Colin's 3 Ps of Strategy Execution
Colin’s 3 Ps of Strategy Execution: Precision, Patience, and Persistence
Whether you’re strategizing during a game of chess or creating a digital marketing strategy for a small to medium sized business, when it comes time to implement your strategy, we have to deal with reality. Reality takes time, literally. Reality also has context, by definition. Because of this, there are three key principles strategists and strategy consultants should follow: Have Patience, Be Persistent and Execute with Precision.
Execute your strategy’s tactics with Persistence, to ensure the objective our strategy is met.
Have Patience while you implement your tactics, it takes time. This means going to sleep many nights without any results to show for your efforts (maybe other than some data).
Be Persistent with the steps laid out in the plan. Once you create a strategy and have a plan, it’s documented. Being persistent means having faith in your plan’s success. The plan associated with your strategy is a guideline you must follow. Honor all the effort you went through creating it, by following it. It can be tempting to try something else out. But you created this plan recognizing the flow of events you accounted for and associated responses wanted to leverage.
If there is a potential change that must be made, there should be a formalized process to audit your strategy and see if your idea makes sense in the context of both the plan, and reality.
In this blog post, I am going to dive into detail the significance of each of Colin’s 3 Ps of Strategy Execution, and provide some tips to remain Persistent, Patient and Precise in your execution.
Patience
Having patience is the most psychologically challenging step in implementing a strategy. This becomes even tougher in larger organizations. The first reason for this is you must maintain your team’s confidence if the strategy: they must believe in it from the moment its created until the moment it succeeds. The second reason is managing the pressure of your strategy succeeding from your superiors and all other stakeholders.
Furthermore, you must engage in doubt management. No matter the strategy that we create, whether it’s a product launch, a content strategy, or an overall digital marketing strategy, during the middle of it we concern ourselves with:
The environment - The environment changes. Maybe our competitors develop a plan, launch a new marketing campaign or launch a new product that changes the context with within which we created the strategy, drastically changing the strategy we must take to compete successfully.
Stakeholders - Whether this is a client, boss, stockholders, the board, or anyone else, the strategy we create with which our tactics fall into, is our baby. We made it. This is what makes you money. This is what gives you credibility. A lot is on the line.
Our Strategy - This includes just general performance & doubts about our strategy. So far so good? Was this the right plan? Could we have done this cheaper? Could we have done this smoother? Simpler? Was there another route to our objective besides the one I made?
Whether any of these things may be true or not, maintaining patience that you created the best strategy - a culmination of your experience, intuition, knowledge, and support from your team - is of utmost importance to ensuring that your strategy is seen through to the end. Interrupting a good idea can disrupt the flow of events/steps in your plan, resulting in failure.
Only when it makes absolute sense, which should be verified by a number of sources, should you adjust a plan. This is especially true when it is not in response to the environment. Certain adjustments in relation to the environment can be obvious, however, it’s generally unadvised to adjust due to pressure from stakeholders or doubting your strategy, from both a management perspective and just in terms of your plan’s success.
Let it be seen through to the end.
Note: It is important to distinguish between adjusting your strategy as a result of monitoring data & reception, and adjusting due to expectations and doubt. The former should be part of your strategy, while the latter should be generally avoided in most circumstances.
Persistence
Maintaining persistence is also psychologically difficult, however, we have much more control over this portion of strategy implementation. Maintaining persistence actually utilizes Patience as well, however with the additional component of sustained effort.
What’s a plan that breaks down half way through? Nothing. What was a concrete actionable set of steps becomes an pipe-dream. A could-have-been. Abandoning a strategy should virtually never be done, and not maintaining persistence is tantamount to abandonment.
If you’re not fully able to trust your plan, and are not committed to carrying it out, you probably should not be in the position of implementing strategy. Filter out all the noise, and focus on your strategy.
That being said, being persistent is a psychological game of managing patience and remaining committed. Regarding commitment, remembering why the plan is being executed in the first place and believing in your competence helps in its maintenance.
Get up every day, and pick up where you left off.
Strategies that are tended to have a much higher likelihood of seeing success. Make sure you have the resources to tend to your strategy each day. Develop a schedule and basic plan to maintain your tactics.
Persistence and consistence are like cousins, and when combined, are a force to be reckoned with. Make your strategy a force to be reckoned with.
Precision
There is more to Precision then meets the eye. Fine execution is what it can be defined as.
But doing this doesn’t involve much extra skill (minus technical things such as analytics). Rather, Precision is an attitude.
You’ve laid out a plan, critiqued it, amended it, finalized it, and presented it. People know about it.
Taking the results of the strategy personally, gives drive to execute it precisely. Which means this, along with the previous two, come back to commitment. If you’re committed to your own work and the things you create, then you’ll take the execution and success of your plan personally.
If you take your strategy personally, then you actually create more to lose. With the right attitude, this becomes a weapon. When there is more to lose, you naturally devote more resources to a plan, that otherwise may lay latent. Things such as time and devotion. Other capacities show their face as well, such as the ability to persuade stakeholders that your strategy will work (and that its worth being invested in), or additional things that you did not think of.
If you invest yourself in your strategy, you can use a variety of latent resources to ensure your strategy is executed successfully. It gives you an attention to detail that, perhaps, wouldn't be there. This attention to detail is precision.
The Lowdown
So remain committed, take it personally and invest yourself into your strategy, and you’ll be able to be consistently, and persistently precise. On the other hand, manage your expectations, doubts, and time and you’ll be able to remain patient as the plan is executed.
Follow Colin’s 3 Ps of Strategy Implementation, and you’ll be able to execute a successful plan, when money, trust, credibility and your job are on the line.
‘Cause, aren’t they always?