Sorry, you cannot be tactical anymore!

Hmmm.. Intriguing statement, is n’t it?

If you google, the first definition you would see on difference between tactic and a strategy is “Tactics are the specific actions or steps you undertake to accomplish your strategy” from a blog,

From quite sometime now, there has been a discussion surrounding the tactical and strategic approaches that organizations should adopt for short-term and long-term successes. In fact, for decades the organizational approach to definition and execution of mission and goals has been on this basis.

But, in the current world (irrespective of COVID scenario), is there still relevance to being tactical for achieving strategic goals as ‘the’ ‘word’ now is strategic agility for achieving true business and organizational agility which requires adjusting the methods and processes to ever changing / dynamic customer needs and expectations leaving no line or time between strategy and tactic.

How do we measure the strategic agility? While there are frameworks available, could the following be couple of ways to achieve / measure the strategic agility?

Alongside of output, define value per task.

Traditionally, everything is defined as a task in delivery and there is an output defined for each task in terms of expected result / through definition of done statement. Think the method should be to associate a value alongside of the above to measure true value derived from the task.

For example, could we measure benefits of an initiative with defined revenue stream by associating a part of it’s value to a solution architect (role) who is providing solution architecture (deliverable). Likewise, If there is a delay in the deliverable, can we associate loss of revenue owing to the delay in deliverable? Can benefit realization be part of the task getting executed than through a definition of statement of benefits post deployment?

Accelerate decision making

Decision making, centralized vs decentralized, is a topic that’s much talked about. I think the value is not merely in who decides but also on what decisions to be made and when

For example,

• During a retrospection, instead of discussing in what went well and what did n’t, could a scrum master / product owner be harsh and say last iteration was no good and the investment was a waste to re-do as the value realized is not the value predicted
• Could hiring manager challenge the mechanism and say lets hire based on value proposition than the skillset? If I need a devops engineer, I would give him a problem on hand and seek solution (of course ensuring necessary guidelines) rather than traditional coding / interviewing tests?
• Could business say, we have invested enough, we do not want to invest further as market dynamics have changed and we need to treat last 3 months as sunk costs?

Redefine customer centricity

Who is a customer? Is it only end users of the product? Is it one who is availing the service/es? What’s customer centricity? With varied experience levels, backgrounds, skills, every employee of an organization may not be able to relate to what end customer wants and it should not be construed as a failure.  

Rather, I reckon, the teammates across the organization need to continuously align, realign at individual and team levels and channelize the efforts to achieve quantified business goals & objectives defined by leaders for their lines / units based on their missions which is resultant of organizational / enterprise vision and why would n't that achieve required organizational success irrespective of method / model ?

For example, lets take a scenario

• a chairman of an organization goes to the market and promises a 20% percentage increase in earnings per share in a span of 5 years
• Chairman gives goals to his business and technology leads to contribute 10% each through increase in revenue and adopting lean methods respectively
• Technology chief gives goals to his 5 portfolio leads to achieve 2% each of above 10%
• Portfolio leads define their individual and collective goals to achieve that 2% each and 10% as a group respectively
• Finally, within each portfolio, value is assigned to every team and at all levels of execution

In this scenario, if teammate gets that individual contribution is resulting in 0.01% of chairman's commitment to shareholder, would n't that be sufficient motivator to achieve the goal whether or not customer centricity is understood? Would n't teammate will still be construed as customer centric if he is achieving 0.01% contribution to shareholder? Clarity on big picture and goals could be more vital than customer centricity or that itself could be customer centricity.

Thoughts?