Good morning and welcome everybody to the event called Transforming Vision into Value. We're super excited to see that so many of you decided to sign up for our event and we hope that you're comfortable out there behind the screens with a warm cup of coffee ready to dive into the topic of strategy execution with us this morning. The event will last a little less than 30 minutes as we know that most of you probably have a hard stop around nine and it will be mostly us talking most of the time but we do encourage you all to answer the polls and also to post any questions or comments. that you may have along the way. We promise that no question will go unanswered. However, it will be very hard for us to make it all the way to the end of the list of questions and comments so we will follow up with an email to all the things that you do post in the chat. This event is the first in a series of events that we decided to execute on the topic of strategy execution. It will be the official launch of the Community for Strategy Execution Professionals We aim to just keep you up to date on our latest thinking and experience, and we'll talk much more about that later. All right, now that we got the housekeeping out of the way, I think it is time to properly introduce ourselves. With me today in the studio, I have Alexander. Good morning, everyone. Alexander is the head of our department of more than 60 people focusing on strategy execution, and he's also one of the leading experts on how to transform vision into value. And in addition to that, he also holds the record for the fastest talker in all of implement. So fear not, we will record the event, and if you want to watch it later at half speed, you can safely do so. Combined, Alex and I have more than 20 years of experience in the topic of strategy execution, and within the last eight years, we've worked together on several projects in shipping, pharma, financial services, manufacturing, tech, telco, and many other industries. And the reason why we're here today is we're both very curious about the gap between strategy and execution. And we hope to not only share our experience with you today, but also share some of implement's best practice from literally hundreds of projects that aim to close this gap. So the agenda for today is fairly simple. First, we want to explore the challenges of strategy execution and try to answer first, how big is the problem? And second, what are the main causes of the problem? And after that, we'll dive into our strategy execution model where Alexander and I, who both co-authored the model, will try to describe how to best close this gap between strategy and execution. All right, let's jump into it. So one of the first things that comes to mind when you're thinking of the strategy execution gap, at least to me, is how big is the gap? So if you look to academia, you can find numerous studies, both new and old, but they all point to the fact that this is quite a large and quite a persistent problem. One example that we decided to bring here today is a Harvard Business Review article that basically states that on average, strategies deliver 63% of the predicted financial performance. Now, if that's true, that's quite a lot of money that's being left on the table, which means that this is a problem that's actually really worth solving, at least in our opinion. Now, I have a background in economics and finance. So whenever I see a number like this and a study like this, I get quite skeptical. I mean, couldn't this gap just be overly optimistic estimates? I mean, all humans are prone to doing that. But it turns out actually that many of these explanatory factors are actually internal factors within the span of control of a company. That means you can actually do something about it. So let's for a moment accept that this number is true. Could you ever imagine a CEO being satisfied with a 37 percentage point gap on operational performance? Or could you ever imagine a CEO accepting a 37% downtime on machinery? We find that quite hard and astonishing to imagine. So why would you ever accept such a number on your business development? Now, some strategies have a 37% chance of success. Now, some strategies have a higher probability of success. And we know that some strategies are basically just last year's results, 5% better. But certain strategies also have more of a life or death kind of flavor to them. Or at least you can call them transformative. And if you look at transformation, you're facing some different odds. Looking at this statistic here, you're facing a 22% chance of success. So regardless of whether you accept the first or the second or a third number from a different study to be true, I think we can all agree that this is a fairly big problem and definitely worth solving. And in fact, for most companies, this might convert into performance improvement of anywhere between 60% to 100%. So where does it go wrong? What we have here is a list of challenges that we've encountered along our way of trying to tackle this challenge. So I will now list 12 challenges that our clients have faced in the past and that we've helped them overcome. And I would encourage you to just get out a piece of paper and a pen and jot down which of the ones that I list now are applying to you as we will do a short poll right after this. The first challenge is that leaders are not aligned on the strategic direction. Very often we see that different SVPs try to optimize for their area and there's no coherence between the leadership team. The second one is the lack of clear prioritization of the roadmap and the portfolio. So you first of all don't have a clear picture of what's going to get started in the future and the ongoing portfolio. It's also not clear to the organization what the priorities actually are, which means that people have different views on the priorities. This can sometimes convert into the next challenge, which is that resources get spread across too many projects. Oftentimes you have too many things ongoing at the same time due to a lack of prioritization and that means that people are working on six, seven projects at a time. The next one is an incorrect or inefficient translation of strategy interaction. So this