Cheating and cover-ups are natural byproducts of a top-down culture that does not accept “No” or “Tt can’t be done” for an answer. But combining this with the approach that treats strategy and execution as separable is a sure recipe for failure. At both Wells Fargo and VW, disconfirming. data was available for a surprisingly long time and was not acted on by senior management. Signs that corners were being cut were ignored. And the illusion that brilliant top-down strategies were working persisted — fora time. We are not saying top-down fixed strategies necessarily lead to fraud. Rather, our point is that these two visible examples of strategic failure illuminate the risks of failing to integrate strategy and execution through a deliberate and continual executive-learning process. Strategy as learning requires senior executives to engage in an ongoing dialogue with operations across all levels and departments. The people who create and deliver products and services for customers are privy to the most important strategic data the company has available. And the strategic learning process involves actively seeking deviations that challenge assumptions underpinning current strategy. Deviations and surprises must be welcomed for their informative value in adapting the strategy. Executives who adopt a strategy-as-learning framework understand that pushing harder on execution may only aggravate the problem if shortcomings are, in fact, evidence of inadequate market intelligence or flawed assumptions about the business model. Companies that fuse strategy and execution, continually making adjustments and periodic dramatic pivots, demonstrate what strategy as learning can look like in action. Consider the steady strategic morphing of Amazon from online bookseller to global retail powerhouse. Or take ING Bank in the Netherlands, which adopted an agile approach to strategy and execution that uses “squads” as the company’s “nervous system” to sense changes in customer needs and competitive realities and to give senior executives the data they need to rethink strategy and respond. These and other cases exemplify a fundamentally different (iterative) approach to strategy making. Of course, embracing a learning approach at the top of the organization is not a new idea. What we suggest has much in common with the notion of execution as learning, introduced in HBR some years ago. Our ideas are also consistent with current work on organizational agility — defined as an ability to sense and respond quickly to changes in the environment. (See these articles by Jeff Gothelf, McKinsey, and the Boston Consulting Group.)What is new is the idea that closing the gap between strategy and execution may not be about better execution after all, but rather about better learning — about more dialogue between strategy and operations, a greater flow of information from customers to executives, and more experiments. In today’s fast-paced world, strategy as learning must go hand in hand with execution as learning — bypassing the idea that either a strategy or the execution is flawed — to recognize that both are necessarily flawed and both are valuable sources of learning, improvement, and reinvention. Some of the research for this article was supported by Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management's Baillet Latour Chair in Error Management and its senior researcher, Vincent Giolito. Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School and a coauthor of Building the Future: Big Teaming for Audacious Innovation (Berrett-Koehler, 2016) Paul J. Verdin is the chair in strategy and organization at Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management. This article is about STRATEGY @ rouow THs tore Comments leave a Comment post25 COMMENTS Lawrence Gingold 8 months ago This is a great article. | have provided business operating strategy for over 30 years. From the first time | assisted in deploying a new company the one constant was change. Not any change. Changes in presumptions and assumptions. Especially in todays "disruptive" environment, we need to understand that any program has a business impact. The basis of the impact is the business changes that happen in the course of the program. Here is an anology. if you build ‘a bridge it comes from both ends to the middle. Constant monitoring and alignment need to managed because if you are off by even one degree you could miss by a mile when you get to where the two end need to meet. It is the same with Strategy and mobilising the organisation to meet that strategy. Both sides need to know when things start to change. Mainly everything that we think we know is a presumption and needs to be watched for changes. Anything we have little evidence for is an Assumption and presents an even greater risk to meeting or having the right business strategy. REPLY oop ‘\V JOIN THE CONVERSATION \We hope the conversations that Lake place on HAR org will be energetic, constructive, and thought-provoking, Te cemment, readers must signin or reg'ster. And to ensure the quality ofthe discussion, aur moderating team wil review all comments ané may edit them for clay, length, ane relevance. ‘comments that are overly promotional, mean-spitited, or off-topic may be deleted per the maderators' judgment. 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