What Has to Be True for This Strategy to Work?

The Hidden Architecture of Implementation: 1 of 3

When a strategy is adopted, one of the first implementation questions is usually:

• What do we need to do?

It is a reasonable place to start. Strategies need actions, responsibilities and timelines if they are going to move beyond intention. But moving immediately to an action list can mean we miss a different question - one that can tell us much more about the conditions needed for implementation to succeed.

• What has to be true for this strategy to work?

That question shifts attention from individual activities towards the organisation, relationships and wider system that need to support them.

The instinct to start with actions

Action-oriented planning is familiar and useful.

• What needs to happen?

• Who is responsible?

• When will it be completed?

• What resources are required?

These questions turn broad ambitions into something tangible. But they can also encourage us to focus on activity before we have fully considered what successful implementation actually requires.

An action might be perfectly sensible while depending on conditions that don't yet exist. It might require collaboration between teams that rarely work together, information that isn't currently shared, capability that needs to develop or an external partner whose role hasn't been explored.

The action itself may only be the visible part of a much larger implementation system.

Start with success instead

An alternative is to begin further into the future. Imagine the strategy has been successfully implemented. Not simply that its actions have been completed, but that the change it was intended to create is becoming visible.

• What would be different?

• How might people across the organisation be working?

• What decisions would they be making differently?

• What relationships would need to exist?

• What systems or processes would support them?

• What might communities, partners or other stakeholders experience differently?

Starting here changes the conversation. Instead of immediately asking what we should do, we first become clearer about what we are actually trying to create.

What would successful implementation actually look like?

This distinction matters because completion and success are not always the same thing.

An organisation can deliver a training program without developing lasting capability. It can establish a working group without improving coordination. It can produce community resources without changing preparedness. It can complete every action assigned to individual teams while important dependencies between those teams remain unresolved.

Looking at the desired future encourages us to describe outcomes in terms of what would actually be happening differently.

It also makes broad strategic language more tangible. Words such as resilient, adaptive, integrated or prepared become more useful when we ask what we would expect to see if they were genuinely reflected in everyday organisational practice.

Work backwards before moving forwards

Once that future is clearer, we can begin asking what would need to make it possible. This kind of thinking draws on approaches such as backcasting, which begin with a desired future and work backwards to explore what would be required to reach it.

The value is not simply in imagining the future. It is in changing the direction of the implementation question. Rather than projecting today's activities forward and hoping they eventually produce the desired outcome, we look backwards from that outcome and ask what needs to be in place along the way.

That can expose requirements that an action-first approach might not reveal.

Look beyond activities to the conditions underneath them

Suppose a strategy depends on different parts of an organisation making more integrated decisions. One response might be to create an action to establish a cross-departmental meeting. But the existence of a meeting doesn't necessarily create integrated decision-making.

People might also need shared information, clarity about responsibilities, relationships across teams, appropriate authority to make decisions and an understanding of how their own work affects other parts of the organisation.

The meeting is an activity. Those other elements are some of the conditions that might allow the activity to achieve its purpose. Implementation requires attention to both.

What needs to exist - not just what needs to happen?

This opens up a broader set of questions.

• What knowledge or capability needs to exist?

• Which relationships need to be strong?

• What information needs to move between people?

• Where does decision-making authority need to sit?

• Which existing processes could support the strategy?

• What external relationships might matter?

Not everything that emerges needs to become another action. Some things may already exist and simply need to be recognised or strengthened. Others might require different parts of the organisation to work together differently. Some may reveal constraints that need to be understood rather than immediately solved.

The aim is to see more clearly what implementation depends upon.

The value of looking across the whole system

This perspective becomes particularly important for strategies that cross organisational boundaries.

A strategy may be led by one team while depending on decisions made across many others. It may rely on external organisations, community relationships, infrastructure, technology or resources outside the control of those formally responsible for implementation.

Looking across this wider system can reveal why apparently straightforward actions sometimes prove difficult to deliver. It can also reveal opportunities: existing relationships, capabilities or processes that could contribute to implementation but were not originally considered part of the strategy.

From a list of actions to a pathway towards change

None of this means action plans are unnecessary. The question is what informs them. If implementation begins only with What actions do we need to complete?, it is easy to concentrate on activity. Beginning with What has to be true for this strategy to work? creates a different starting point.

It encourages us to think about the future we are trying to create, the organisational conditions that would make it possible and the wider system in which change needs to occur.

Actions still matter. But they become part of a pathway towards change, rather than the definition of change itself.