Leading Indicators of Strategy Failure: What to Watch Before It’s Too Late

About this webinar

Strategy can start losing value before delivery goes wrong. Ben Chamberlain and Stuart Easton distinguish portfolio structural risk, created by the mix of work the organization chooses to fund, from portfolio execution risk, which becomes visible through delays, overruns and failures.

What you’ll hear

• The best submitted projects can still produce the wrong portfolio. A bottom-up planning process can select the strongest proposals it receives and still miss work the strategy actually needs.
• Some value loss is hard to see. Ben describes this as opportunity cost: value the organization could have created but never sees. His evolving Strategy eXecution Forum indicators look for strategic misalignment, overlapping investment and business-as-usual activity or operating spend that escapes the same scrutiny as change.
• Years of improvement can still miss the real problem. Ben gives three reasons: executives can treat strategy execution as program management on steroids; functions can optimize their own areas while value is lost between them; and successive methods can start bottom-up, leaving the portfolio-level problem unresolved.
• Some execution problems start at portfolio level. Stuart argues that without clear priorities, work can't be sequenced, people get overloaded and projects collide. Better project management does not fix a portfolio that has taken on too much work at once.
• Build the case before the next crisis. Ben asks first whether the C-suite understands how much value is at risk. If not, he recommends building a coalition across the relevant functions. Stuart adds a head, heart and heartbreak case: prepare the logic and understand leaders’ pain before a visible failure forces action.

The central question is not only whether projects are being delivered well. It is whether the organization is funding the right mix of work in the first place.