Execution: Unfolding our Strategic Napkin

Having been raised by an English teacher, my love for words and learning were nurtured and encouraged from an early age. As I started my career in credit unions, I fell in love quickly with the strategic documents I eventually had the opportunity to support crafting. The research, the collaboration, and the writing were all energizing. Over time, I observed that not everyone in the organization felt as much engagement with a thoughtfully produced, well-bound, beautifully designed, hundreds-of-page strategy document.

During my time at Bethpage Federal Credit Union, as I worked with Kirk Kordeleski and Linda Armyn on strategy, I felt the power of strategy well communicated. Everyone across the organization understood the simply articulated calling for impact. The strategy underneath was complex and took years to create. The way the credit union’s strategy was shared brought together human beings from diffuse operating units and with diverse perspectives and created seamless alignment.

Strategy is complicated. Sharing it should be easy. To achieve the impossible, leaders must bring bold action to life through a well-articulated, focused, engaging, and simple set of short statements. At Community Financial Credit Union, we share our strategy on a paper napkin to manifest that concept. The idea started metaphorically and is now a physical representation of our brand and future.

Many of the most legendary strategies were crafted over a coffee or beverage of choice on a napkin. Shifting from a big binder to a paper napkin ensures our intentionality stays intact and pushes us toward concise messaging, shareability, and accessibility. Metaphorically, the flexibility of paper folding and the infinite possibilities a humble piece of paper provides are remarkable.

Our napkin also supports our iterative approach to strategy. It’s a physical manifestation of our commitment and flexibility in an incredibly dynamic world where the change we are experiencing today is the slowest we will ever experience. Our strategic napkin enables living ideas. While some elements remain constant, portions evolve and improve, and we continue to iterate.

Strategy represents taking charge of your own destiny. It forces leaders to stay where they should be, imagining and building a future of impact. Strategy is not a plan with clear next steps and doesn’t represent an inevitable destiny. It jolts us from the comfort of routine that we as humans crave and requires us to envision what might be possible. It calls us to dream boldly about solving our members’ most significant challenges in compelling new ways.

As much as I adore strategy and dreaming about the impossible, the best strategies only create impact if they are well executed. The bridge between strategy and execution must be steady and sound for an organization to thrive. It’s a common misconception that organizations primarily falter due to lacking tactical planning. More often, if there are disagreements about the steps to be taken, the root cause can be traced back to ambiguities in strategy or vision itself. As David Lancefield, in his article for HBR, "Don’t Let Distractions Derail Your Company’s Strategy," points out, distractions can lead organizations astray. External pressures such as market shifts, competitive actions, or internal dynamics like overconfidence or lack of support can cloud strategic focus, leading to what appear to be execution failures.

Lancefield elaborates further on how distractions can derail strategic intent. He suggests that leaders delve deep into the nature of distractions, calling them out and understanding their implications for strategy. This self-awareness helps distinguish between harmful distractions and those that could be strategic opportunities.

Today’s world elevates bountiful distractions. A leadership team must support one another to discern what inputs should be considerations for strategic updates and what noise should be ignored and discarded in honor of excellence in execution. At Community Financial, we lead a rolling three-year strategic cycle and review and iterate on that plan quarterly. This provides a nimble approach to shifting our strategic target in real-time. We host ongoing conversations with different groups of human beings, sharing new insights, learning from listening posts with members, research, and expert brainfood. The operational discipline to create space for strategy hones our detection system for distractions, and our growing project management office insists on discipline. We’ve also created structures for innovation, as Dennis Campbell and Luis G Dopico outline in the Filene Research Institute report, “Structures for Innovation.” We know that we must protect BOTH innovation and execution and the two need space from one another.

Leaders must build the muscle to distinguish between strategic shortcomings and execution failures to nurture the success of both. Consider:

• Cascading Communication. Excellence in organizational communication takes ongoing discipline and must be codified by the executive team and across all other levels of leadership. Building the practice for cascading matters so that the responsibility and ownership do not solely reside with executives who make large decisions but also with the next tier of leaders empowered to increase the level of buy-in at all levels of the organization. For instance, if the executive team decides to launch a new product without partnering with the training and marketing teams, the ensuing chaos is not a strategy failure but a lapse in execution.

The key to successful execution in the face of strategic distractions lies in robust communication and realistic appraisal of organizational capabilities and external factors. Leaders must ensure that every segment of the organization understands the overarching strategy and their specific roles in its execution. One way to reinforce this daily through communication is to leave a team asking, “What might you do today to help us carry this forward?”

• Hidden systematic issues. Recurring misfires or launch instability might sometimes be mistaken for strategic errors. However, these are typically execution errors where the systems in place fail to meet the strategic standards set. Often, executive teams “don’t know what they don’t know” about the systems that might either be aging or simply being embraced based on historical practices rather than being the best solutions or approaches.

External reviews of long-standing operational commitments can remove bias and the human resistance to change. Taken a step further, forensic vulnerability tests explore opportunities for efficiencies and may identify unknown risks that can stifle execution.

• Underlying signals from delays. Chronic delays might indicate a more profound strategic misalignment or even organizational structure gaps. Isolated incidents where reasonable timelines are not met usually indicate execution inefficiencies. Building a practice for the review of execution across projects with a simple framework of asking “What went well?” and “What might we do better?” and cataloging those learnings over time can not only support the organization in continuous improvement, it helps a team take even more pride in how they are contributing to the growth in the organization’s capacity for execution.

Distinguishing between strategic gaps and execution issues requires a tuned eye, a humble curiosity, and a nuanced understanding of organizational dynamics. Turning strategic distractions into opportunities requires a proactive leadership approach that integrates feedback, refines even our favorite strategic commitments, and aligns them with practical execution plans led by a disciplined project management team. By addressing execution issues directly and refining strategies to accommodate real-world challenges and distractions, organizations can bridge the gap between plan and action, turning strategic visions into realized successes.

As your strategic napkin unfolds, we face a vibrant opportunity to change lives for the better and live up to the vision the founders of our movement had for the potential of the cooperative finance model at a time when human beings need credit unions most. Strategy and execution live together as balanced partners. Our members depend on that balance remaining, and our organizations will thrive when we bring both to life exceptionally well.