means that you're basically not able to convert these very vague must-win battles into concrete projects or actions for your people to execute. The next one is that the organization does not know or understand the strategy. This is typically something we see when we do assessments. The top layer of management typically have a very clear picture of what the strategy is and as you dive into the organization it becomes less and less vague. The next one is that no or few projects are ever stopped or paused. So you have a tendency to start a lot of work. things and stop very few things and stop very few things. So projects that even though they don't promise that much value keep on going. The next one is the pace of execution is too slow and we see that materializing. You might have the right strategy but you might be executing it too slow and therefore not being competition and then the strategy becomes less relevant. The next one is the next one is the next one is the next one is a lack of tracking of the strategic KPIs and value realization. So you're basically driving a car without the lights on as we say. There's also an issue of an unclear link between the strategy and the portfolio so it's not really clear for the organization the project that they're working on right now how does it help realize the strategy. The next one is an unclear need for people and competences to deliver the strategy so you will be surprised at the bottlenecks that you experience in the short term because you weren't predicting what you needed in the long term to execute your strategy. The next one is the limited ability to adjust the strategic direction based on learnings from execution. Sometimes you make a five-year plan and stick rigidly to it but the world is changing constantly. we know that the pace is increasing a lot. So the ability to reorient as you go along becomes even more important. And the last one is a lack of aligned approach to evaluating and executing projects so you're not comparing apples to apples. You're basically unable to see which project fares better. This was a fairly long list. I hope you could follow along. What we will do now is to do a quick poll and ask you what your challenges are in your organization. So please get out your phone and scan the QR code and follow along. We're looking forward to seeing your answers. All right. Thank you so much for answering the poll. We have about 130 people actually logging into Menti and answering here. So thank you so much for that. I think we're about 250 people. So if you want to answer the poll at some point, you're welcome to do that. I think it's a quite interesting picture that's starting to paint in front of us here. We're looking at all of the paints actually materializing across the people who've decided to respond. So it's not like any of these are uncommon to the group of people that we see here today. There does seem to be a pattern. I think it's a pattern that some of them. I think it's a pattern that some of them are more important than others. And the one that stands out right now is that resources are spread across too many projects. This is very, very relatable, both in professional context, but also in your own personal life. You can tend to want too many things at the same time. So this is definitely a pain that we see. And we can definitely dive more into that later. I think two other ones that stand out is the lack of interest. So this is the lack of prioritization of the roadmap and the portfolio. And also the one just below, which means that no or very few projects are stopped or paused. When we get to the framework and the model later, we'll try to relate some of these pains to the solutions that we propose and try to focus a bit more on those. Great. I guess it's time for you to take the road. Thank you so much. And just before we move on, I also think it's important to see that all of these are kind of interconnected. So the more you spread out your projects or resources across different projects, the more you'll start to see them pile up, the harder it will be to create transparency. And the more you'll actually have a hard time stopping them and actually getting that full overview and prioritizing. So it's an important topic that we'll also cover in the model in just a second. But this is basically an ecosystem strategy execution. Understanding these different parameters are key. So I'll dive back into that. But thank you so much for your answers. And also, thank you so much for choosing to spend 30 minutes with us this morning. Before I dive into the model. Before I dive into the model. I just wanted to kind of share our overall thoughts on how strategy actually links to project execution. And before we dive into that, let's take a trip down memory lane or at least look at how strategy typically has become translated into execution. So in the past, what we've seen is that we have had a strategy being formulated. It's been a document that would be the organization. organization's ambition for the organization's ambition for the next one, two, three, four, five years. And then we have actually cascaded that into a roadmap, which would be taking the strategy and actually moving it out into time. So how would we like to arrive at that point in time? And then there will be a handover to the, you could say, the execution part or the portfolio part of the organization that would work with. So how do we actually prioritize all of these different strategic initiatives on the roadmap? And again, after that, we would initiate our execution and move it into the project and program domain. That is a well-proven recipe. However, it has one huge caveat as we see it. And that is that it's a one-way street. So what we typically experience here is that the strategy gets formulated by some part of the organization, gets passed on to other areas, departments, functions that then have to prioritize and initiate this. And then basically, it's a start and stop point where everything cascades one way. The caveat here is there is no way of getting feedback on time back into the organization. And one of the main issues here is that when we start a strategy, we do it with the mindset that it will be delivered in X amount of