The Ideation-Execution Gap
A recent survey of over 400 global CEOs revealed that lack of execution excellence is the top challenge leaders face, over 80 other challenges. Interestingly, many leaders do not struggle with generating innovative ideas or crafting compelling visions for their organizations. The real challenge lies in implementing and executing those ideas effectively.
The dilemma is clear – without execution, ideas remain nothing but ideas. As Steve Jobs once famously said, “To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.” The transformational impact that leaders envision for themselves and their organizations cannot be realized without successful execution. However, despite its apparent complexity, execution excellence is a learnable skill that can be mastered by any leader.
How To Close The Gap
As a leader, you can learn to adopt an action bias that constantly puts you in the direction of converting your ideas to tangible results–ultimately elevating your authority, impact, and abundance.
There are important competencies every leader or visionary must embrace to rapidly execute the vision, idea, or strategy they have crafted.
Rapid execution will have a different meaning for you depending on your visionary stage. You may be at a point where you want to launch a fresh project, expand to new markets, or simply take your work to the next significant level. Our Visionary Path Assessment can help you clarify this but know that wherever you are with your vision, assignment, or project in this season, you will find these 7 execution strategies relevant to you.
- A Clear Vision and Success Metrics
A clear vision and success metrics is the foundation for rapid execution. It has to do with the ability to catch a distinct picture in your mind about what the future looks like. Visionaries who go the long term, who birth legacy through leadership, who elevate in authority, who elevate in impact, who elevate in income and in the abundance that they can experience always work with a clear vision. The quicker you catch a distinct blueprint in your heart of the work, project, product, or service you want to launch in the next phase of your work, the closer you are to making it a reality. After you have gained a good measure of clarity about the vision, you need to take it a step further in breaking the vision down into defined metrics. Metrics are the specific parameters through which you measure what success means to you and your team.
You want to ask yourself this vital question:
What will I see in my project launch, product, service, or organization in the next year that will tell me we are succeeding?
The moment you are clear on this, you become precise on what to look out for, and you begin to move in the direction of what you believe to have the greatest utility of resources in creating your idea of success.
- Research and Development
The distance between when you catch a vision and when it becomes tangible results is significantly connected to your capacity for search and research. Research and development is the body language for Future-Forward visionaries who want to go far to make a difference, and who want to have their feet on the ground for the long term. It helps you uncover the trends, megatrends, shifts, and data-driven demands of the space that you are in. Research and development is undoubtedly a big part of what we do at the Visionary Compass Accelerator Program(VCAP). We’re constantly asking our coaching clients pointed questions about what we can improve on and asking them to rate the key pillars of our processes. We then use the insights we receive in this ongoing revolutionary research and development procedure to plow back into the work we do. This is what keeps us executing rapidly.
The moment you catch a vision in your heart, one of the ways to move quicker and begin to see results however little is to open yourself to knowledge. Knowledge breaks you out of your small bubble. As you search and research, you begin to acquire the thought pattern, the expertise, the technicalities, the tools, the technology, the software, and the shortcuts that make you move faster and help you get results.
- Immersive Focus
Immersive focus is the science of utilizing the training of the mind to plunge yourself completely into a particular project within a shorter amount of time. This is what we mean. You are either executing in short bursts of time or over a lengthy period. Research shows that 90 days is usually a good timeline to maximize immersive focus. This is because the human mind possesses finite energy and is not designed to fixate on a particular thing for a long period. Even when you’re executing over a lengthy period, you have to learn to bundle your projects within that lengthy period of execution into smaller bursts of time. This is how you can manage motivation, energy, and resources, and monitor performance within shorter timelines.
You want to determine the portion of the work that can be accomplished in 90 days and go for it.
Your project may not come out as perfectly as you envisioned, but it’s going to be good enough and you can go ahead to use prototyping and reiteration to rebuild it and make it better in subsequent editions. This is more profitable than waiting for your work to be perfect before you launch. Our 90-Day Execution Blueprint is a high-value resource that will provide you with practical insights on how to craft goals you can get going in 90 days.
- Motivation Mastery
This is a big important technique if you’re going to be a rapid executionist. One of the greatest competencies of a visionary is your ability to protect your energy, motivation, unique cutting-edge, and flow. You have to be on the lookout for the people, things, ecosystems, experiences, and situations that rattle you, unsettle you, and jolt you out of your lane of focus and flow and deal with them. There are three core pillars of Motivation Mastery:
- Never work on a project or vision that does not excite you
The truth is, you’re not always going to be excited about your vision. There are dimensions of your purpose that may not appeal to you, but whenever you determine that you want to move in a certain direction, serve a purpose, or be a forerunner for a vision, you need to immerse yourself in it enough to connect to what excites you about it. Think about the change you can create, the lives that can be transformed and the nations that can be positively impacted. Do not get on a project that does not excite you
- Understand who you are, your wiring, energy cycles, and the type of people that you would like to have around you
- Learn the art of reward and celebration
Zoom in on your victories in the different seasons of getting your work out and celebrate them
- Agile decision making
Agile decision-making is key to rapid execution. It is the ability to make decisions rapidly, knowing what to trade off, and asking the right questions when necessary. You need to know how to make quick decisions and think on your feet. The decisions that you’re waiting to make ultimately have an impact on how quickly you can create the results you want. Think of the ultimate goal in your mind and what serves the highest good as far as that goal is concerned and go for it.
- Team and People Leadership
Surround yourself with the right people–people who are willing to learn, people who have the right skill sets, and are willing to acquire additional competency that will make you grow quickly with your work and with your vision. You empower your team for rapid execution by:
- Vision Imprinting
It’s important to gain the buy-in of your team members by imprinting the vision on them. This involves selling the vision to them, showing them where you are headed, and defining what their role is as far as the vision is concerned.
- Setting up Regular Meetings to review work progress
Regular meetings with your team helps you to cut short cycles of errors and limit error margins because you’re able to make improvements quicker and help them do better
- Using clear vision and metrics techniques to monitor and measure performance
You need to draw a clear blueprint of what success looks like for you and your team and constantly evaluate their performance based on that.
- Resource Mobilization
Resource mobilization involves attracting what you require to get the work done. It is knowing how to canvas and crusade your vision in a way that the resources in the hands of others can be aligned with the work you do and the vision you are building.
You need to learn how to ask, create compelling proposals and pitch decks, follow up on networking opportunities, and source what you want. The mindset that what you need is not money but what money can buy is key at this point because what you want to use money to buy already exists in the hands of others. This is where the value for value algorithm comes in. Ask yourself:
What can I offer in exchange for what I’m looking for?
These seven big techniques will help you facilitate the rapid execution of your next-level vision. Which of these have been of the most value to you? Share in the comment section
