ABSTRACT
Strategic initiatives often impact on many different divisions, functions or regions within an organisation, and thus the controls and processes employed to manage and implement them need to be common to all the different units involved. It is commonplace to hear the word ‘strategy’ used in conversations between executives, managers and staff when the topic of an organisation’s intentions, aims and objectives are being discussed. Similarly, organisations’ leaders are prone to launch ‘initiatives’ that are designed to change something about the business, to help implement its ‘strategy’. Such ‘strategic initiatives’, therefore, are highly likely to consist of work that can best be viewed as projects, programmes or collections of projects and programmes. Project management, implemented poorly, can become a bureaucratic burden on an organisation. Coherent leadership, however, is only the first of the people-related challenges facing strategic initiatives. An area in which there have been great strides during the twenty-first century has been confluence of psychology, neuroscience and behavioural economics.
