strategy from abstraction into actual day to day implementation reality for each and everyone in the organization.

Level 2: The Inner Human Leadership Architecture Problem

Relational and Narrative explanation and translation of the strategy requires you as a leader to speak to it from conviction rather than just presentation.

What does this mean for you as a leader?

It means that the more you understand and relate to the strategy at hand, the easier it is for you to explain it to your teams. The more they understand it, the easier it is for them to implement it.

How you understand and relate to the strategy as a leader, is the level to which you will be able to communicate it to them. Your outer actions, habits, behaviors and communication is influenced by your inner conditioning, your inner architecture.

Inner conditioning is generally ingrained in all of us between the ages of 0 and 7. This becomes our inner nervous system wiring, i.e. our inner architecture.

How you react, act and relate to and with your outer environment and others, is an outer expression of your inner nervous system wiring. In other words, your nervous system wiring is the engine that drives your everyday decisions that result in the way you live, lead and how you run your business.

A lot of adults are recycling what they were taught before the age of 7. The great news is that a lot of adults are in personal, professional and leadership development. They are working on their talent and skills. This is good.

The challenge however - a big However - is that a lot of the personal, professional and leadership development work that is being offered in the mainstream, concentrates on the 5-15% of who you could be.

But it leaves out the inner wiring, i.e., the larger ore pertinent 85-95% that sits in your subconscious conditioning, yet quietly influences your everyday decisions and actions.

Let’s look at how this presents in your strategy and leadership.

As a leader or organization, you may have figured out how to create a good strategy on paper. You do this using the cognitive and behavioral performance knowledge you have gained. And perhaps, you have even learnt how to relationally translate it to your people – because you found a way to ‘hack performance’.

But what I see is that your true inner self presents its head - good or bad - especially in periods of change and pressure. The outer behavior or the way you handle pressure or the ‘stressors’ that that brings over time, are the signals of the pattern, the conditioning and resulting nervous system wiring within.

The Reckoning

During calm times of the organization, they excel as they put these hard skills to work. The challenge or failure comes in times of pressure. It is experienced when the internal leadership architecture, that guides the outer strategy, struggles to sustainably hold the pressure, complexity, communication, trust, and decision-making required for long-term performance.

In these rapidly changing times that we have been experiencing since the advent of the Covid pandemic, this has become even more apparent. The truths of who leaders are within, is coming to light.

My work with leaders and organizations

The goal is to provide Business and Leadership transformation at the level of identity, conditioning and awareness, (i.e. the 85-95%), not just at the 5-15% cognitive and performance levels.

In addition, we simultaneously work on revealing the inner authentic self that was there, and always is, before the socio-cultural conditioning. This work allows you to take the informed steps to be authentically present in the way you lead, serve and look after all those around you.

1. Where do you as an individual leader need coaching and advisory support?
2. Where do you, as an organization or team of leaders need support?

​Here are ways I work with Organizations and their Leadership Teams →​

​Here is how we can work together as an Individual Leader →​

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