Turning Strategy Into Action: A Practical Guide for Moving Your Mission from Ambition to Delivery
You’ve spent months (and significant budget) crafting a strategy that promises to change lives. The board is happy. The vision is inspiring. But three months later, the "Big Picture" feels like it’s gathering dust on a shelf while your team remains buried in business-as-usual tasks. The outcomes are long forgotten because everyone is getting through what needs to be done. It’s exciting to create a vision that you feel your team can get behind, however when reality hits, deadlines pile up and you feel like you’re trying to keep your head above water, it’s easy to lose sight on the projects that will help you and your team, and your community long term, when the short term and urgent is a lot louder.
This is why we believe strategies are not meant to be put aside, or reviewed quarterly. The strategic pillars need to be translated into your team's daily habits for you to be able to deliver on the outcomes.
Try this: Book in a standing meeting every Monday or Friday with you and your team to go through the strategy, your strategic pillars, the projects that will lead to the impactful outcomes, and the owners of those projects. We protect an hour and a half every Friday talking through our progress. Because we are a small team, we don’t have a dedicated group tucked away just to work on strategy, we have to do this work alongside our daily client delivery.
We are honest about the fact that sometimes projects move at pace, and other times client deliverables have to take precedence. This time is where we look at what we’ve been through and decide where the team needs to support or reprioritise what is important now. We even use the time to actually progress the goals together.
The key is that everyone knows exactly how we are moving forward, what their role is, and how their day-to-day activities align back to the strategy we built together.
It’s better to do this weekly, because it's the small tracking and breaking bigger tasks down so they are manageable and that is how you make progress. If you keep it high level and bigger milestones things don't move - we know this from experience. But breaking something down into a small chunk to do in a week - it gets done.
The Search for "The How"
If you’ve found your way to this guide, you’re likely facing one of these points of contention:
You have a great mission statement, but your teams are working in silos, unsure of how their daily tasks contribute to the "Big Picture."
Your team is exhausted by too many "top priorities." You need a way to sequence the work so it’s manageable and transparent.
Initiatives start with momentum but drift over time because there is no clear owner or rhythm for tracking progress.
You’re worried your strategy looks good on paper but doesn't actually improve the experience of the people your organisation exists to serve.
If we are right, then read through our six pillars of strategic execution to ensure your vision turns into a reality. To move from ambition to delivery, you must shift your focus from intent to infrastructure.
1. Make the Big Picture Simple and Shared
Strategy dies in complexity. If your leaders cannot articulate "good" in the same way, your delivery will be fragmented before it starts. Communication is the downfall for many projects. And what we have found is that the simpler the message, the easier it is to understand and translate into action. Leave the jargon out of a strategy; you want to make sure even your grandmother could understand what you plan to do and how you plan to do it. Your team needs to be able to look, read, and understand this strategy to be able to articulate it when they execute.
What you gain: A common language that eliminates confusion.
The Action: Define success on a single page. If you can’t explain the impact simply, you haven’t simplified the strategy enough.
The Big Picture is less about how it reads and more about how it feels, and if someone in your team is confused about what they are reading, they are not going to feel the gravity of what your Big Picture is.
2. Break Strategy into Actionable, Bite-Sized Initiatives
High-level intentions are rarely enough to guide real work. You must translate pillars into defined, sequenced priorities. Sometimes the Big Picture can be overwhelming when you have a team with different dynamics. Some people can see the dot-to-dots before they are prescribed, others will need help to chunk down the overarching intention into phases or sprints so that they can focus on what's next, and how to achieve it. Take our team for instance, each member is so incredibly different. We have someone who wants all the details, the plans, the information so they can digest it and make it real, then we have someone who gets the concept and just goes with the flow, someone who wants a view of what it will look like, what is in it for them and what the change will be at the end, and another who likes smaller pieces; “what do I focus on next and how does that link together”, because too much information gets them overwhelmed. We are a small team, now imagine if you're a team of 500 or more, the different way people need information changes and we need to cater for this.
What you gain: Visibility and reduced "noise."
