What’s more important, what we say or what we do? I think we all know that our actions reveal what’s really important. Actions speak louder than words and all that. So in the realm of strategy it makes little sense to invest in communicating a strategy if your company’s actions say something else.
A company’s projects represent al large part of its actions. Projects enable a company to design and create new products, make improvements to processes, open up new markets, etc, etc. Projects are your engine of change. In fact, it’s been said that the best predictor of what a company will be doing and what it will achieve in three years is to simply look at the projects it has underway right now.¹
So your current strategy, no matter what you say, is communicated by the projects are doing. And when you launch a new strategy it’s important to look at those projects and see which ones support the new strategy and which ones tell a difference story. And if you don’t like that story you’ll need to change or stop those projects, which we all know is not an easy task. Strategy, however, is about choices and alignment, aligning what you say with what you do, at all levels. And you projects speak the loudest.
^1. Morgan, Levitt and Malek (2007) Executing Your Strategy, Harvard Business School Press.