years. But when things change, when new needs arrive, when we need to prioritize, that doesn't get fed back into the strategy overview, which actually means that we are maintaining an incorrect strategy. Or as we wrote on the LinkedIn post, that the strategy you are actually realizing or executing is different from the one that you hope to do. So what our model does and our framework, what we have incorporated here is two things. First of all, it's a loop, feedback loop, all the way from the strategy engine and down through the execution engine and then back to the strategy, which means that we are cascading information. We are getting all of the insights from the projects back into the prioritization, the roadmap and the strategy. That gives us one huge advantage and that is that we can adjust and reprioritize along the way. And having that very streamlined process will also create speed. It will help us find the projects that are no longer relevant and move in new directions if needs arrive. So that's the main point to take away on our model is that we try to create a feedback loop all the way from strategy to execution. All right. Looking into the model itself, as we have talked about a few times, it's the ambition to close the gap between having a strategy and actually seeing that value come out, you could say, once we're done with the strategy. And typically that's been a closed system where we don't really know what happens. It gets sent out, but we don't really get any feedback. Our framework is designed to do one thing and one thing only that is connect the strategic ambition with the value creation and make sure that we have transparency, focus and momentum along the way. It goes into two main domains. The first one is about doing the right projects. In here, we're talking about the strategic prioritization. We're talking about how to manage your portfolio, how to look at the collective sum of projects and programs we're doing and balance that against our strategic ambitions. And then when I talk about it as an ecosystem is because it has a counterpart, which is doing the projects right or executing with momentum and transparency. So you cannot have one without the other. If you want to close that gap between strategy and value, you have to be good at prioritizing and moving the projects along. Diving into the elements here, the first one that we typically work with in doing the right projects is an old but very important discipline called portfolio management. What we look into here is getting a full transparent overview of all the projects we have in the portfolio. It's making sure that we have a rhythm and a cadence in how we monitor the portfolio, how we adjust, prioritize and make decisions. So we know that the projects we have in the portfolio and again, going back to your own point, not too many, but the projects we have in the portfolio are actually helping us deliver the strategy. And I think you hit it right on the main point here because the other domain in doing the right projects is, of course, also balancing the amount of resources or competencies you have to put into your portfolio. We tend to see a lot of organizations that have what we call a shadow number, which is they have a large amount of projects that are not really reflecting anywhere but still draws resources out from the organization. So when we look into doing the right projects, we get an overview, transparent overview of the projects. And then we also work with how do we make sure that the right capabilities, the right people are assigned to the right projects, preferably with a very high allocation, so we know we can execute with speed. And then we also work with how do we make sure that allocation practices, so how you actually are assigned and moved between projects, that's streamlined in the best possible way. We, of course, we have a tool that supports this whole journey digitally. That can be a talk for another session. But ultimately, what we're trying to balance here is the amount of projects we're doing with the available resources and making sure that we get speed in delivering on that. On the other side, we're talking about doing the projects right. We work with project management, another old and classic domain where we typically work with making sure that the organization have a shared way or a common way of actually working with projects as a project model and a shared language. What we typically experience here is that there are many different ways of working and that can also become an inhibiting factor when actually wanting to create that transparency in the portfolio. We also work with having standardized, simplistic tools and methods that all projects can use. It doesn't matter if we are talking agile, waterfall, traditional or hybrid. Those can be merged. And then we have a special emphasis on actually working with how to monitor project performance. We have our pulse check and implement that monitor stakeholder satisfaction into the projects. And we also work a lot with making sure that we are on point with the benefits we hope to get out of the projects. And again, here, the project information will get looped back into the prioritization part of the organization. Another part of this domain is also working with capability building. What we also see is that even though we have all of these, you could say, structural components in place, there is also a need for moving the organization's capability level to fit with the future needs. So there is typically something around having everyone that works with development and projects work with the same roles and responsibilities definition. There is also something around having a way of working with the same roles and there is also something on having a community and a way of actually developing project management as a career path. Typically, when we work in this domain, we also see that the execution rate and the, you could say, the quality of the projects increase quite drastically when we get really good at this. To link all of these together, we have a domain in the middle called governance and performance. The main point here is actually linking doing the right projects and doing the projects right based on data-driven