Barriers to Strategy Implementation

Before the drivers and instruments that aid managers in strategy implementation are introduced, it is perhaps worthwhile to identify some of the problems organisations often experience when attempting to implement their chosen strategy or strategies. Some of these problems include:

• The coordination of implementation effort is not sufficiently effective.
• Leadership and direction provided by top and middle managers is inadequate.
• Goals have not been sufficiently defined and are not well understood by employees.
• The formulators of the strategy are not involved in implementation or have left before the implementation is finished.
• Key changes in responsibilities of employees have not been clearly defined.

The Balanced Scorecard Collaborative, a company founded and led by the creators of the balanced scorecard, has found that nine out of ten organisations fail to implement strategies and a few as 10% of effectively formulated strategies are effectively implemented. They identified four barriers to strategy implementation.

These are diagrammatically depicted in the figure below.