When I announce a new direction, I want to know whether it actually changes what people do daily, so I do not discover after a year that nothing moved.

Job context

Who

An executive who has just announced a new strategy

When

Three to six months after the announcement

Trigger

A meeting revealing a team still working the old way

Situation

Everyone agrees with the strategy and no calendar changes

Constraints

Cannot inspect each team personally, and asking always yields the right answer

5 Pains

• Everyone agrees and nobody changes their work

  High

  Agreement is free; changing how you work is expensive.

  Root cause: Nothing is required to stop in order for the new thing to start

• Cannot see what people are actually doing

  High

  Reports describe the work in the new strategy's language while the work stays the same.

  Root cause: Reporters know the strategy and describe their work in the expected shape

• Resources stay where they were

  High

  Budget and headcount do not follow the announcement.

  Root cause: Stopping an old thing is always harder than announcing a new one

• Dissenters go quiet instead of arguing

  Medium

  Objecting in the room costs reputation; quiet non-compliance costs nothing.

  Root cause: There is no channel to object impersonally

• No signal between announcement and result

  High

  Results arrive after a year with nothing in between to say whether it is working.

  Root cause: Strategy is measured by final outcomes, and final outcomes are late

5 Desired Outcomes

• See whether daily work changed

  Functional

• Know whether resources moved

  Functional

• Hear objections before they become inertia

  Social

• Have mid-way signals instead of waiting for the outcome

  Functional

• Stop feeling like they are speaking into a void

  Emotional

5 Existing Solutions

A solution is not the same thing as a product — a customer can hire a behaviour or a workaround too.

• An OKR system

  Product

  Records intent, and intent can be rewritten to match whatever work continues.

• Quarterly business review

  Behaviour

  The formal checkpoint, producing a presentation rather than a truth.

• Re-read the budget allocation

  Behaviour

  The least deniable evidence of an organisation's real strategy.

• Read the work directly in the project tool

  Workaround

  Executives go looking for truth where it has not yet been rewritten.

• Ask each manager what they will stop

  Behaviour

  The most effective question here, and the most uncomfortable.

2 Opportunity Gaps

• Strategy is measured by what people say in reports while the truth lies in what they stopped doing.

  Why existing solutions fail: Every goal system has a field for what will be done and none for what will stop, so an organisation can accept every new priority while dropping none.

  Potential opportunity: Requiring each new goal to name something it stops, and measuring strategy by that list.

• The person who knows best that their team has not changed is the person judged for it.

  Why existing solutions fail: Every review cycle asks managers to self-report their own progress, which is asking people to supply evidence against themselves.

  Potential opportunity: Reading progress from existing work traces instead of self-reports.