All too often, organizations do the hard work around market and business model analysis to redefine their strategies, without considering the implications of successfully executing the plan. Strategic planning is a dynamic and iterative process, and all organizations approach it differently. Crossland believes it is critical to test the key elements of a strategy before developing a comprehensive implementation roadmap. We call this optimizing strategy.

Many leaders will design a strategic plan that dramatically impacts their business model, but then stop short of analyzing how they will build organizational capability to operationalize it. Now in our second decade of helping organizations navigate the journey from strategy to implementation, we have become sensitive to a consistent set of "blind spots" that, if not addressed, will dramatically impact execution:

• Inadequately assessing the organizational preparedness and capabilities—people, systems, partners, infrastructure—required to deliver the strategy

• Ignoring the desired experiences of key stakeholders in designing strategy

• Believing the strategic planning process is fixed, rather than a dynamic and proactive, way to innovate and adapt to changing market forces

To counter these challenges, organizations not only need to get the "what" of their strategies right, but simultaneously anticipate the moves required to define the "how."