How Strategy Management in MENA Is Shaping Up: Key Insights from TKI’s 2024 Report
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Putting up a business in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is a journey of navigating unique opportunities and challenges. The MENA region presents a dynamic environment for entrepreneurs and established corporations due to its diverse markets, rich cultural heritage, and fast-growing economies. However, thriving in this region requires more than looking outward. It starts with internal clarity—a well-crafted strategy that seamlessly integrates planning, measurement, and execution.
Strategy Planning
According to the State of Strategy Management Practice – 2024 MENA Region Report, 76% of organizations in the region utilize a formal approach to strategic planning and 56% of respondents review strategy annually or every three years. However, while 39% employ a consistent process without relying on a specific methodology, 37% adopt a structured approach based on established techniques and tools.
Based on these statistics, Cristina Mihăiloaie, a Strategy and Performance Management Expert and Chief Operating Officer at The KPI Institute, explained in a webinar that deliberate strategy planning is the predominant approach in the MENA region. Deliberate strategy planning is a structured process in organizations, where a clear strategy is developed through a strong top-down and bottom-up engagement, ensuring high strategy awareness and effective communication.
However, Bori Péntek, a Management Consultant at Systaems who specializes in organizational development and human resource management, believes that deliberate strategy planning is too complicated to achieve success on its own, “Mostly, it offers an illusion of stability that is not there anymore in the external or internal environment. A lot of things have to work very well for the deliberate strategy to work.” Thus, achieving effective strategy planning in the MENA region requires balancing structured formal methods with adaptable informal approaches or emergent strategic planning. Emergent strategic planning allows organizations to adapt to change by prioritizing flexibility and iterative processes over traditional linear methods. Implementing such an approach is also shaped by the organization’s size and unique industry characteristics.
Moreover, identifying potential obstacles early enables proactive risk management. This approach allows organizations to create effective contingency plans that minimize risks and enhance their strategies. Once the plan is established, the focus shifts to strategy measurement—monitoring progress using key performance indicators (KPIs), frameworks, target setting, and automation to ensure objectives are met.
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Strategy Measurement
In the MENA region, the balanced scorecard (BSC) continues to be the most widely used performance management system (PMS) with 40% of respondents claiming their organization uses the framework. It is followed by objectives and key results (OKRs) at 34%, which has grown by 70% in popularity compared to last year due to its short-term focus that boosts agility and flexibility. However, many still claim that there is no formal PMS in place (36%), a significant increase from 24% in 2023.
Moreover, a large proportion of organizations in MENA continue to face challenges in working with KPIs, with 32% struggling to select the right KPIs, 20% having difficulty aligning KPIs and targets across the organization, and 17% encountering issues in collecting performance results for KPIs.
With Bori’s experience as a management consultant, she shared, “Irrespective of whether you use BSC or OKRs, you’re going to have these challenges. It’s not about selecting one system and just going along with it. It’s about leveraging the strength of each system by thinking wisely about where they can be used.”
Thus, it is recommended that organizations consider creating a hybrid PMS to overcome challenges related to KPI selection, target setting, and aligning strategic initiatives with broader organizational goals. A hybrid system combines KPIs to track routine business activities with OKRs to assess the success of strategic initiatives. This approach ensures that day-to-day operations are efficiently managed while strategic goals are clearly defined and actively pursued.
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Strategy Execution
Building on strategy measurement, the focus now shifts to execution, where organizations turn plans into results. This phase involves overcoming challenges such as fostering collaboration, integrating new technologies, and adapting to market changes. As globalization and digital transformation reshape industries, translating strategy into results has become more complex. Effective execution also relies on strong project management, initiative prioritization, and organizational agility, ensuring businesses remain adaptable in a dynamic environment.
In the MENA region, most organizations (39%) report success in strategy execution, while a substantial number (44%) remain neutral about their execution capabilities. When asked about the reasons for strategy failure, the top three responses were ineffective cross-functional collaboration (42%), lack of leadership support (40%), slow decision-making and approval (33%), and insufficient resources for projects to succeed (33%).
To address cross-functional collaboration, Cristina advised nurturing the right rituals. “Procedures become quickly obsolete, but rituals are what we do and how we do it, are the unwritten rules that govern the workplace. It’s not necessarily about the work procedure, it is more about how people come together and get things done.”
She also added that it’s important to create multidisciplinary teams rather than work in silos, to have regular performance meetings and use KPIs to understand the business better, to challenge selves constructively, and to promote transparency and collaboration in problem-solving.
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The State of Strategy Management Practice – 2024 MENA Region Report can serve as a starting point—a guide to navigating the complexities of strategy planning, measurement, and execution. This report, a collaboration between The KPI Institute and Systaems, explores challenges and success factors in business planning, strategic transparency, performance management systems, KPI deployment, project management, organizational agility, AI adoption, automation, and more. It gathers insights from executives, managers, and strategy experts, while also featuring best practices shared by professionals in the field. Click HERE to download the full report.
In 2019, the Performance Magazine editorial team interviewed Dr. Mark Powell, business writer, consultant & entrepreneur, and Jonathan Gifford, business author & speaker, on the topic of business innovation, specifically on how businesses could greatly improve by replicating the daring, yet highly successful model of performance arts.