The Action: List your top 3 initiatives for this quarter. If you have 10, you have none.
For a leader, and an ambitious one as that, it can be really hard to simmer down your list to just three initiatives because to us they all feel like a priority, and they may be, but it’s up to us to really understand which ones should come first versus others. Some initiatives may be dependent from other initiatives, so these can easily be put down the list. Sometimes we need to step back and ask someone else who might be able to see the varying degrees of the initiatives we have put forward. They might be someone who better understands the capacity of the team, the timing of the project, and the other logistics that could affect whether that initiative is part of your top priorities.
3. Give Every Piece of Work an Owner
Accountability is what keeps the work moving forward. In mission-driven organisations, I’ve found that when we say "everyone owns it," it usually ends up meaning "no one owns it".
We previously tried assigning working groups to our strategic projects, but things often got muddy. Because it was a group effort, someone always thought someone else had it, and the task would end up on the back burner. Now, we assign a single owner for every initiative. Even if that person delegates the work to others in a group, having one clear owner ensures that it actually gets done.
We know that many small founders, including our own, often fall into the trap of making themselves the owner of everything. But we’ve realised that the team wants to be involved. We need to trust them. The key is breaking those big goals down into the bite-sized pieces we talked about earlier so the team can actually manage and own them.
When an outcome is part of a specific person’s reporting, it gets the visibility it needs. That visibility is what ensures we see real progress.
What you gain: Clear decision rights and a prevention of strategic drift.
The Action: Assign a named owner to every initiative. Not a department, but a person.
Bonus: If you’ve noticed a trend of who you’re assigning multiple times, this can be a great exercise to decipher who in your team you can count on to implement and do the work. It might show some insight on the culture you currently have, and whether that is aligned with the team and culture you want to be leading.
4. Anchor Everything in Your Services
Strategies fail when they don't connect to the actual experience of your community. In other words, if your initiatives do not affect the experience of your community in a positive way, what’s the point? It just becomes busy work, and that is something we want less of. Each task, each directive, and each initiative needs to be built with intentionality for it to be worth your and your team’s time.
What you gain: Work that is grounded in real value, not just internal administrative goals.
The Action: Map your initiatives against your core service touchpoints. If an initiative doesn't enhance a service, ask why you're doing it.
5. Blueprint the "How"
Service blueprinting is one of the most powerful tools for implementation. It reveals who needs to do what and which systems are required. It uncovers the backstage systems (the tech or processes the community doesn't see).
What you gain: A shared, practical view that exposes friction, gaps, or duplication.
The Action: Create a visual map of a single service. This isn't just a flow chart; it's a way to see where your team is double-handling work or where a "hidden" system is failing your community.
Again, visibility is key to achieving any goal; if we can’t see it, we can’t own it. It’s with this exercise that you lay out the facts and it’s best not to hold back, you’ll just trip over the blindspot later on. Give yourself time to really figure out what each element is, and what the process looks like from start to finish.
6. Support the Shift in Ways of Working
Embedding change is just as critical as designing it. Strategy only succeeds if your people are supported, not just told, to work differently.
We believe this is the moment things go right: creating the psychological safety to experiment. Experimentation is inherently about trial and error. When you introduce new processes, there will be teething issues. A healthy culture allows the team to get a feel for new rhythms, share honest insights on what isn't working, and recommend improvements without fear of reprisal.
What you gain: A resilient culture that celebrates progress, removes bureaucracy, and makes it easy for everyone to see (and feel) the wins.
The Action: Establish simple operating rhythms like a 15-minute weekly stand-up to clear roadblocks, share insights, and check in on progress without the weight of unnecessary meetings.
Ready to Turn Your Strategic Mission into Real Impact?
Most mission-driven organisations invest significant effort into shaping a vision, but the real challenge lies in translating those ideas into meaningful, coordinated action. Once your plan is set, the work must shift toward clarity, prioritisation, ownership, and practical execution across your diverse teams.
Download the Guide: Turning Strategy Into Action
Ready to stop standing in one place and start driving change? Our guide takes these 6 pillars and turns them into a step-by-step implementation roadmap for your team.