What Makes an Initiative Strategic? And Why Does It Matter?

Mark Mullaly - October 24, 2016

We hear a lot about strategic initiatives. We hear about how important they are. And we also hear about how frequently they fail.

What we don’t hear about, however, is how and why they get that label in the first place. What makes one project strategic, where another one is just a project? And just what kind of impact does labelling a project “strategic” have on its ability to be successful?

For starters, where did this whole idea of strategic initiatives come from in the first place? It’s a fascinating question. The term has been around for a while (you can find references in different contexts back to at least the 1970s). In the collective consciousness, Ronald Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative” (also known in the mainstream media as “Star Wars”) certainly popularized putting the two words into close proximity with each other (although the strategic emphasis was arguably on “defense,” not “initiative”).

Being able to trace the idea of strategic initiatives back to the 1970s, however, is not an accident; this coincided with a rise in popularity and emphasis in organizations on strategic management in general, and strategic planning in particular. The earliest coinage of strategic initiatives derives in part from the recognition that a means of implementing strategic plans was through launching initiatives.

Since then, project management has gone so far as to say that projects are the means by which organizational strategy is implemented. That is certainly a central principle articulated within A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK^® Guide). In fact, the guide goes so far as to assert that all projects in an organization must be strategically aligned. While that’s wonderfully idealistic in theory, it ignores the very real fact that projects come into being for a variety of reasons, in response to any number of operational, political and entirely whimsical imperatives.

It’s argued by many, however, that strategic initiatives aren’t projects—they’re programs. In other words, they are big enough, complex enough, ugly enough and interconnected enough that they need several projects to effectively deliver, the coordination of which requires the discipline of program management in order to be successful.

There are inherent biases in all of these perspectives, some of which serve very different agendas than simply ensuring that strategy is successfully implemented in an organizational context. What’s not terribly helpful, though, is that there is seemingly little agreement on what strategic initiatives actually are, why they exist or how they need to be dealt with.

I’m going to attempt to provide some answers. But more importantly than just giving clear answers, however, my plan is to leave no uncertainty as to what questions really should be asked. These are questions that ought to be addressed at pretty much every level, from the board room to the war room because if there aren’t clear answers in any given context, then the very real risk is that the woeful track record of success in delivering strategic initiatives isn’t likely to get much better.

The first thing we need to deal with in tackling strategic initiatives involves the separation of the concept of “strategic” from the context of “initiative.” There are implications created by the choice to use both terms, but we need to be clear about what those implications are, and why we are making those choices.

Let’s start with the question of using the term “initiative.” Just where did this come from, really? Why not simply use “project”? A cynical view might be that initiative just sounds sexier and high level, and we want to be ensuring that how we brand our work has the right gravitas. To a certain extent, the use of the word “initiative” actually aligns with the program management claim; that there are operational as well as project components, and the whole enterprise simply needs to be managed at a higher level.

There might be a level of truth to that, although that also may be an intended consequence of our choice of words. Certainly, the things we think of as strategic initiatives have a number of tentacles that insinuate themselves in a far-reaching manner throughout the organization. There are operational, project and change management activities that must be managed. These impacts need some overall level of coordination, and program management has carved out a space for itself that represents itself as doing just this sort of thing.

And certainly, coordination is important. This kind of work does represent massive change. There are a lot of impacts to be managed in terms of the emotional, structural, organizational and behavioural shifts that are required to make them successful. There are operational changes to be coordinated. And within it all, there are also projects.

At the same time, the majority of organizations undertaking this work don’t necessarily recognize themselves as engaging in program management. While they may create organizational accountability for the change, that is often going to be at a senior executive level (and involve more of a hands-on role than just being a sponsor implies). Only those organizations that are well invested in project management as a strategic capability are likely to adopt a program and project dynamic by which to get this work done.

Whether that is a good thing or not is neither here nor there. It’s the reality that exists today. Some may view their strategic initiatives as being a multi-syllabic reframing of program management. Many more are simply going to endeavor to get the work done.

The other aspect that we need to tackle is the idea of “strategic.” This is where we line up with and knock directly on the door of strategic planning (and the broader context of strategic management). Popular impressions of strategic planning, however, also assume a much more deliberate and formalized structure than is actually applied in many (if not most) organizations.

An inherent challenge of strategic planning is the question of whether the future can actually be planned with any degree of certainty whatsoever. We live in an age where change is accelerating exponentially, is far more disruptive than heretofore imagined and doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon. There is little predictability in our economic, technological, political or organizational contexts. Many organizations have quite frankly given up trying to predict with any great degree of certainty what is going to happen next. And many strategic management scholars have been arguing for decades that it is foolhardy to even try.

Henry Mintzberg, regarded as one of the foremost strategic management scholars alive today, has argued that strategy can be interpreted as taking many different forms, and viewed from many different perspectives. These are often referred to as the 5Ps of strategy: plan, ploy, pattern, position and perspective:

• What we traditionally refer to as strategic planning is what is meant by the plan perspective; that strategy is a deliberate choice made as the result of careful consideration, planning and formulation, that defines our desired future outcome and the path to get there.
• The idea of ploy is more often referred to as how we go head to head with (and sometimes mess with the heads of) our competitors. This very much echoes the principle of disruption that characterizes much of the current popular thinking about start-ups.
• Patterns put strategic planning on its head. They suggest that strategy can only be inferred in hindsight, as a result of the collective consequences of the decisions that we have consciously and unconsciously made. This is the essential basis of the idea of emergent strategy.
• Strategy as position suggests that strategy is about finding a specific niche for ourselves in the marketplace that is different from what others are doing. This is very much reflective of the idea of competitive differentiation.
• Finally, strategy as perspective addresses and calls into question the biases, beliefs and value sets that we bring to the table that shape (and limit) our view of what is strategically possible. Similar to the influence of cognitive biases in decision making, this shapes how we perceive our environment and interpret what is even possible.

The ideas of “ploy” and “position” suggest a much more dynamic approach to strategic thinking than that of “plan,” whether deliberately and proactively or reactively and in real time. Sometimes this is driven by purposeful intent, sometimes by playing catch up and occasionally just by being deliberately antagonistic to our competitors. And “pattern” and “perspective” radically re-think just what it means to “plan” strategically in the first place.

The reality is that strategic formulation in most organizations is far more dynamic than it is deliberate. It evolves and adapts, responds and reacts—and so do the implementation activities that come from it. That challenges the very notion of what it means to actually “manage” a strategic initiative. We are not putting in place deliberate strategies from which extend thoughtful and well-developed plans; we are embarking on a rapidly changing journey into the unknown, littered with opportunities, wrong turns, right turns, right turns that felt wrong when they started, and every manner of distraction.

Navigating this requires having some sense of purpose and direction, certainly. It also requires enough flexibility to respond in real time to changing demands and opportunities. It means having enough humility to admit that the last few months have been heading down a promising but ultimately unworthy direction, and we need to backtrack. It demands the intestinal fortitude to stay going on a path that is hard and difficult but that needs to be followed. And above all, it needs clear principles that are known and abided by in order to provide the best guidance as to how to respond to any of these situations.

Strategic initiatives are important to organizational success. Like gifted children, though, we potentially set them up for failure by actually labelling them as strategic initiatives. It makes them sound like they are deliberate. It makes them sound like they are projects (or programs), which can be managed with formal and rigid process.

True success in strategic initiatives come when there is commitment and leadership throughout the organization to getting it done. It needs to be the primary focus, and the subject of continued conversation, discussion and decision making. They require responsiveness and adaptation in operational activities, behaviors, beliefs and—yes—projects.

---

Comments (33)