Rutendo Nyeve
STRATEGY expert, Mr Bruce Msimanga has revealed the hidden organisational gaps that cause many well crafted business strategies to fail, urging Zimbabwean insurers to look beyond people problems and fix how their organisations are designed.
Speaking at the Southern Africa Insurance Indaba in Victoria Falls on Thursday, Mr Msimanga, founder of Msimanga Advisory, argued that the gap between having a strategy and delivering results shows up in underwriting quality, claims turnaround, customer retention, distribution effectiveness, risk management and profitability.
He identified seven interconnected elements that determine whether an organisation performs which include environment, strategy, core processes, structure, systems, culture and results.
Misalignment between these elements, he said, is the hidden cause of execution failure.
“Strategy execution is not primarily a people problem. It is an organisational alignment problem,” Msimanga told delegates.
“Conventional answers matter but cannot compensate for a system built to produce something else.”
He warned that many organisations fall into a false execution loop misdiagnosing a structural problem as an execution failure, then responding with tighter targets, more reviews and stricter discipline.
“If capable people are working hard and the strategy still isn’t delivering, look at how the organisation is designed,” he said.
The gaps he named include conflicting priorities, weak accountability, insufficient monitoring, repeated hand-offs and rework, conflicting targets between functions, slow decisions and unclear escalation, and customer promises the operating model cannot keep.
Citing a 2010 study of four South African life insurers, Mr Msimanga said CEOs reported barriers such as insufficient focus, limited capabilities and little tracking of progress conditions which he said are organisational rather than merely communicational.
He challenged leaders to ask whether their processes, structure, systems and culture reinforce the strategy or pull against it.
“You cannot consistently execute a strategy through an organisation designed to produce something else,” he said.
Mr Msimanga proposed a 90-day cycle to assess, diagnose, realign and measure focused on one strategic outcome at a time, tracing the work with the people who do it and testing one targeted change to the weakest link.
“A good strategy does not guarantee good results. The actual test begins after the strategy is approved,” he said.
