Adapt: aligning the organization with the strategy

What does adapting mean?

Adjustment. It covers everything that together enables your company to respond to outside forces while still reaching the target picture.

This step starts where strategy development ends. You know where you stand and where you want to go. What's missing is an organization that fits.

In practice, that means six things: question structures and processes, check whether the right people with the right skills are on board, take a critical look at the culture, set up data and IT for the future, make innovation a routine, and clarify how you work with partners.

The name says it all. This is about adjustment, not reconstruction: you change what has to change so the target picture becomes reachable, and you leave everything else alone. Anyone who treats this as the moment for a complete overhaul ties up the energy that execution needs.

This step determines success more than the choice of strategy itself. An average strategy in a fitting organization beats a brilliant one in an ill-fitting one.

How do you close the gap between today and tomorrow?

With a tool that turns every goal into a task you can actually work on. It's called the gap statement, and it has three parts.

The middle part is where teams get stuck. Describing the target state is hard because it has to be concrete: not "we're more digital," but "every inquiry is in the system within four hours and nobody retypes it."

A common mistake is to paint the current state in a better light. That rarely happens on purpose: whoever describes it usually helped build it. So it pays to have someone in the room for this part who joined the company only recently.

From the obstacles, you then develop solutions in the form of initiatives, projects and measures. That's what turns a goal into something someone can start on Monday.

What do consistency and coherence mean?

Two conditions a working system has to meet. They sound similar and mean different things.

Consistency means the elements fit together like the pieces of a puzzle. A sales approach built on an online channel and a commission model that only rewards deals closed in person are not consistent.

Coherence means all activities pull in the same direction, like the gears of a clock. Two units can each work consistently on their own and still work against each other if their goals point in different directions.

When one element doesn't play its role, or two work against each other, the strategy stalls. That rarely shows up as open conflict. It shows up as a delay nobody is responsible for.

How does the second strategy workshop run?

Four to six weeks after the first, once the wording of the target picture has been reworked. That interval keeps the momentum up and gives you time to sharpen the formulations.

Plan for a day and a half. The new group of participants needs to be brought up to speed, then you identify gaps and develop measures. As with the first workshop, it pays to start the evening before and have dinner together.

The group is deliberately widened, to 20 to 30 people. Five small groups work along the five goals, with four to six people each. Pick people who bring ideas rather than objections: the purpose is to make the target picture robust, not to defend it.

The same rule applies to group composition as in the first workshop: mix the units. A group from a single department finds the obstacles it already knows about. A mixed group finds the ones that sit between two departments, and those are the expensive ones.

By the end, each group has a completed field-of-action card for its goal, with initiatives, owners and time horizons. That's the handover from development to execution.

Who owns the gaps?

The leadership team together, across all goals. That wording matters and is often skipped over.

This wording comes from the book, where it's explicitly justified: it prevents a silo mentality that otherwise hardens during execution and later becomes hard to break up.

When every goal belongs to one person, you get exactly the silo thinking that slows execution down later. Five goals with five owners who stay out of each other's business add up to five projects, not a strategy.

Shared responsibility doesn't mean nobody is accountable. Every initiative gets a person with a name. But the question of whether the overall gap is closing belongs to everyone.

Also name one person per goal to collect progress. That's a reporting role, not subject-matter responsibility. Without it, the group hears about a delay only when it can no longer be made up.

In practice, you can handle this through the meeting format. If every report covers only your own goals, silo thinking takes hold. If the group discusses bottlenecks together, it doesn't.

What comes out of this step?

Three things that together carry you into execution.

• Filled action areas. One card per goal with initiatives, projects and measures, assigned to the six fields.
• A roadmap. The sequence in which these initiatives get tackled, with milestones.
• A communication plan. Who gets informed about what, when and in which format.

The third point often decides how the first months go. After the announcement "we're realigning," a communication vacuum opens up if it isn't immediately clear what that means in concrete terms.

At the end, check whether the three fit together. A roadmap that shows initiatives in one order while the communication plan tells a different story will fall apart at the first follow-up question.

The detailed planning of the transformation doesn't belong here yet. This step is about setting the course and building a network of supporters. The full execution concept takes shape in the TRANSFORM step.

Expect to reopen something from the target picture at this point. If describing the gaps shows that a goal can't be reached with the resources at hand, that belongs back in goal setting. A roadmap that's unrealistic from day one costs more credibility than a late correction.