From PDF to practice: Why do strategies fail to make the transition?

Whether we hand over a strategy for how to tackle a new market, or a design for a new educational product, all consultants face the ‘PDF to practice’ challenge: how do we make sure the work we’ve done doesn’t just stay as a nice PDF?

Venture capitalist Ricardo Viana Vargas has written a series of articles that explore this question through different lenses – the role of talent, technology and even organisational design. In this article, for example, he discusses three internal roadblocks:

• Fear of change
• Inadequate communication
• Going too fast (or too slow)

We encourage you to ask yourselves the same hard questions we do during projects: what can we do, say or explain that will give this project the best chance at survival in the wild?