Research and White Papers

This section shares our:
1. Implementation research, since 2000
2. Published white papers

Every year leaders invest the time, energy, and capital to implement strategy and have varying degrees of success – with more failing than succeeding.

Since 2000, Bridges has been researching strategy implementation. The catalyst was that when we first looked, we could not find any research in Asia, and very little across the world specific to our field. Our first survey revealed the stunning result that 90% of implementations failed.

Bridges is among the few consultancies in the world to consistently track strategy implementation performance. Our latest research, we conduct it every four years, reveals leaders have improved but once again are finding it even more challenging as they need to implement in a digital world. Our research also leverages 20 years of trends. It’s Bridges’ mantra to “support leaders to succeed in implementing their strategy and our research reveals interesting trends toward accomplishing that.

Research timeline

20 Years Consistent Findings
in Strategy Implementation

  • Leaders habitually underestimate the implementation challenges
  • Vision, mission and values is always in the top three organizational transformations
  • Employees struggle to understand the right actions to implement strategy
  • Leaders don’t review their strategy implementation frequently enough
  • Poor communication, lack of different actions being taken and lack of leadership consistently rank as the key reasons implementation fails
  • People are being recognized for their efforts
  • Leaders have the skills and knowledge to implement strategy successfully but not the discipline to do it
  • Only one in five leaders reviews the implementation at least once a month

2020 Changes from
Previous Surveys

  • More companies succeeded than failed for the first time – 52%
  • Implementation strategy improved by +15%
  • Implementation is perceived as marginally more important than strategy for the first time
  • Confidence in an organization’s performance to implement strategy is dropping despite improving performance. This could be due to the pandemic.
  • For the first time, culture is the lowest-ranked reason
    why implementation fails
  • “Digitalization Transformation” is a newly added strategic transformation
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Bridges 20 Years of Strategy Implementation Research – Download

Previous Strategy Implementation Research

2016

2016 brought good news in that organizations are improving in their ability to implement strategy and the failure rate has fallen from 90% (2002) to 67% (2016).

One in every two leaders rated implementation as equal in importance to strategy. Most people (78%) feel recognized for their implementation efforts in their organizations.

It was a concern that leaders spent only one day a month discussing their strategy’s implementation. Also concerning was that fewer leaders (down from 80% to 68%) believed their organization was good at developing strategy compared with 2012 research, and that one in three leaders rated their organization as being poor or very poor in its ability to implement.

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2012

Our 10 years of research brought some startling responses. It was the first year you were able to gather online responses.

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2008

Key findings from this year research identified:

  • The most popular implementation initiative was rolling out vision mission and values.
  • The biggest challenge was ensuring employees were taking the right actions.
  • Poor communication was a top reason implementation fails.
  • Senior leader’s scorecards should be linked to the implementation efforts.
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2002

In our very first survey we needed to replace the word “implementation” with “change” as implementation had not yet become part of the business acumen. Key findings identified:

  • 90% of change in issues failed to deliver the desired results stated by the leadership team at the outset.
  • 97% of people agreed with the statement that implementation fails because of bad execution not bad strategy.
  • Gaining employee support was the top challenge in strategy implementation.
  • Poor communication was also a key challenge.
  • The greatest resistance comes from middle managers.
Digital Leadership Survey 2024 online

The Digital Leadership 2024 Perspective (2024)

Insights from 2,138 leaders across four continents

2024 Research presented by: The Digital Leadership Specialists (Jeremy Blain and Robin Speculand)

The Progress

Digital transformation has created many breakthrough successes and efficiencies for companies. Our latest research reveals that:

Leading in a digital world is on the right track – Leaders are coming to terms with the many moving parts of digital transformation and starting to incorporate them into their companies.

Being digitally confident – Almost two out of every three leaders interviewed believe they were able to guide their organization through its digital transformation.

Adopting new measures – Leaders recognize the importance of creating new measures to track the value gained from digital transformation.

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Digital Maturity Index report (2022)

Closing the Digital Knowing-Doing Gap

71% of individuals who responded are at the lowest level of digital maturity.

In this white paper prof Michael Netzley and Robin Speculand identify an individual’s position along their digital journey. The results are from a sample of 1,463 respondents completing our assessment tool, the Digital Maturity Index.

Individuals have the knowledge but not the skills to participate in digital transformation, and as a result, they are struggling to move from acquiring new knowledge to embedding into practice.

In this evidence-based research white paper, we call this difference the Digital Knowing-Doing-Gap, and we aim to close it. Our research has identified what people know and do the most and least about digital transformation. For example, they know the most about smartphone apps and the least about blockchain. The findings about what people do, however, reveals that some of the most important digital methodologies are not yet highly adopted. This Digital Knowing-Doing-Gap can be closed by applying the skills that unlock the full value of the acquired knowledge.

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Future of Strategy Implementation (2020)

In collaboration with the Strategy Implementation Institute the white paper was published from the future of strategy implementation. The paper emerged after the 2020 international virtual conference that discussed the following six future trends:

  1. Implementation Prioritization
  2. Shift in Leadership Style to Implement in a Digital World
  3. Leverage AI in Implementation
  4. Increasing Importance of Middle Managers in Strategy Implementation
  5. Purpose-Driven Strategy Implementation
  6. Culture of Flexibility
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Transforming Your Company into a Digital-Driven (2019)

Bridges and PerformanceWorks collaboration into the state of digital in companies in 2019, reveals some fascinating and uncomfortable views. The white paper focuses on how companies are transforming into digital-driven businesses

Digital transformation is levelling the competitive playfield and most leaders are not ready. Time is running out…

Transforming Your Company into a Digital-Driven Business

Strong results in 2018 won’t guarantee success in 2019. Leaders are now being challenged to build and develop their company’s digital infrastructure faster and more effectively to meet the demands of tomorrow.

The research we conducted targeted 1,874 leaders across the Asia Pacific, North America, and Europe on their views of digital transformation and their readiness to implement it. It produced fascinating and even uncomfortable insights, such as

  1. Companies and leaders are not prepared for a digital driven world in 2019.
  2. Digital transformation is not deemed as urgent by almost 50% of the leaders interviewed.
  3. Digital is levelling the international competitive playing field.

We wanted this research to be action-oriented, helping companies fast track their transformation across all aspects of their businesses, strategically and operationally; internally and externally.

Within the White paper, we have been clear to draw relevant conclusions and suggested actions, including a 3-stage, 11 step model to help any company fast track their whole business transformation.

“Strategy is about making the right choices. Implementation is about taking the right actions.”

“Strategy can be defined as the thinking and implementation as the doing.”

“Leaders are guilty of repeating the same implementation mistakes they have previously made.”

“Knowing and taking the right actions move organizations from strategy creation to strategy implementation.”

“You can outsource the crafting of a strategy but not its implementation.”