A nonprofit museum is struggling to make ends meet since the Covid pandemic forced them to close their doors. They need a new strategy that doesn’t rely solely on foot traffic, so they look at several options and make the strategic choice to expand their programs into the online space. This new strategy has the potential to save the museum—maybe even enable them to reach more people and see greater success than before. But putting that strategy into action is the next big hurdle. What do they do to make their vision a reality?

If you can relate to this “what next” feeling, you’re not alone. At IDEO U, we’ve heard that taking action on a strategy is something many people struggle with. Crafting a strategy for your business won’t help much if it ends up being a file called “Strategic Business Plan” that sits unopened.

Jennifer Riel, IDEO’s global director of strategy and instructor in our course Designing Strategy, has spent many years helping businesses of all shapes and sizes, including Procter & Gamble and Ford, create and activate strategic plans. She co-authored the book Creating Great Choices and spent 13 years teaching strategy at the Rotman School of Management.

In this Creative Confidence Podcast conversation, Jennifer shares how to know when you’re ready to put your strategy into action, three design tasks required to do so, and examples and tips to help you get started.

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Are you ready to take action, or still gathering info?

In our Designing Strategy course, Jennifer talks about how important it is to generate multiple possibilities and gather information on them before making a decision. But making a decision is a critical step. She sees many companies fall into the trap of trying to do everything at once instead of making a clear bet on a single strategy. If you’re still deciding between two compelling possibilities, try committing to a set period of time where you’ll continue to experiment—a year of learning, for example. Jennifer pushes her clients to clarify the moment they’re in: “Are you really choosing to take the time to experiment, or are you choosing not to choose?”

One of the core principles of strategy is that you need to make trade-offs. “If you fail to make clear choices, you're probably splitting your concentration,” she says. “You're likely heading towards mediocrity.”

The biggest mistake she sees teams make is waiting until after they have finished designing the strategy to think about how they will activate it. “The activation of strategy is not separate from its development,” Jennifer says. “It is part of the creation of the strategy.”

You can’t have everyone in the company involved in the process, but surprising them with a new strategic direction is a mistake too. The result is an organization that doesn’t understand your new strategy, feels unheard, and doesn’t agree or feel motivated to help. You’ll be more equipped to take action on a new strategy if you’ve brought others along on the journey. Try recruiting a broader group of people to help in the experiment and research phase before you make a final choice.

“The activation of strategy is not separate from its development. It is part of the creation of the strategy.”
Jennifer Riel

3 design tasks for taking action on a strategy

To turn a strategic plan from a wishlist into something you actually do, Jennifer outlines three main tasks. These are buckets into which many smaller tasks will fall.

1) Build capabilities and management systems

When you build a new strategy and you seek a new source of competitive advantage, Jennifer says you will almost certainly find that there are gaps in your capabilities and systems. If your business was previously focused on direct-to-consumer sales and your new strategy involves a shift to wholesale, you might need to understand the wholesalers’ needs, create new pricing structures, hire new staff, and shift your inventory management system. You can build some of these capabilities internally, pay for services from an outside vendor, or reorganize your company to better meet these new needs.

Case study: Ford Motor Company CEO Jim Hackett led the organization in a strategic shift from a car company to a mobility company—a move away from a singular focus on building cars to thinking about how people will get places in the future. IDEO worked with Ford on their new strategy, part of which was to become more human-centered and focus on what people would need 100 years from now. To make this strategy real Ford needed new design capabilities. They created D Ford, a globally distributed design team that partners with business-line teams around the world to design new vehicles, ways of working, internal systems, structures and culture. “Ford has quietly built one of the biggest and best design capabilities in the world by focusing on the management system that would be required,” Jennifer says.

How to get started: Do an honest assessment to identify gaps in skills, knowledge, and abilities: What are the five or six most important capabilities we need to be successful? Where do we need them to be, and where are they right now? If you can assess your current state realistically, you can define a plan to bridge that gap.

2) Track the strategy

How will you know if your new strategy is working? What would you expect to see? Determining how you’ll measure the performance of your strategy is the next big task of putting it into action. Your specific metrics and measures will be distinct and specific to your organization.

Case study: Jennifer worked with a financial services company that was struggling to differentiate their product. They decided on a new strategy that was rooted in exceptional digital service. One key metric they landed on to see if this new strategy was succeeding was something they called NGO—a term meaning “not in good order” that identified online customer purchases that couldn’t be processed without human intervention (clearly not good digital service). At the time 80 percent of all customer purchases had that label. To achieve their new strategy, leadership rallied the company around a goal of getting to 10 percent NGO orders—something everyone at the company understood and saw how they could individually contribute toward.

How to get started: Start with the human beings you’ll need to engage with and what they need: What do people need to do and know in order to make this strategy work? How might we as the people creating the strategy meet those needs?

3) Communicate to encourage action and engagement

Early on, determine who needs to understand your strategic choices and create a plan to bring them along. You can’t have 100 people in every strategy meeting—you’d never finish your strategy—but everyone at your company will play a role in helping you make the strategy real. Think about leaders who will need to create nested strategies (ex. Product, talent or regional strategies) that ladder up to the company-level strategy, as well as frontline employees. It is very rare that a single set of broad communications will get the job done.

“If you have a new strategy that will require people to act differently and do different things, you owe it to them to explain it in a really clear way so they see and feel their own agency,” Jennifer says.

How to get started: Plan for more frequent communication. Create moments of real engagement where people can ask thoughtful questions about where the strategic choices came from and what they can do to help.

“If you have a new strategy that will require people to act differently and do different things, you owe it to them to explain it in a really clear way so they see and feel their own agency.”
Jennifer Riel

Strategy during times of disruption

Disruption, as Jennifer defines it, is almost guaranteed in business. It could be a new competitor, emerging technology, a global pandemic, recession, or something else that is fundamentally shifting the dynamics of your industry.

In these moments, having a clear strategy can help you navigate the chaos and stay your course (or know when to make a shift). Taking action on your strategy or continuing to implement it can be the difference between expanding your competitive advantage and going out of business.

The two flavors of competitive advantage are cost and differentiation. In crisis, the knee-jerk solution often feels like reducing prices. But if your product is better, you may find people will still be willing to pay for it. American retailer Target is an example Jennifer points to of sticking to their differentiation strategy during the Covid pandemic and being one of the few retailers to make a profit during 2020.

As you prepare to take action on your strategy, whether you’re setting the course for your business launch or responding to a disruption in your market, you’re likely to feel some sense of urgency. And while you will need to act eventually, go back to Jennifer’s original prompt to determine the moment you’re in. Are you still gathering information to make a strategic choice, or ready to take action? A good strategy is one built on experimentation. And as Jennifer says, “experimentation, when done well, is actually the first step of activation.”

Learn a process that will help you create and take action on a strategy for your business, team, or organization in our online course, Designing Strategy.