decisions and making sure that we have a fixed way of communicating this to the organization. So establishing a set of shared KPIs, monitoring portfolio and project performance and having a way of, with a fixed cadence, aligning the leadership levels so we communicate and actually go in the same direction with our strategies. And of course, underneath all of this, we have a component that has been, we have quite easily just written down here, but that's a huge factor called leadership and change. And what we work with here is, of course, making sure that the whole leadership team is behind the strategic direction and that we can cascade those decisions down through the organization to get as effective execution as possible. And typically, when you start working within this ecosystem, there's also a huge factor of change management here. A lot of new behavior needs to be implemented and set in place and we all need to make some changes to make this work as perfect as we can. One last very important factor to remember here is that our approach and recommendation is that you not only work with one or two or three of these disciplines. You need to see it as a whole ecosystem where you don't have to go for a gold standard in all of the components, but you need to understand that without having a good way of executing your projects and reporting on them and measuring performance and benefits, your portfolio management will have a hard time delivering value. Without managing your resources, without managing your resources, the projects will slow down and so on and so forth. So you need to work with all of these dimensions to actually take a step forward on moving your strategy execution capabilities. That's the last component of that. And without further ado, I think I'll hand it over to you again, Christian. Thank you. All right. So you might sit there and think this makes logical sense. This is a natural framework and it kind of aligns with what I already think about strategy execution. But the next question would probably be then how do I get started working with this? So what we typically do is that we do a maturity assessment and establish a baseline across the five parameters of interest. And we do that through interviews and observation studies and surveys and reviews of tools and documents and so on. So basically something that you would also be able to go ahead and do tomorrow yourself. The baseline basically establish a shared understanding across departments and stakeholder groups of what the current gaps are and it becomes very clear with the baseline where to start. So where are the biggest challenges today and where should we start tackling them? After establishing a baseline, we try to align on a shared ambition and we do that through a series of solution design workshops. Again, again, again, something that you could probably do yourself. But I think one of the key strengths of this approach is that not only do you get an understanding or a shared understanding of the current gaps, but you also get a common view of the goals across the organization and stakeholders. And this makes transforming your way of doing strategy execution very actionable. So we see this work in several organizations and we'll also share this approach with you so you can get started yourself. The maturity assessment is fairly simple. It's got five levels on the y-axis and you can see those on the right side here called rating criteria. And on the x-axis it has the five parameters of the model. For each, we try to explain what needs to be in place in order to be a level three within resource management, for example. And one of the key strengths of the very is a very simple one pager here is that first of all, it creates a shared language and understanding of what do we even mean by strategy execution. And second of all, it becomes a tool for assessing progress, you can keep doing a maturity assessment and see how well you fit into this. So you should also get a shared language for how far are you towards reaching your ambition. So you can essentially do this an infinite number of times and monitor progress over the years. The output or outcome of such a process might look something like this. This is an example of a global niche pharmaceutical company and the process that we did in collaboration with them. So we did the assessment and the ambition setting and this produced the roadmap right in front of you. So you can see that there's the five categories listed and within each category we have a number of deliverables that we aim to complete by a certain date in order to lift the level of service. So we have a number of strategy execution capabilities in the organization. I won't go into more details with this slide here, but you'll have ample time to read it. We will share it afterwards. So, so far we've been through four main different things today. We've covered the challenges and the scope of the challenge. We've talked about the framework. We've talked about the model. We've talked about the model and we've also just discussed the maturity assessment. So we'd like to do another poll here real quick. So we invite you to go back into Menti and please answer what you would like us to dive more into. Maybe we have the chance to do that today. Otherwise, we hope to create a series of events diving into the topics that are most relevant for you to know more about. Thank you. Thank you. Fantastic to see all of those, you know, desires to hear more. And of course, we know that this was a very short and very intensive session. So, so we hope to be able to, to create a community, I guess, around this where we can continue to, to share information and, and, you know, thoughts, thoughts behind this. I think what's really important to, to remember here is that this is a transformation that, that we are kind of working with. So, so the assessment is one part understanding where we are having a shared language of that. And then comes, you could say, solving, solving it together and actually developing a framework that fits, which I think we'll dive into for, for the next session. Yeah. I guess all that's left to say is thank you so much for showing up and hope to see you next time. Thank you. Thank you.