Strategy becomes effective
when leadership turns it into
coordinated action.

Strategy activation is a change process rooted in group dynamics. An organization’s key people are enabled and motivated to actually execute a strategic initiative. It differs from strategy consulting in that the focus is not on the content of the strategy but on the conditions for executing it: focused attention, aligned thinking, available capacity and a shared rhythm.

A strategy consultancy delivers an answer. We build the mechanism with which your own leadership develops and implements the answer. That is why we do not write a strategy but examine the existing one, facilitate its concretization and introduce a rhythm of execution. At the end there is no report, but an accepted target picture, a concrete roadmap and a working execution mechanism with trained multipliers from your own organization.

Six: the diagnosis of the existing strategy, making it concrete for every unit, a guiding picture from which a personal contribution can be derived, a roadmap with a binding near-term horizon, an execution rhythm in sprints of 3–4 months, and the enablement of internal facilitators. The last step determines whether the impact remains after we leave.

A guiding picture answers, for every employee, why a strategic initiative matters and which attitudes and behaviors it takes to succeed. It gives orientation about the contribution each person makes to overall success. Without that derivation, there is no identification, at best agreement. It also serves as a decision aid in the situations where one’s own behavior makes a difference, and thus enables new routines and the build-up of the right capabilities.

What employees perceive is decisive. Objections and concerns in particular have to be voiced openly and evaluated for activation to work. They are gathered in dialogue formats and structured interviews with selected key people, not in mass surveys. Whoever is expected to implement something later must have been heard beforehand — the success rate of strategic initiatives rises measurably when the people implementing them took part in developing them. The prerequisite is an atmosphere in which dissent has no consequences.

The decisive one. Leadership is the capability that carries strategic goals into execution, the positive force of change. It sets the direction, frees up capacity, involves key people and tells the story about the future of the company itself, not through a consultant or service provider. Where a management team delegates this work, activation fails reliably. That is why we only work with leadership teams that take part themselves.

What matters is defining the criteria for success before an activation program begins. They have to be measurable during implementation. That can be the measured perception of those involved regarding understanding, motivation, capability and effectiveness, collected on Likert scales. It can also be the average time from concept to delivery of particular results, or the number of key results successfully achieved.

For larger programs, a standardized survey before the start and after 12–15 months is worthwhile, using the same version of the questionnaire. Among relevant stakeholders it covers, among other things, understanding of the strategy, trust in leadership and engagement. In one documented case, the score for leadership effectiveness rose from 36 to 73 points among 3,500 respondents. We disclose the survey instrument before the contract is signed.

Nine to eighteen months until handover, beginning with a review of four to six weeks that can be commissioned separately. We work with fixed project fees for defined deliverables rather than daily rates, and each phase can be commissioned on its own. The time required of your leadership is about four days per quarter.