" Any fool can make a plan. It’s the execution that
gets you screwed up."

— Henry Mintzberg
quoting a U.S. Army officer in “The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning” (New York, The Free Press, 1994)

Execution

A plan is little more than wishful thinking if you can’t effectively execute it.  The aim is to achieve safe, efficient and effective action; that is, action that achieves the objectives with minimum risk and minimum resource.

The work that is done during the Strategy Deployment, Tactical Planning and Target Setting stages sets the scene for effective action.  Execution is about managing the people and the processes against the plan.

Efficient and effective action requires a workforce that is both capable and motivated. Capability implies:

  • Having the necessary skills and training to do the tasks (Training and Development).
  • Knowing the current best practice for performing the task...and continually seeking to improve it. (Standardised Work)
  • Having sound problem-solving skills and the ability to react appropriately to unexpected events. (Root Cause Analysis)
  • Having the appropriate authority and accountability to get the task done with minimum administrative overhead. (Organisational Design)

Motivation is the innate desire to do one’s best.  Motivation is, to some extent, dependent on individual personalities and relationships, but there are tools that can used to improve the motivating potential of the work environment.  According to Tudehope, quoting Hackman and Oldham (Ref 5):

“The level of a job’s motivating potential depends on the degree to which each of the following three critical psychological states are present:

  • Experienced meaningfulness of the work – work should be perceived as non-trivial and should count as important.
  • Experienced responsibility for the outcomes of the work – workers should perceive that they are personally accountable for the work outcomes.
  • Knowledge of the actual result of the work activities – workers should be able to determine how well the activity was performed.”

This is covered in more detail under Workforce Empowerment. 

Providing meaningfulness to the work should be an aim of the Strategy Deployment process. Visual Workplace is a powerful tool for creating an environment where people can see the result of their activities and are empowered to make changes.  The Reward and Recognition systems also have a powerful influence on motivation. 

Care for the Health and Safety of all employees and external stakeholders is an essential value in an excellent business.  How can you expect employees to care about the job if the company doesn’t actively care about their wellbeing?  How can you expect to attract talented and motivated staff to a company that causes harm to members of the community?  To be effective, Health and Safety needs to be built into every aspect of every person’s job, not something managed separately by a dedicated team.

Execution is also about Process Management. An excellent business must continually strive to achieve maximum performance from all its systems and processes.  This requires:

  • Managing your business process as integrated system, to avoid optimising the parts at the expense of the whole.
  • An understanding of the capability of your processes (Benchmarking).
  • Using good quality data to inform decision making.
  • Using of Root Cause Analysis to identify and correct issues.
  • The data and skills to support good Root Cause Analysis.
  • Techniques for uncovering the hidden waste in processes and systems (Value Stream Mapping).
  • A sound process for implementing improvements (DMAIC).