Aric Wood - The Strategy Activation Playbook: A Practical Approach to Bringing Your Strategies to Life

Contents

Praise for The Strategy Activation Playbook

In the world of organizational decision-making, we hear one thing over and over: what matters most is the people. Yet when we make strategic plans there is one thing we forget over and over: the people. I am so excited about Arics book and the methodology he brings. I am excited that he puts people at the center and that his team communicates everything in a clear, simple, visual way. No one can align a team thinking about the strategy. We align teams thinking about the team.

Dan Roam, bestselling author of The Back of the Napkin and Draw to Win

Strategy activation is the difference maker. Successfully leading an organization through real, authentic strategic transformation is hard, and damn near impossible without an investment in and commitment to strategy activation. Give yourself the best chance for success by following Woods framework, learning new and modern skills, and committing to the journey that he outlines in this book. As a CEO who has done it, I can tell you it really works.

Andy Youniss, Executive Chairman, Rocket Software

In 2020, I partnered with Aric Wood and XPLANE on a major change initiative. Little did we know, the world of work would change dramatically as we undertook our work together. The Strategy Activation Playbook reflects the human-centered, empathetic, co-creative process I witnessed firsthand. It is a different and much needed approach in time when we are all searching for meaningful ways to design our shared future.

Lisa Schwartz, COO, Mathematica, Inc.

Arics approach to strategy activation is the critical ingredient organizations need to move from a great plan on paper to real results. Ive worked with Aric across 4 companies and each time hes helped invigorate the full organization to truly believe in its strategy and have a lot of fun along the way!

Amanda Eisel, CEO, Zelis

The Strategy Activation Playbook is a must-read for anyone who wants to move from the 80 percent who fail to execute their strategy to the successful 20 percent. Aric has captured one of the key reasons why most organizations do not effectively executethey do not activate the energy of their people to want to execute. In this powerful and easy to read book, Aric breaks down what it takes to activate your strategy and provides useful tools to help you energize and activate your people to overcome the gap between planning and execution.

Norman Wolfe, CEO, Quantum Leaders and author of The Living Organization: Transforming Business to Create Extraordinary Results

The Strategy Activation Playbook copyright 2022 by Aric Wood

Project management: Nancy Sewell

Creative direction: Tim May

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

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First E-Book Edition: September 2022

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022935035

ISBN 9781637741825 (trade paperback)

ISBN 9781637741832 (electronic)

Editing by Katie Dickman

Proofreading by Jenny Bridges and Cape Cod Compositors, Inc.

Indexing by WordCo Indexing Services

Layout and page design by Nicole Bittner

Illustration and design by Jeffery Frankenhauser, Tim May, Catie Cooper

Cover design by Tim May and Jeffery Frankenhauser

Special discounts for bulk sales are available. Please contact .

For Hadius

Humans will eventually manifest that which they imagine.

contents

Strategy activation is an emerging field. Not quite change management, definitely not strategy execution, strategy activation is a new discipline emerging in tandem with the modern organization, which is more diverse, empowered, and independent-minded than the top-down, hierarchical organizations of old.

Strategy activation fits in between strategic planning and strategy execution. The space between these two is the desert where strategy goes to die.

Brought up in old models of business, many leaders still believe that when we jump directly from strategic plans to strategy execution people will just follow along. But thats not our current reality. Because organizations now compete on creativity and innovation, we have built a creative and empowered workforce which thinks for themselves. And in that gap between strategic planning and strategy execution, there is a choice. These empowered, critically-thinking teams can decide for themselves whether they agree with the strategy and the planand whether they plan to follow it.

Strategy activation, and change activation at large, is about understanding the people in the system: their wants, needs, and barriers to change, and how to persuade them to join your cause and move forward together. Its about bridging that gap between strategic planning and strategy execution with a new, critical middle ground that persuades, aligns, and engages people to move in new directions.

As such, its a new branch within the realm of business acumenanchored not in the typical MBA curriculum but more in psychology, learning and development theory, and design thinking (with its tenets of empathy, observation, and user-centricity). It requires upgrading current systems of business and change management with a new toolkit of capabilities and methods drawn from broad disciplines, far afield from traditional business training.

As the world changes, and the pace of change only continues to accelerate, a leaders ability to navigate change while motivating people to achieve an organizations purpose will be one of the most important new capabilities to nurture, and is critical to leadership success.

Based on three decades of experience leading strategy activation programs across the spectrum of organizations from Fortune 500 to government entities, global NGOs, and nonprofit organizations of all sizes, weve assembled a successful framework, a toolkit of methods, and a set of proven principles and best practices, which collectively shape the emerging practice of strategy activation.

This book is a playbook for leaders to activate changea toolkit you can begin to apply immediately in developing your own organizations capacity to change and adopt new strategies at scale.